Teen Babysitter Asks For Advice After A Dad Holds Her Hand & Tells Her To Keep His Out Of Town Wife 'In The Dark' About Extra Shifts
He makes her feel "unsafe," & people are telling her to trust her instincts & run.
Monstera/Pexels; Canva Keeping teens safe nowadays is a hot-button issue for parents. On one hand, teens need to discover how to be self-sufficient and autonomous. But on the other, they need to be kept safe from a world they don't yet know how to navigate.
But as a teen girl who recently posted on Reddit shows, teaching kids to trust their instincts can go a long, long way. Because in the end, it was the young girl's instincts that just might have saved her from a dangerous situation, as she discussed in a post to the "r/TrueOffMyChest" subReddit.
The dad of the kids a teen babysitter cares for sexually harassed her and told her to keep it secret from his wife.
The babysitter, who is 17, has been helping the family for a while now, and since they are young parents to a one and three-year-old and spread pretty thin, she offered to help with more than just babysitting.
The father of the kids seems to have quickly gotten the wrong idea—something that is all too common for childcare workers, as a TikToker who is a former nanny revealed in the video below.
When the mother of the kids went out of town, the dad asked the babysitter for extra help around the house.
She had previously offered to help with things like grocery shopping and other household tasks, so when the mom and kids left the country for a month on a trip, the dad asked the babysitter if he'd help him with cleaning up the house while his wife was gone.
He offered to pick her up in his car and bring her to the house so that they could discuss what he needed help with and create a schedule. She writes that he regularly picks her up and drops her off, so she didn't think much of it.
The dad asked her to keep his wife 'in the dark' about the babysitter's extra work, and then he began flirting with her.
She writes that after he instructed her not to keep quiet about the extra work, he told her she was "very beautiful," which made her very uncomfortable and seemed "strange" to her.
When they got to the house, he stood her in front of a mirror to see if she was taller than him—another thing that struck her as strange especially, she writes, when "he held me around my waist to measure me," which made her very uncomfortable.
He then asked her to put on his wife's wedding dress, and offered to let her wear it to a party. She declined and said that she was pressed for time, but things escalated even further on the way home.
The dad began touching the babysitter in ways that were inappropriate and made her not only uncomfortable but 'feel so unsafe.'
First, he offered her some chocolate, and when it got on her lips, he touched her mouth to wipe it away. He also held her hand while driving her home, and instructed her that she was not allowed to talk to other men.
"I was so startled by this that I mentioned that I had a boyfriend," she writes, and he agreed that that was fine but that she should never accept money from another man, and that she should only work for him and his family, telling her "we need you here."
The girl says she was "horrified," especially when it seemed like he was going to kiss her hand while he was holding it.
The dad then asked when she turned 18, and invited her to go out with him.
"He said we could go out to eat sometime because he was so alone now with the kids and wife being gone," she writes. He reiterated that she should not tell his wife about anything they talked about or about the extra work she was going to do for him, because, he said, his wife would "get super angry" if he knew they were spending time together.
"I think they talked about me before," she writes, "and I assume that she said that she didn’t want me to be there alone with him."
Most horrifying of all, the girl writes that she noticed "he was hard throughout" the entire interaction, and she was terrified by the incident. "It freaked me out," she wrote, and begged her fellow Redditors for advice, asking "should I stop working for the family and never meet him again?"
People on Reddit urged the babysitter to stay away from the man, and used her situation as a parenting lesson for other moms and dads.
Most commenters felt this was an obvious case of a predator grooming a victim. "Tell your parents," one person wrote. "Tell your parents and have them help you tell the wife." Another user agreed, adding, "he is a danger to you, and you need people who can protect you."
Others commented to discuss how they had taught their own children to respond to situations like the babysitter's.
"I have taught my daughter that if someone says not to tell us something... we need to know right now," one parent commented. "My parents also taught me early on that ANY adult that tells you not to tell your parents something is doing something bad and I should tell as soon as safely able to," another person added.
That seems like good advice—especially since sexual harassment of teenagers is far more common than most of us might think.
As the video below reveals, fully half of middle and high school students—both girls and boys—report having been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual advances from adults.
Others commended the babysitter for having done what all too many of us must learn the hard way to do—to trust her own instincts.
As one Reddit commenter put it, "as a woman in my thirties, I'm so proud of you for recognizing these behaviors for the red flags they are...and for asking for help for how to deal with the situation."
"Your instincts told you this was a dangerous situation, and you listened. Don't ever ignore that feeling."
Anyone affected by sexual assault can find support on the National Sexual Assault Hotline, a safe, confidential service. Contact The Hotline or call 800-656-HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.