WOW! The price of a babysitter sure has skyrocketed since the days when my daughter was little! I am shocked at what parents in the Big Apple are paying on average for a babysitter these day! Parents in New York City are dishing out the highest hourly rate for babysitters in the country, at $15.50 an hour. But even in lower-cost cities such as St. Louis, date night can cost nearly $10 an hour just for someone to watch the kids. How much are you paying for a babysitter these days?

UrbanSitter.com, a site that provides babysitting services to parents in cities around the country, found the average hourly rate per child nationally was $12.75; and the average total booking for jobs was $67.

It seems to me that just FINDING a babysitter is getting harder, with a lot of teenage girls not even interested in babysitting at all. When I was a teen, I loved making extra money by babysitting, shoveling snow…whatever I could do to make extra money. My own 2 daughters, rarely if every did any babysitting at all. They both did get part-time jobs instead. This makes me pretty curious…

Do you have a hard time finding a babysitter, and what is the going rate here in the Motor City these days?

Would you go out more if babysitting wasn’t so expensive?