What To Do In Babysitting Emergencies

By Allie Mitchell on May 16, 2016

When you’re a college student, you want a flexible way to make money. Those jobs include, but are not limited to, fast food, online jobs and babysitting. People usually start babysitting in middle or high school and they start by babysitting younger siblings or a family friend’s child.

Someone of course has to trust you heavily to watch their child for a certain amount of time AND to pay you for it. There are full websites now for finding babysitters and nannies. What they don’t tell you up front about the art of babysitting is that yes, on the outside it seems to be that you come over to the house and watch the child for the allotted time and then you leave, getting paid in the process.

Sorry, but there is so much more that goes into it. No matter how old the child is, problems and emergencies can arise. You need to be well-equipped with knowledge of CPR, the Heimlich, choking first-aid for infants and so forth, before you say yes to any babysitting job.

The best thing about articles like this and others out there is that they are here to help you prepare for those times and make sure that if such things happen, you will be more aware of what to do than you were before reading.

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Basics

Let’s start with the basics.

Boo-boos (small): Small issues come in all forms, but small things like bruises, cuts, scrapes, all things of that nature come with the same ending. You may have a crying child or a child who doesn’t notice.

If they fall and get a bruise, but you aren’t there to notice it, you may have a small issue if the parent sees it before you do. Make sure your eyes are on the child at all times, although children — just like adults — get random bruises out of nowhere, so just paying attention is the simple solution.

As for scrapes and cuts alike, make sure to keep the child calm and clean the wound. When the parents come home, fill them in on the situation.

Severe

Choking: Make sure you are always aware of this. Children need to sit down and eat, not be running around while chewing their food or speaking to no end and accidentally swallow a whole piece of food/whatever they are choking on.

The age of the child determines how you proceed. Babies need assistance differently than older children. Infants, when choking, can be helped in two ways. You can simply reach carefully in the back of their throat and take out the hazardous item, or you do compressions on their chest with only one of two fingers.

Older children are different — you can revert to the Heimlich, but not too hard considering the age of the child.

Broken Bones: Say you take the child to the park and they go down a slide; you look away for one second and then hear a scream or a thud. You look back to notice your child is on the ground grabbing their leg/arm. Even from far away you can see something is off about whatever limb they are holding. You run over and go through asking them what hurts and can they move it.

Regardless, your best bet is to take them to the hospital. And to of course call their parents. Make sure to be clear and conscience about what happened. Most children will be hurting and may cry for an hour or two, but personally I’ve seen them recover faster than adults. Getting them ice cream for doing so well isn’t a bad reward in the end.

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Extreme

Finally, the extremely severe situations.

Running Away: Some children go through their phase of thinking the world is against them, or basically all adults are. Most children have considered running away, but have never done it and probably don’t even remember thinking about it.

On the other hand, there are those children that do act upon it. Ideally, most kids don’t exactly go very far considering they can’t get very far in the first place. A good number of children go to some place familiar, like a friend’s house or a park.

If you notice that your child is missing, that is an extreme babysitting emergency. You need to call the parents immediately and start looking for them. Go to the place you think they might go first and then go to other places. Call the police while you are at it; though ideally the parents will probably do this before you do, do it anyway. Aside from running away, another babysitting emergency that is around the same scenario is …

Losing a Child: This is different from them running away, because in this scenario they aren’t “running away” per se. Losing a child can happen at the park, the mall, or anywhere else where there are lots of other people around. It can happen almost as fast as blinking. The child gets distracted or even worse, you get distracted and they literally disappear within a millisecond. Look at scenario three in this article from well-known website care.com for tips on how to handle this situation.

The job of babysitting is not as easy as it looks, because you personally have someone else’s life in your hands. You have to make sure they are safe and cared for until their parents come home. If you can make it through these many things in the world of babysitting then potential clients will come flooding in — if of course, continuing the babysitting road is what you want to do after the summer is over.

Just remember, you can’t know if something is going to happen, but you can always be prepared for it.

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