If you want a job done right, do it yourself! On a popular Reddit thread in the Am I The A**hole Subreddit, a teen teaches some parents this very lesson.
Too young to hang with the adults but too old to hang with the kids.
I have a big family. My sister has a kid with my brother-in-law that she had from a previous marriage. They often have family parties and invite their friends who also have kids. The parties are usually adults and then their kids, but I am in the middle of the two as I am a 16-year-old girl.
Whenever they invite my family, I am expected to watch the kids (usually, there are 8-10 of them there), and it gets increasingly hard seeing how most of them are six and below.
Whenever I take a break for five seconds, I am bombarded by parents asking me where their child is at. I am met with a scoff whenever I say that I don't know. It has gotten to the point where last week, I snapped.
One of the kids asked me to play in a shallow creek with them, I was tired from watching the 8+ children all day, so I said, “maybe later” so 10 minutes later, after being shot in the head with a nerf gun by another one of the kids, the father of the kid who asked me to play in the creek asked me where she was. I said that I didn't know.
He then preceded to tell me, “well, she isn't outside, so do you know where she might have gone?” I told him what she had asked about the creek, and he ran out there and picked her out of the water (it reached her ankles). He came back and started yelling at me about how I should've been watching her.
I got tired of it and snapped, saying that I didn't want to watch their kids and that it made me resent coming to the parties and kids all together. My brother-in-law is calling me an a**hole now for messing with his closest friends. So am I the A**hole?
'My rate for babysitting is $X per hour per kid. Did you want to hire me to watch your kid today? I wasn't planning on it since I thought I was invited as a guest.'
NTA. And you have every right to ask if you are being invited to parties as a guest or as an employee...if they make it clear that they expect you to babysit, you can decline to go.
When they inevitably claim that you have to go because it's a 'family function,' explain that you feel like people are treating you like a servant rather than a family member. And until that changes, you would rather spend your time with people who treat you with respect.
NTA, but the adults sure are. You are either there as a guest or a paid babysitter. I'd skip the next one, the one after, and the one after. When they ask you to come, tell them your rate, that you won't watch more than five kids at once, and that you want to be paid before you start. You can walk off as soon as you have six kids (or 8 or 10) shoved at you with no regrets.
They are 100% using you for free childcare without your permission or willingness. Bail on them. They KNOW they are in the wrong. I bet the guests don't even know that you've been commandeered as an unpaid sitter, although it's possible that it's just an AH collection or they were lied to.
NTA. Do they want you to watch 8-10 little kids at a time??? For FREE? Nope. They can find baby sitters and pay them if they can't be bothered to watch their children at a party. These kids are not your responsibility.