Séamas O’Reilly: ‘I had no experience of babysitters as a child’

Aoife (pronounced Aoife) smiles kindly, although this rigmarole is redundant by now. She’s babysat for us four times and it’s never been remotely difficult for her. Nor, it must be said, has her babysitting ever aligned too closely with our instructions, since my kids are so excited to see her that preserving anything like a normal routine is functionally impossible.

They are already leaping and shrieking and jumping on her lap to tell her stories, because Aoife is teenaged and cool and wise. She’s done GCSEs, goes to gigs, buys vinyl records and wears hoodie sleeves down to her palms.

Suffice to say, my kids adore her and respond to her arrival as if we’re leaving them alone for the evening with a foot-high mound of cocaine.

As we ready ourselves to leave, I tell my wife how novel all this is for me, since I had no experience of babysitters as a child. I grew up in open countryside, miles away from any other houses, with a widowed dad and 10 siblings – I’m telling you this bit, my wife’s known for ages – so we never had babysitters at all.

My parents’ remarkable fecundity had provided us with a permanent conveyor belt of children turning roughly 15 each year, any of whom my father deemed acceptably senior to stand in for him, should he find himself working late or staying overnight somewhere. Whether this arrangement would be acceptable in 2025 is debatable, but such examination of one’s own childhood is best avoided.

Looking back, my father might not have been a fantastic aggregator of risk. He was the product of a less anxious time, but this quality was greatly laminated by the nerve-shredding experience of raising 11 children by himself and the dozens of trips, falls, broken bones and hospital jaunts this brought with it, which gave him the careworn indifference of an army medic from the Napoleonic wars. His concern for his own personal safety was similarly cauterised, most especially in cases when the safer alternative to any task would require paying money to a professional. As a civil engineer, he was extremely proficient in most aspects of DIY, plumbing and electrics. But, as a miser, he made it his life’s passion to push towards the fatal frontiers of this expertise.

One might cite the occasion on which he switched the large gas bottles in our caravan while smoking a cigar, which projected, faceward, a big plume of blue flame that nearly took his eyebrows off. Or his ardour for heaving himself, or us, up ladders to patch tiles or reach fraying, buzzing light fixtures. Sometimes these ladders were perched on tables and at least once on a ladder he held himself – swaying like a circus act, as he placed its base on his bending knees. I was unblocking our septic tank with sewer rods by the time I was a teen. He taught me how to prime and start a chainsaw at 10.

It’s quite possible he thought we were all immortal – a conceit which, I must admit, has been ratified by our unanimous commitment to still being alive. As such, paying an outsider, or even a cousin, to babysit would have been not merely profligate, but unnecessary, meaning babysitters belonged to that same genre of mundane things – like pocket money, trick or treating or having neighbours – which seemed so exotic as to be American.

Babysitters were beautiful teens in sitcoms and horror movies, forever drinking on the job or inviting their boyfriends over. As a child, I probably would have quite liked the opportunity to form a desperate crush on one of them, even if it carried the attendant risk of being chased through the house by a serial killer. I had the chainsaw, so I’d be fine.

My wife is a great deal more experienced. She was minded by aunties and friends throughout her childhood and became something of a prodigy in the babysitting world herself, caring for a plethora of small cousins and neighbours across Dublin by the time she was in her early teens. This she did at Celtic Tiger pricing, an early foray into the labour market which, regrettably, has given her taste for the finer things in life.

My first experience of babysitting was for my brother Dara and his wife Penny, shortly after we moved to London 15 years ago. Their daughter was a toddler then, a chubby-faced cherub who seemed delighted to be minded by someone other than her parents, so long as one of us (my wife) knew what she was doing and the other (me) looked quite a bit like her dad.

It was, in essence, my first real experience of parenting: the first nappy I changed, burping I administered, tantrum I soothed. With pleasing, if mildly terrifying, circularity, that self-same cherub is now the Aoife who sits in front of us, the mature, kind young woman laughing as our kids scream in one ear each and who seems infinitely more capable of dealing with it all than I was, well into my adult years. But, I think to myself, smugly, has she had chainsaw training?

Photograph by Getty Images