Do your babysitters have experience with twins before you hire them?

When you are looking for a new sitter, do you search for sitters based on their experience with twins? If so, is that one of the best indicators for how well they will work for your family, or just one component. If you hire a new sitter with no experience with twins, how do you prepare them?

 

When I babysat I would do up to 5 kids. Twins are unique, definitely with challenges, but I don't see it a ton different than if I had a 1 and 2 year old. I don't really prepare them- I see if they play with my kids and if my kids connect with them. I don't leave a babysitter much to do nor do I expect s/he to clean up while they are awake. I want him/her to interact with the kids and if there is time pick up after they go to bed. Basically I want reliability, dependability and maturity. I don't think you have to have experience with twins to have those qualities.

 

No, but our sitter is a mom of 4 (two that are 2 years apart), so she has some experience with babies and kids in general.

 

I agree with PPs - it's not something specific I've looked for in a sitter. More their connection to the girls, their maturity & ability to think on their feet. We do have a sitter who's nieces are twins almost exactly a year older than our girls, but she says they're so different from our girls that it's like comparing apples & oranges.

 

We've never had many sitters. Usually just family. And now my oldest is 13, so she usually watches the other kids if we need. She's super responsible. But when we have had sitters, I didn't worry about twin experience. I didn't have twin experience before having them and did fine. With a sitter, I want someone who is responsible, comfortable with small children, someone they like, etc.

 

I would definitely want to know they had experience with more than one small child at a time. Most of the sitters we use are either teachers from their school (who are used to a 5:1 ratio of kids to adults, plus have all sorts of other training/experience) or other parents that we do babysitting swaps with, whose kids are the same age as ours.

The one time we hired a teenage babysitter, we had her bring a friend as backup, and it sounds like they both worked pretty hard! Our twins were just babies, though.

 

I only have had one sitter and I got her name from our local Mothers of Multiples group. She's been a nanny of twins many times and she's currently a nanny of triplets. So yes I sought that out.

For me it had to be someone that had experience with either multiples or a daycare type setting. I couldn't just hire someone that hadn't dealt with multiple kids the same age.

Things were also different because I had a baby and twins that were a year older, so I had to know that they could multi-task and hold one baby while entertaining a toddler.

I do know that I'm on the more over-protective side of this though

 

Thank you for your responses and insight! I was just talking with a friend of mine who had twins earlier this year (babies #3 and #4). Her regular sitter did not feel comfortable caring for all 4, including twins. Now she is finding the right sitter must be careful with several children. She also does not leave them for very long. I'm sure as the children get older she will have more flexibility.