Suburb Saturdays Volume 4: Your Babysitter Stole Some Of Your Beer

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Finding a good babysitter can be hard work. You've got to conduct interviews, potentially do background checks, call references and really trust the person. Having kids is a lot of work, so trusting a person you didn't previously know and aren't related to is a big deal. I was alerted of a situation where a guy found out his 18-year old babysitter, who has been with them for a couple years, stole a six pack of beer from him. The babysitter does a great job and has always been super reliable, trustworthy, and affordable. Only the guy knows and she's graduating next year. She has a younger sister who could be a future babysitter. The alcohol stolen was a six pack of Yuengling from his garage fridge. He's not quite sure what to do.

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His options are:

Option #1) Tell your wife, fire the babysitter and look for a new one. The hangup there is that you'd have to go through that whole process of interviewing and background checks and references again and the new babysitter may not be as good. The kids like this one so it's easy and convenient. But can you still trust her?

Option #2) Look the other way and pretend it never happened. Your wife never knows and you just go on as if none of this ever happened. The issue here is will she continue to abuse the trust? What happens if she does something worse? Could lying here turn into something way bigger down the road? In which case you look like the absolute worst

Option #3) Confront the babysitter and tell her you won't put up with stealing or underaged drinking on your watch. This could result in her quitting or manipulating the story into something bad and turn into a he said/she said. But this is the most direct approach and could lead to her turning it around. Telling your wife in advance could help with this though.

How would you handle this? I'll put out a poll on Sunday night with these options and tune into next week's Suburb Saturdays to find out what the appropriate response is.

Here is last week's poll result:

And a reminder to keep DMing me potential ideas for future Suburb Saturdays. They're a great resource. Until next Saturday!