When you’re married with kids, getting time away with just adults can be expensive. We’re talking about the cost of babysitting. A good babysitter will charge a decent wage, and it is definitely well deserved. Taking care of children is a big responsibility, and it can be very stressful at times.

One 24-year-old woman shared on Reddit that she was visiting her parents over Christmas when her cousin asked her to babysit. Her cousin and cousin’s husband and their three kids were all staying in the same house as this Reddit user over the holiday season, but the cousin and her husband wanted to get away for a few days without their kids, and they needed a babysitter.

She wrote, “Then my cousin and her husband asked if I could babysit all day for three days, so they could visit some friends in the area and hang out with just adults. I said I had planned on doing freelance work at the library, and she offered to pay me to babysit.”

The freelance work she was planning on doing was coding, and she charges $60 an hour for her freelance coding work. She explained, “I said I could [babysit] if they got close to my freelance rates. She wanted a number, and although my freelance rates are $60 I didn’t feel like that was right, it was high. But I didn’t want to go too low; honestly babysitting 3 kids would be harder for me than the routine coding work I had for my freelance project. I don’t know a lot about kids and I’ve never babysat for long, and I had a feeling it would be stressful and difficult. So I said $35, which is below what I make hourly at work, and what is the bare minimum I’d value my time for, if that time is spent doing difficult work.”

The cousin was not at all happy with the thought of being charged $35 hour. She wrote, “She went crazy at me, saying that’s a ridiculous rate for babysitting, that I was entitled and being selfish, that I’m trying to take advantage of how she didn’t have other options, etc.”

The cousin’s husband was even more upset “saying that I was a 24 year old girl, that I’m damn near a child myself, that my time is not worth that much and it’s childish to say that it was. And that I was a stupid girl for not knowing that babysitting costs like 15 an hour, when I grew up and have kids of my own I will see how stupid I was being.” She continued, “I was kind of done with being called stupid so I just told them I hoped they could find someone else.”

Her mom sided with the cousins telling her she “asked for something offensive,” so she turned to Reddit to find out if she was really being a jerk for asking $35 hour to babysit three kids all day for 3 days.

Reddit users feel that she is definitely not being a jerk and that $35 an hour actually is a fair wage. One Reddit user wrote, “I used to babysit (at the age of 20, not a teenager) and other girls who babysat charged $15 per hour PER CHILD.”

Another Reddit user responded, “Methinks the parents are the ‘entitled and selfish’ ones for feeling entitled to triple childcare at nearly minimum wage.”

Another person commented, “If you’re so stupid and young then how irresponsible of them to ask you to baby sit for them! Call child services.”

One person wrote, “If they wanted to bank on using your time for three straight days like that, they should have reached out to you and arranged it ahead of time. Thinking they have a right to tell you how to value your time or how to spend it because you are young is such complete BS.”

Do you think $35 an hour is too much to babysit 3 kids? Do you think the Reddit user is the “entitled” one or the cousin?