I have to admit, as a man who has yet to produce Baby Slices, it's a question I've never considered. My first impulse was "Why not?" But it looks like the majority of parents polled in this advice column are skittish about letting a teen answer the door without an adult present:
"We don't do delivery unless the sitter is an adult. We just pick up frozen pizza and go out with a peaceful mind. To be quite honest, if the sitter is 16 with a 4-year-old, I would do mac and cheese in the microwave or sandwiches. A 16-year-old hasn't had enough kitchen experience, and a 4-year-old is unpredictable."
OK. I'll give them the stranger-coming-to-the-door bit. Understood. But worrying about a 16-year-old burning down the house trying to cook a frozen pizza? Come on, you nattering nabobs. That's ridiculous.
I take that as an insult..a 16 year old not having enough kitchen experience! At 16 I could prepare an entire dinner, soup to nuts including a London broil, wild rice and asparagus. Not to mention the Caesar salad!
I take that as an insult..a 16 year old not having enough kitchen experience! At 16 I could prepare an entire dinner, soup to nuts including a London broil, wild rice and asparagus. Not to mention the Caesar salad!
If a 16 year old can't yet cook a simple dinner, perhaps s/he should not be babysitting.
It never occured to me that ordering pizza could be dangerous. Back in the early '90's when I was a teen babysitter, it was done all the time. But I guess it's ultimately up to the parents. I think I'd be ok with it.
It's too bad that some people can't even trust the pizza delivery guy! If you're old enough to be the babysitter, you should be capable enough to answer the door and pay for a pizza.
As a babysitter from the time I was 14-16, I was always required to do some cooking. Whether or not I would be capable of doing so was asked in the interview.
Funny this topic should come up. I was just having a conversation w/ friends the other day about how there have been several commercials lately featuring female pizza deliverers. We all agreed that this would never actually happen as it would be too dangerous for the teenage girl delivering the pizza to go up to strangers doors.
I've babysat for parents who ordered pizza and had it ready for me before I got there, which makes sense if you're worried about strangers, which, sadly, in this day and age you probably should be with 16 year olds. But it's absolutely outrageous that someone would let someone watch their child who they didn't think competant enough to heat up a pizza. I mean come ON, people.
Come on! If you live in any major city and live in an apartment, your door will have a peek hole. If you live in a house, I presume you will have some windows. Someone rings the doorbell. The babysitter can look out the window or peek hole. The stranger (most possibly wearing a shirt uniform) holding the big pizza warmer is the pizza delivery person. You open the door, take the pizza and then pay the person.
I don't know what is next in our society. Maybe parents will start driving their kids to school. It doesn't matter that they only live three blocks away and that walk might be the only exercise the child has all day. Oh wait, that is going on now too!
And for the record, there are female delivery drivers. Maybe not as many as there are male, but they do exist.
To rephrase the comment on female delivery drivers: the ones recently appearing in commercials for chains look like they just got their driver's licenses. I am all for equality, but if I owned a pizzeria, I would see this as a liability.
I answer the door for pizza people - I ignore it when unsolicited or uninvited callers (such as those who choose to share their religion) come around. No worries.
Usually, I order a pizza/other takeout food before we leave, pay for it by credit card, and either have it delivered before we leave or shortly thereafter. My main go-to sitter is my step-daughter - she is a tad scatter brained, but perfectly capable of taking a pizza, paying for it if necessary and closing the door firmly. And she's only 14.
Look, for those of you who think that babysitters should make a meal for the kids--c'mon, that's another job--should they clean the kid's room too? A preteen getting a few bucks an hour shouldn't be expected to cook London Broil.
As for heat-up pizza--getting a good pizza delivered is much healthier than a processed frozen one.
When I babysat, the parents almost always gave $ for pizza. Unfortunately, the kids were into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and liked the ham and pineapple variety.
The kids I sat for were much scarier than any pizza delivery boy.
I think you guys are all actually missing the point. I wonder if you guys have children? I have no children but my understanding wasn't questioning the sitter's ability to heat a pizza, but rather how to do so while watching a 4 year old. My 2 year old nephew is FAST and I would hesitate to prepare a meal for him while he's up and about (which, at age 4, he probably will be more than now, even). Unless you plan on strapping them into a high chair before you start, the little tyke is running around, grabbing things, screaming, creating a mess, a lot of noise, and whatever. You can't pay attention to everything at once and the fact is, he can easily grab something off a table that everyone will regret him doing (hot pan, hot pizza, knife, whatever). With 30+ people around WATCHING HIM and trying to prevent him from getting hurt, my nephew managed to grab a teapot and spill it all over himself. Luckily the water was cooling down, but it was still hot enough that he had to go to the emergency room.
Kids are unpredictable and a bit scary. I'm honestly terrified of being given him to watch - he comes over to play with my (very gentle) dog, and I'm up and running after him taking things from him quickly and telling him repeatedly "No, not for playing! No, not for Dylan! NO NOT FOR PLAYING NO DON'T THROW THAT AT THE DOG NO AHHHH" while his mother sits there in the couch, ignoring me cuz she's used to it lol (and doesn't realize how NOT kid proof my apt is vs. her house).
If a 16 year old isn't mature enough to answer the door on their own, or cook a frozen pizza on their own, they're not mature enough to babysit a 4 year old on their own... sorry... next?
I was cooking in the kitchen of my family's restaurant at age 16 and babysitting my four younger brothers on weeknights while my parents worked there. A four-year-old who runs around like a banshee has a major discipline problem. A little corrective action on the posterior region would solve that problem once and for all, and allow the sitter to do her/his job. Everything is a "problem" in today's world, not because times have changed but because most people born after (roughly 1950-55) have not been brought up to be decisive. Decisiveness eliminates fear.
I was probably about sixteen when I put a frozen pizza in the oven on a plastic plate. (The baby had cried a lot and I was harried and distracted and deeply, deeply stupid.) After awhile I noticed the smell of burning plastic and found that the plate had melted all over the oven. I scraped it off the rack and the oven floor, opened all the windows, turned on the fan, and ate the pizza.
I probably could have handled answering the door, but I'm not making any promises.
When I was 15 I spent the summer as a live-in nanny for family friends. The kids were about 5 and 8 at the time. I prepared lunch every day, and dinner most days. Sometimes it was just making sandwiches, sometimes it was heating canned soup, and some days it was actual cooking. In my own home I did almost all the cooking, and I mean making spaghetti sauce from scratch, and knowing how to make a roux so I could make mock-Hamburger Helper (mom did not allow the real stuff in the house.)
Oh, and I answered the door all by myself too, but this was in a rural-ish area and during the 80s and the world hadn't quite gone to hell in a handbasket yet.
A 16 year old, even in today's insane world, should both know how to cook, and know how to be cautious about opening the door to a stranger. 4 year olds complicate the situation for anyone...but a 16 year old should be able to handle that if they're gonna be babysitting.
@JerseyWarren: if you're referring to my nephew, he's 2, and he gets excited when he sees my dog. I can't testify to how crazy he behaves the rest of the time because I'm not around him that often, and when I am, there's usually a ton of other people around, more reason for him to be excitable. But I'm sure I'd receive more pleading phone calls from my sister if he really was that terrible.
As for those of us born after 1950-55, I don't know what you really mean, because I was born way after that and I'm damn decisive. And for sure, I received "posterior corrective action" on the regular (I was a very mischievous kid).
Ok. My parents have owned various Chinese restaurants my entire life, and at the age of 16, I was delivering food all over the place. 4 years later, I'm still expected to come home from college over the summer to deliver food. It might be scary to open the door to a stranger, but it's also fairly nerve-racking to have a stranger open the door to you! I completely agree that kids should learn how to be self dependent. I look at my 10-year-old little sister and how she doesn't even know how to boil eggs and cringe at how much my parents baby her. At her age, I was making authentic Cantonese dinners for my ailing grandmother!
I Was A Teenage Female Pizza Delivery Driver! Sounds like a subject for letters in the Penthouse forum, but it is true. I delivered pizza, off and on from the age of 16 until I was 22. In a college town no less. To frat houses having beer bashes. The biggest danger was nobody admitting to ordering the pizza and no one being willing to pay for it. All that wasted time & no tip.
If a 16 year old can't heat up a pizza while watching a 4 year old they have no business watching that child. Presumably in the 4 years the child has been alive the parents have said "HOT, no touch, stay back!" when they open the oven themselves on a few occasions, so the concept is not unknown to the 4 year old. Or they could turn on the TV when teh oven is finished preheating, plop the kid in front of it, go perform the scary and highly dangerous insertion of the pizza, leave the kid in front of the TV for the 15 minutes of cooking time (So the sitter can stand in front of the oven, fire extinguisher in one hand and phone ready to call 911 in the other in case the cheese sets the oven on fire) and again while doing them even more highly dangerous act of removing the pizza and slicing it.
Oh but wait, that would mean exposing the kid to 15 minutes of TV. Can't have that
oh, and for the record I have a 5 year old and a 4 year old and their teenaged sitters often cook them dinner using the big scary dangerous oven. We live in the boonies and no one delivers out here so that is not an issue, though I would let them order out if they wanted.
So what you're telling me is that a sixteen year old who is old enough to drive a car; who is old enough to hold a part-time job after their school day; who is old enough to watch MTV whether you want them to or not - is not old enough to answer the door to get pizza because THE PIZZA GUY MIGHT GET THEM?
It's a Steven King sort of world we live in, isn't it.
yeah...now that I think about it, it's ridiculous. I mean, they probably order food at their OWN houses and answer the door, we don't lock our 16 year olds in houses or hire sitters whenever their parents leave, so why would they be able to take care of CHILDREN but not operate an oven or decide if someone's a sketchball or a delivery man?
I delivered pizza in high school and I'm a girl. *shrugs* No big deal. You just have to be aware but that goes for any delivery driver, male or female.
Also, I was cooking full meals at least one night a week by the time I was 16. Lots of 16 year olds work at fast food places. You can trust them with a deep fryer and not an oven? You trust your kids to someone who is that old and can't use an oven????
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25 Comments:
I take that as an insult..a 16 year old not having enough kitchen experience! At 16 I could prepare an entire dinner, soup to nuts including a London broil, wild rice and asparagus. Not to mention the Caesar salad!
RichardCrystal at 11:47AM on 06/03/08
I take that as an insult..a 16 year old not having enough kitchen experience! At 16 I could prepare an entire dinner, soup to nuts including a London broil, wild rice and asparagus. Not to mention the Caesar salad!
RichardCrystal at 11:56AM on 06/03/08
If a 16 year old can't yet cook a simple dinner, perhaps s/he should not be babysitting.
It never occured to me that ordering pizza could be dangerous. Back in the early '90's when I was a teen babysitter, it was done all the time. But I guess it's ultimately up to the parents. I think I'd be ok with it.
Kerosena at 12:25PM on 06/03/08
Also, by the time I was 16, I was likely to have been dating the pizza boy.
Kerosena at 12:27PM on 06/03/08
It's too bad that some people can't even trust the pizza delivery guy! If you're old enough to be the babysitter, you should be capable enough to answer the door and pay for a pizza.
LiveToEat at 12:32PM on 06/03/08
As a babysitter from the time I was 14-16, I was always required to do some cooking. Whether or not I would be capable of doing so was asked in the interview.
Funny this topic should come up. I was just having a conversation w/ friends the other day about how there have been several commercials lately featuring female pizza deliverers. We all agreed that this would never actually happen as it would be too dangerous for the teenage girl delivering the pizza to go up to strangers doors.
liwinegirl at 12:43PM on 06/03/08
I've babysat for parents who ordered pizza and had it ready for me before I got there, which makes sense if you're worried about strangers, which, sadly, in this day and age you probably should be with 16 year olds. But it's absolutely outrageous that someone would let someone watch their child who they didn't think competant enough to heat up a pizza. I mean come ON, people.
embolini9 at 12:56PM on 06/03/08
It actually happens about 50% of the time I get a pizza delivery....
Cary at 12:57PM on 06/03/08
Come on! If you live in any major city and live in an apartment, your door will have a peek hole. If you live in a house, I presume you will have some windows. Someone rings the doorbell. The babysitter can look out the window or peek hole. The stranger (most possibly wearing a shirt uniform) holding the big pizza warmer is the pizza delivery person. You open the door, take the pizza and then pay the person.
I don't know what is next in our society. Maybe parents will start driving their kids to school. It doesn't matter that they only live three blocks away and that walk might be the only exercise the child has all day. Oh wait, that is going on now too!
And for the record, there are female delivery drivers. Maybe not as many as there are male, but they do exist.
kevlney at 1:13PM on 06/03/08
Yeah, I have female friends who've been delivery drivers.
So what happens at these no-pizza houses when the Jehovah's Witnesses ring the doorbell?
mollyjade at 1:38PM on 06/03/08
To rephrase the comment on female delivery drivers: the ones recently appearing in commercials for chains look like they just got their driver's licenses. I am all for equality, but if I owned a pizzeria, I would see this as a liability.
liwinegirl at 2:41PM on 06/03/08
I answer the door for pizza people - I ignore it when unsolicited or uninvited callers (such as those who choose to share their religion) come around. No worries.
Usually, I order a pizza/other takeout food before we leave, pay for it by credit card, and either have it delivered before we leave or shortly thereafter. My main go-to sitter is my step-daughter - she is a tad scatter brained, but perfectly capable of taking a pizza, paying for it if necessary and closing the door firmly. And she's only 14.
Maureen at 3:32PM on 06/03/08
Look, for those of you who think that babysitters should make a meal for the kids--c'mon, that's another job--should they clean the kid's room too? A preteen getting a few bucks an hour shouldn't be expected to cook London Broil.
As for heat-up pizza--getting a good pizza delivered is much healthier than a processed frozen one.
When I babysat, the parents almost always gave $ for pizza. Unfortunately, the kids were into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and liked the ham and pineapple variety.
The kids I sat for were much scarier than any pizza delivery boy.
HeartofGlass at 3:49PM on 06/03/08
I think you guys are all actually missing the point. I wonder if you guys have children? I have no children but my understanding wasn't questioning the sitter's ability to heat a pizza, but rather how to do so while watching a 4 year old. My 2 year old nephew is FAST and I would hesitate to prepare a meal for him while he's up and about (which, at age 4, he probably will be more than now, even). Unless you plan on strapping them into a high chair before you start, the little tyke is running around, grabbing things, screaming, creating a mess, a lot of noise, and whatever. You can't pay attention to everything at once and the fact is, he can easily grab something off a table that everyone will regret him doing (hot pan, hot pizza, knife, whatever). With 30+ people around WATCHING HIM and trying to prevent him from getting hurt, my nephew managed to grab a teapot and spill it all over himself. Luckily the water was cooling down, but it was still hot enough that he had to go to the emergency room.
Kids are unpredictable and a bit scary. I'm honestly terrified of being given him to watch - he comes over to play with my (very gentle) dog, and I'm up and running after him taking things from him quickly and telling him repeatedly "No, not for playing! No, not for Dylan! NO NOT FOR PLAYING NO DON'T THROW THAT AT THE DOG NO AHHHH" while his mother sits there in the couch, ignoring me cuz she's used to it lol (and doesn't realize how NOT kid proof my apt is vs. her house).
So, yeah.
feistyfoodie at 4:17PM on 06/03/08
If a 16 year old isn't mature enough to answer the door on their own, or cook a frozen pizza on their own, they're not mature enough to babysit a 4 year old on their own... sorry... next?
ronzoni at 4:20PM on 06/03/08
I was cooking in the kitchen of my family's restaurant at age 16 and babysitting my four younger brothers on weeknights while my parents worked there. A four-year-old who runs around like a banshee has a major discipline problem. A little corrective action on the posterior region would solve that problem once and for all, and allow the sitter to do her/his job. Everything is a "problem" in today's world, not because times have changed but because most people born after (roughly 1950-55) have not been brought up to be decisive. Decisiveness eliminates fear.
JerseyWarren at 5:32PM on 06/03/08
I was probably about sixteen when I put a frozen pizza in the oven on a plastic plate. (The baby had cried a lot and I was harried and distracted and deeply, deeply stupid.) After awhile I noticed the smell of burning plastic and found that the plate had melted all over the oven. I scraped it off the rack and the oven floor, opened all the windows, turned on the fan, and ate the pizza.
I probably could have handled answering the door, but I'm not making any promises.
esmesbell at 7:29PM on 06/03/08
When I was 15 I spent the summer as a live-in nanny for family friends. The kids were about 5 and 8 at the time. I prepared lunch every day, and dinner most days. Sometimes it was just making sandwiches, sometimes it was heating canned soup, and some days it was actual cooking. In my own home I did almost all the cooking, and I mean making spaghetti sauce from scratch, and knowing how to make a roux so I could make mock-Hamburger Helper (mom did not allow the real stuff in the house.)
Oh, and I answered the door all by myself too, but this was in a rural-ish area and during the 80s and the world hadn't quite gone to hell in a handbasket yet.
A 16 year old, even in today's insane world, should both know how to cook, and know how to be cautious about opening the door to a stranger. 4 year olds complicate the situation for anyone...but a 16 year old should be able to handle that if they're gonna be babysitting.
AliceBlue at 8:00PM on 06/03/08
@JerseyWarren: if you're referring to my nephew, he's 2, and he gets excited when he sees my dog. I can't testify to how crazy he behaves the rest of the time because I'm not around him that often, and when I am, there's usually a ton of other people around, more reason for him to be excitable. But I'm sure I'd receive more pleading phone calls from my sister if he really was that terrible.
As for those of us born after 1950-55, I don't know what you really mean, because I was born way after that and I'm damn decisive. And for sure, I received "posterior corrective action" on the regular (I was a very mischievous kid).
feistyfoodie at 12:20AM on 06/04/08
Ok. My parents have owned various Chinese restaurants my entire life, and at the age of 16, I was delivering food all over the place. 4 years later, I'm still expected to come home from college over the summer to deliver food. It might be scary to open the door to a stranger, but it's also fairly nerve-racking to have a stranger open the door to you! I completely agree that kids should learn how to be self dependent. I look at my 10-year-old little sister and how she doesn't even know how to boil eggs and cringe at how much my parents baby her. At her age, I was making authentic Cantonese dinners for my ailing grandmother!
hefloats at 2:30AM on 06/04/08
I Was A Teenage Female Pizza Delivery Driver! Sounds like a subject for letters in the Penthouse forum, but it is true. I delivered pizza, off and on from the age of 16 until I was 22. In a college town no less. To frat houses having beer bashes. The biggest danger was nobody admitting to ordering the pizza and no one being willing to pay for it. All that wasted time & no tip.
If a 16 year old can't heat up a pizza while watching a 4 year old they have no business watching that child. Presumably in the 4 years the child has been alive the parents have said "HOT, no touch, stay back!" when they open the oven themselves on a few occasions, so the concept is not unknown to the 4 year old. Or they could turn on the TV when teh oven is finished preheating, plop the kid in front of it, go perform the scary and highly dangerous insertion of the pizza, leave the kid in front of the TV for the 15 minutes of cooking time (So the sitter can stand in front of the oven, fire extinguisher in one hand and phone ready to call 911 in the other in case the cheese sets the oven on fire) and again while doing them even more highly dangerous act of removing the pizza and slicing it.
Oh but wait, that would mean exposing the kid to 15 minutes of TV. Can't have that
staceylynn at 9:33AM on 06/04/08
oh, and for the record I have a 5 year old and a 4 year old and their teenaged sitters often cook them dinner using the big scary dangerous oven. We live in the boonies and no one delivers out here so that is not an issue, though I would let them order out if they wanted.
staceylynn at 9:36AM on 06/04/08
So what you're telling me is that a sixteen year old who is old enough to drive a car; who is old enough to hold a part-time job after their school day; who is old enough to watch MTV whether you want them to or not - is not old enough to answer the door to get pizza because THE PIZZA GUY MIGHT GET THEM?
It's a Steven King sort of world we live in, isn't it.
foodvox at 10:13AM on 06/04/08
yeah...now that I think about it, it's ridiculous. I mean, they probably order food at their OWN houses and answer the door, we don't lock our 16 year olds in houses or hire sitters whenever their parents leave, so why would they be able to take care of CHILDREN but not operate an oven or decide if someone's a sketchball or a delivery man?
embolini9 at 12:25PM on 06/04/08
I delivered pizza in high school and I'm a girl. *shrugs* No big deal. You just have to be aware but that goes for any delivery driver, male or female.
Also, I was cooking full meals at least one night a week by the time I was 16. Lots of 16 year olds work at fast food places. You can trust them with a deep fryer and not an oven? You trust your kids to someone who is that old and can't use an oven????
mjane79 at 6:51PM on 06/04/08