Dignity for the carer is safety for the child.
I started this to protect children. That was the whole mission : keep kids safe, give parents someone they could actually trust. I was looking at all of it from the parents' side, because that's the side I was standing on.
Then I started hiring sitters. And one conversation at a time, they showed me a side of this work I had managed not to see.
What they told me
I won't name anyone, and I've kept their stories deliberately blurred, because they trusted me with them. But the same things came up again and again, from different women who had never met each other.
Wages held back, with a sudden, invented complaint about their work as the excuse. Being treated as interchangeable. Lose one, find another, it doesn't matter. Women who were afraid in the homes they worked in. Women accused, absurdly, of trying to seduce the husband. Women carrying enormous love for children who weren't theirs, and being handed almost nothing in return. Not even basic respect.
One of them told me something that stayed with me. She'd worked for an agency that gave her real, good training. Montessori, child safety, genuine skills. And then the company changed direction and let go of most of its sitters almost overnight, because they didn't speak English. Years of women, trained and capable, discarded the moment they stopped fitting a sales pitch.
The word that kept coming up: invisible
Here is the paradox nobody says out loud. These women make our lives possible. They are the reason we can work, travel, take the meeting, climb the ladder, get through the hard week. We hand them the most precious thing we have, our children, and at the same time we treat them as a function, not a person. Replaceable. Background. Invisible.
Most parents are not villains. The problem isn't a parent here or there. It's a system built so that this kind of disregard is easy, normal, and unseen. The industry treats these women as interchangeable, and most of us never have to notice.
What changed for me
So my mission grew a second half. It's still about keeping children safe. But it's now also about giving these women back the place they've earned, by caring for our kids, by giving them love, by making our own work possible.
That's why we take zero commission from a sitter's pay. Other platforms take a cut from women who are already underpaid. We don't take a cent of theirs. It's why we verify them properly, treat them as the professionals they are, and never throw someone away because she stopped ticking a box.
Where this goes
One verified sitter, one family at a time, but also one respected woman at a time. The children are safe, and the person keeping them safe is finally seen. That's the whole point.