Questions to ask a babysitter before the first booking

A cleared Working With Children Check tells you the state looked at a specific set of records and found nothing disqualifying. It is worth having, and it is narrow. It says nothing about whether someone will notice a child has gone quiet. This guide is about the part you have to work out for yourself, in one conversation, before you leave the house.

Start with the part that is checkable

If the sitter holds a Check, verify it before you spend time on anything else. It is free, it takes about two minutes, and we have written up how to check a babysitter's WWCC step by step. Do that first and the conversation changes shape: you are no longer trying to work out whether someone is safe in the abstract, you are working out whether they suit your family.

Not every casual babysitter holds one, and in NSW a privately arranged sitter working in your own home is not legally required to. That is a real distinction rather than a loophole, and it is covered in babysitter vs nanny. Asking anyway is reasonable.

The five questions worth asking

Send these in one message rather than drip-feeding them. It respects the sitter's time, and the speed and shape of the reply is itself information.

The first one replaces "how many years have you been babysitting?", which sounds like the useful question and is not. Someone with six years of school-age experience and someone with six years of babies have the same number and completely different skills. Ask which ages, and listen for whether they distinguish between a two-year-old and a four-year-old.

The second is the one that earns its place. You are not looking for a disaster story. You are looking for whether they can describe a hard evening without either dramatising it or pretending it never happened. The answer is usually mundane, which is the point.

The third works because it is specific to your child. Swap in whatever your evenings actually throw up: the toddler who climbs out of the cot, the eight-year-old who negotiates. A sitter who has done the work will answer with what they would try first and what they would do if that failed. A sitter who has not will answer with reassurance.

The fifth question is not about safety and is the one most people leave out. A sitter who is vague about getting home from your suburb at eleven at night is a sitter who cancels, or who starts watching the clock at nine. Sort it before the booking, along with the rate — which belongs in the same message, and is covered in babysitter rates in Sydney.

What a good answer sounds like

Specifics, and a child in them. "I had a four-year-old who would not go down unless the hall light stayed on, so I started leaving it on before bath" is a real answer. "I am great with kids, they always love me" is not an answer, it is a description of themselves.

Watch for someone who has never had anything go wrong. Anyone who has sat regularly has had a child refuse to eat, a nappy fail, a parent come home two hours late. A sitter who reports a clean record has either not worked much or is managing you, and both are worth knowing before you book rather than after.

You are also allowed to notice how they talk about children who were difficult. Warmth about a hard child is a much better sign than competence about an easy one.

Ring the references, do not just collect them

Most people ask for references and never call. Calling takes five minutes and one question does most of the work: would you book them again?

Listen to the pause more than the answer. Almost nobody will say something damning about a person they liked well enough to hire, but "yes, constantly, they are with us on Saturday" and "yes, they were fine" are different replies and you will hear the difference immediately.

If you get a second question in, make it about the awkward part: was there anything you had to ask them to do differently? A referee who has one small thing is telling you the truth. A referee with nothing at all may not have used them much.

The trial beats every answer

Book the first session short, and be somewhere you can get back from quickly. An hour while you have coffee up the road is enough. You are not supervising. Both of you get a low-stakes first go.

Afterwards, ask your child. Not "did you like them?", which gets you a yes, but what they did. The detail children volunteer about an adult they enjoyed is hard to fake, in either direction.

Then look at the house. Spotlessness is irrelevant. What matters is whether the things you asked for actually happened. A sitter who wrote down the bedtime you gave them and stuck to it within ten minutes has told you more than an hour of conversation could.

What we check, and what we leave to you

A verified badge on this site means we ran the WWCC check ourselves with the Office of the Children's Guardian on a date we record, and separately confirmed a government photo ID against a matching selfie, with the names and dates of birth required to match. That is the whole claim. The full detail is on what the badge covers.

We do not check references, first aid certificates, or the years of experience on a profile. Those sit on profiles as the sitter's own claims and are labelled that way, because we have not verified them and will not imply otherwise. A profile with no badge means at least one of those two checks is not confirmed, and the profile says which one in the place the badge would sit. For a sitter who has just listed, that is the ordinary state rather than a warning.

So the questions above are not a fallback for when a sitter is unverified. They are the half of the job that stays with you either way.