Bringing Back the Babysitters Club

I really hated babysitting, but I loved the Babysitter’s Club. 

Scholastic, Inc. is bringing back the series  and Ann M. Martin is writing a prequel about the group of middle school friends who started a successful babysitting business together.  This news has me nostalgic for Babysitters on Board and all the others I consumed late at night when I was supposed to be sleeping.

I read the books as a  fourth grader who thought seventh graders were really old and sophisticated. Unfortunately, the books did not inspire me as a teenager  to passionately take up babysitting.  Babysitting only inspired me to dislike other people’s children and consider whether it was really fair to pay someone $2 an hour to protect their kids from fires, burglars, and scissors.  I spent most of my time begging the kids to go to bed and fretting that I would burn down the house if I turned on the stove.

 At the time, I loved the details about the girls who seemed so realistic, as though somewhere in the parallel universe of  fictional Stonybrook, Connecticut lived Kristy, Stacey, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Dawn who got together every week for their club meetings and to schedule their babysitting jobs.

Now I kinda think that BSC could be a precrusor to Sex and the City minus the sex (although having that in the books would’ve given Sweet Valley High a run for its money).  Think about it–the four original girls were archetypes–the conservative smarty-pants (Mary Anne), the ambitious tomboy (Kristy), the artistic funky girl (Claudia), and the sophisticated trend-setter (Stacey). Moreover, the books focused on their friendships and conflicts with each other.  We can quibble over whether SATC was truly feminist, but I think that portraying young girls as resourceful and entrepreneurial is pretty cool (even if it was about babysitting).