Ah, The Baby-Sitter’s Club. The middle-grade series “written” by Ann M. Martin (I put written in quotation marks because while Martin wrote the earlier books, ghostwriters took over the later books, at least allegedly) is one of the first few book series I remember ever truly loving. It’s a series I believe got me into reading. I know I read it pretty heavily in the third grade.
I previously told a story about how my reading habit was encouraged (I think I was part of a fan club or something?) by my parents and teachers. And then I changed schools in fourth grade and I had a reading teacher criticize the whole series due to the whole ghostwriter thing.
I’m not interested in debating the ghostwriter thing right now. I’m not going to tell you that I think The Baby-Sitter’s Club is a flawless masterpiece. But I will say that the reading teacher I had in the fourth grade had a negative impact on my reading life throughout my childhood. It’s one thing to encourage students to branch out and try new things. But to outright tell a kid who clearly enjoys reading not to read the books they enjoy can have a negative impact on kids like me.
Last summer, I decided to revisit the first five books in The Baby-Sitter’s Club series and I finally got around to watching the series that aired on Netflix.
I don’t think I ever read all of The Baby-Sitter’s Club books, but I don’t remember how far I originally got. I definitely forgot a lot of details.
One of the things I was quickly reminded of when I revisited the original BSC books was how white the original characters were. Aside from Claudia and later Jessi, the original core group of girls were white in the books. Other people have written about how the Netflix series improved on the books (including making the main cast more racially diverse, making some of the characters LGBTQIA+, etc) so I’m not going to re-hash that.
What I really want to talk about are two lessons that I learned from The Baby-Sitter’s Club that I think still hold up today. I spent so much of my childhood hearing my teacher’s voice in my head that The Baby-Sitter’s Club books were ghostwritten and that ghostwritten meant bad, that I think I lost sight of the good things the books have to offer.
Lesson number one: girls are just as capable of starting a business. Ok, yes, the business in question involves a very gendered activity (caring for children), but Kristy and her friends saw a need in their community and found a way to not only solve it, but capitalize on it. And they were good as what they did. The Baby-Sitter’s Club managed to survive some pretty fierce competition because they took their responsibility seriously and built up trust among their clients. We often see them coming up with creative solutions (kid kits, anyone?) In order to keep their charges entertained and safe. They proved that they could responsibly handle stressful circumstances like hospital trips, a phantom caller, and missing children. Because of this, the girls of BSC had a very positive word of mouth.
As Brooke Hauser wrote for The New Yorker, “For many of us, the Baby-Sitters Club offered an early glimpse into the world of ambitious working women. Granted, they were middle-schoolers, but they were girl bosses, role models long before pop culture gave us Olivia Pope, Liz Lemon, or Leslie Knope.”
Lesson number two: A group of girls with different personalities and interests can be friends.
Over on Book Riot, Emily Martin wrote: “[F]rom the jump, queer girls everywhere identified with the story of a group of girls who prioritized their relationships with one another over boys.” As a side note, I’m sure my asexual self falls into the category of “queer girls” that Martin was referring to, but this statement made me wonder – do cishet girls not care as much about their friendships with other girls? But I digress.
Look, middle school is hard for everyone. Kids can be mean. And on top of that, we often see media featuring girls and women competing with each other for the attention of boys and men. But we don’t get a lot of that kind of competition among the BSC girls.
Yes, they have different interests.
Yes, sometimes they have fights.
But they always find ways of coming back to each other. They talk about what’s bothering them and they work it out.
So, my friends, have you read The Baby-Sitter’s Club books or watched The Baby-Sitter’s Club on Netflix?
PS: I will be sending some further BSC-related reading to my newsletter later this week!
