When Jody Stephenson was a sophomore at Oglethorpe University, she looked for creative ways to help pay for some of her education expenses. At the time, she was babysitting for two families.
“Babysitting was always more than a job for me,” says Jody. “It was an opportunity to care for and build up each child I met.”
Soon, two families turned into 20 families. She realized that families in her community needed help finding quality babysitters, so she began connecting her fellow students to families. They would call Jody on her dorm room landline and she’d arrange for them to have a sitter. It was a real-life The Baby-Sitter’s Club.
By the time she graduated, her team of trusted Oglethorpe babysitters was serving 150 families throughout the greater Atlanta area.
Since then, Jody has grown her network of babysitters into SitterTree, a babysitter request and scheduling tool that connects busy parents with top mom-rated sitters. In April, the company assigned its 25,000th babysitting job, representing a collective $2 million in babysitting wages earned by SitterTree sitters.
To commemorate the milestone, SitterTree debuted its inaugural list of Atlanta’s Top Babysitters, featuring the top 10 highest-rated and most popular SitterTree babysitters in metro Atlanta in 2019.
One of the top sitters is Alpharetta-raised Ashley Melendez, who began babysitting at SitterTree as a way to help cover education expenses. Ashley also began babysitting because she has a big love for children. Ashley plans to attend Physician Assistant school and work in Pediatrics after graduating from Kennesaw University.
“Through babysitting, I’ve learned how to be patient, solve problems, communicate with children, multitask, manage my time, and tap into my creative skills,” says Ashley. “I know how to build a fun and respectful relationship between myself and the children.”
Babysitting has also given Ashley her fair share of heartwarming memories.
“I was babysitting for a family with girls, and although they were shy at first, eventually they asked me to braid their hair,” she says. She spent the evening braiding all the girls’ hair.
“When their mom came back, she told me she had never seen all her girls love a babysitter so quickly.” That meant a lot to Ashley, who dreams of working with children as a physician assistant in the future.