When you live in your parents house, you need to do things to help with the family, and that can sometimes include babysitting.

What would you do if even though you now had a full time job and paid rent, your parents still expected you to drop everything and babysit every time they needed you?

That is what is happening to the daughter in this story, so she finally put her foot down and told them she wouldn’t babysit without advanced notice, and her parents are very upset.

AITAH for not helping my parents with babysitting?

I (25F) have lived with my mom and (step) dad and 2 siblings (7 and 8 years old) since I was 19.

This seems pretty reasonable.

During my college days, I was pretty much broke so I couldn’t pay rent for my room, but my parents told me that my “payment” was to help out with babysitting whenever I can, so I obliged.

I got a part-time job for a couple years but only made at most $300 biweekly, but I still offered to pay whatever I could afford among the household expenses such as exterminator, phone, internet, gas, garbage, etc.

So, this arrangement worked out for everyone for quite a while.

Sometimes my parents accepted the money, sometimes they told me to just keep babysitting to pay them back.

Finally I got a full time job in 2023, I make much better money now that I currently pay “rent” of $900/mo for my room & contribute about $300/mo for groceries, and this doesn’t even include my other usual monthly expenses for car insurance, student loans, credit card, etc.

Where is she living? That should be enough for a small apartment.

I still don’t make enough though to live on my own and I have anxiety about roommates / living with people I don’t really know.

Because I pay more towards the household expenses now, I stopped seeing babysitting as a payment/obligation to my parents, but I think my parents got so used to me babysitting so often that they now ALWAYS expect me to babysit.

She should have a conversation with them about cutting back on babysitting.

Since I got my current job, I feel more mentally drained every day now & pay so much towards my expenses that I feel like I have no money to spend on myself at all and am constantly stressed about money, so I’m never quite in the mindset to watch 2 kids after a long week.

To add babysitting on top of that makes it worse.

Mom definitely got used to having a live-in babysitter available.

I expressed this to my parents and I’ve only ever argued with my mom about it a few times because she’s started to act entitled to my off time from work.

The only slight improvement is now they try to ask me to babysit ahead of time rather than expect me to drop all my plans to watch the kids, but they still have trouble with just THIS.

Here is a detail that makes things even weirder.

To add more context, i have 2 other siblings: my brother, 23, unemployed, doesn’t go to school, and doesn’t go out at all, and lives 30 min across the city; and my sister, 20, lives with my brother, always busy with school, work & her social life.

In the last 6 years, my parents have asked my brother to babysit max 3 times only and that’s when they’re really desperate for a sitter.

Clear double standards.

But they have no issue assuming me & my sister will immediately drop all of our plans to babysit.

I always felt they purposely did this to us daughters because we’re girls so we should “want” to be around babies/kids more often.

There is no way to know if she will change her mind or not.

I also have told my parents many times that I will never have kids voluntarily because of personal reasons, but my parents just keep telling me that I “will change my mind” about having kids in the future. (I won’t.)

Since I’m 25 now, it has felt like lately my mom’s purposely forcing the kids on me so I could change my mind about parenthood.

She needs to set boundaries for now, and start planning to move out.

There were many instances of my parents assuming I would automatically babysit, but recently I feel like it’s just been so annoying.

A week ago, I had an awful day at work & came home early. I just wanted to relax and cry in my room, but suddenly I hear my dad tell the kids to come stay in my room with me because he needed to go to the store.

This is just rude, not even asking.

I was overstimulated and came out the room to tell him that I’m tired and need to be alone, but he already left the house, so I had no choice but to babysit.

Now today, my mom was explaining that she and my dad have to go help at a distant family’s funeral out of town on Sunday.

Once again, demanding, not asking.

In our culture that typically means they have to help cook and clean for the event and pay respects, so they likely will be gone from sunrise to midnight. She told me, “The kids will stay with you. You need to babysit.”

I told her that she never brought this up before and isn’t even asking me right now, just demanding me to do it.

This is not a sustainable situation.

She said, “You have to do it.”

I told her no, she never asked me ahead of time and even if this was a last minute invite to the funeral, she didn’t even have the decency to ASK right now.

Come on mom, your daughter is stressed too.

All that she responded with was, “I’m too stressed to argue about this. It’s happening.”

So I told her it’s a strong no, I’m not babysitting, and they’ll have to find their own solution. I shouldn’t have lied but I did lie and told her that I already had plans for Sunday. (My only plans were to relax before the start of the work week.)

A little courtesy goes a long way.

The thing is, if she had just ASKED, I would’ve said yes. All I ever wanted of my parents was to just be considerate of my time too.

It’s happened too often in the past where they’ll suddenly drop babysitting duties on me without warning when I had existing plans but because I was living rent-free, I felt I had no choice but to oblige so i would just rearrange or cancel my plans then.

She is a paying tenant now, they can’t just demand she babysit anytime.

I appreciate my parents letting me live rent-free for several years, but it’s different now, I do contribute to the household now.

I love them and I love my siblings, I would help them in a heartbeat as I have done so in the past.

It seems the main issue is curtesy.

But I absolutely hate that they’re not being very considerate and are acting too entitled to my free time.

Lately it feels like they don’t see me as their daughter, just their live-in babysitter.

AITA?

Not at all. Mom and dad have clearly gotten used to having a live-in babysitter and they need to figure out alternative options. This daughter also needs to start working on moving out on her own.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

This commenter is correct.

Moving out is the best solution.

Here is a great idea.

She can definitely afford to move out.

Yup, move out and the problems go away.

This family needs to set up some boundaries.

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