why we set up MissMolly

We have discovered, as a consequence of having our own children, that childcare is frightfully expensive. MissMolly tries to address that somewhat in not being an agency, but rather a directory. 

It means that our joining fee for parents is nominal and our joining fee for carers is zero. This means that we are not spending time or effort doing what a parent will do anyway which is to assess and validate any prospective babysitter.

In the past (10 years ago or more) many parents would accept a friend’s recommendation at face value. Nowadays, as we found to our cost, even a recommendation is not enough.

We have designed the website purely as a directory. The policy that we have incorporated in the site is that the parent makes the initial contact to between 3 and 5 babysitters; interviews and collects their references and finally makes a choice. Any babysitter that has registered a CRB and references with the directory would have to produce those at an interview or the first meeting. Although it would be wrong to say that there is no ‘vetting’ of the registered babysitters as each application is checked for various problems, including displaying of personal contact information and malicious registrations.

If we decided to act as an agency, the checking process would be duplicated between us and a parent and if we were therefore in a position to ‘recommend’ someone we would be removing much of the choice that all parents need. Each combination of child and parent is different and can not really be compartmentalised into a small number of selected criteria.

It is for these reasons that we have decided to be the ‘Yellow Pages’ for the babysitter rather than the full blown nanny agency that other websites have decided to become. I hope that each parent will only have to register once (it lasts for a year) in order to find themselves some reliable care for their children. I haven’t set up this site to continuously milk parents each time they need to find a babysitter.