6. The child threatened to lie about me abusing him

I used to babysit two boys (brothers) once a week. One was maybe 5-6 and the other was 2-3. The older one was SUPER smart. And always getting into mischief. He reminded me of Calvin from the comic strip – his behavior wasn’t malicious and he was never really TRYING to cause trouble… but somehow, trouble always found him. I tried not to play favorites, but I really adored him, and had a lot of fun babysitting him. The younger one was sweet & never misbehaved.

Like most kids, they hated going to bed and getting them to sleep was always a long, drawn-out chore. One night in particular the older one didn’t want to go to bed and was pitching fit after fit. I got a little fed up, and as a punishment, he didn’t get to sit in on story time. He naturally did not like this. So he told me: “I’m going to tell my mom you abused me!”

Scariest moment of my babysitting career. How do you defend yourself against a kid saying that? The worst part was the kid could tell he got a reaction out of me so he started running around yelling “You abused me! You abused me!”

I waited really nervously for the parents to come home, and told them immediately what happened. Turns out, they’d been talking about bullying, abuse, “bad touches,” etc, in school that week, and the mom blamed it on that. I thought it was really weird that she’d dismiss her kid saying that so quickly, but then she told me “Oh don’t worry, we nanny-cam’ed you the first few weeks you babysat, we know how great you are with them.”

I was so weirded out, but the next time I went over the kid had made me a card saying he was sorry. The mom said she talked to him about it, and why it was so bad to make up those kinds of lies. I kept babysitting for the boys for a few years. They always overpaid me, so that definitely helped!