28/02/17 - Babysitting apps boom as parents bid to reclaim free time (50)

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/feb/25/parents-babysitting-apps-boom-childcare

This article is about how people have invented this app where if someone needs help babysitting their child, it can be done so with the click of a finger. This app is quite similar to Uber in the sense that if a babysitter is needed with a few minutes, the parent could go onto the app and quickly find someone that is willing to babysit for a while with the parents paying. Over the years, this app has been used more and more frequently which to some extent, people cannot understand why. They don't believe that leaving that someone with a stranger is good and can be a risk considering the parent doesn't know who the person even is; they could be a criminal as far as they are aware. A spokeswomen called Katherine Twamley, from the department of social sciences at University College London said: “As parents see themselves more as having a shared responsibility for childcare they also see themselves as having a shared right to leisure.”

• Frances Jones, 32, from London, has a one-and-a-half-year-old son and regularly finds babysitters this way: “I’ve never left him in the day, it’s just while he’s asleep. If you want to have your life back you have to use these services because you can’t constantly rely on family and friends. Having a nanny or a person locally would be ideal, but I don’t have that.”
• “People are finding themselves on zero-hours contracts and needing to create portfolio careers. ‘Tag team’ parenting – where shifts between work and home are shared between couples – can be hard to manage, especially if parents are single or separated,”

In my opinion, I believe that apps like this are very dangerous and could potentially have a huge effect on peoples lives. If a parent is leaving their child in someone else's hands, personally they should let a family member or a professional carer take care of them. For example, if someone that had no experience of babysitting but needed the money to do so, the parent wouldn't know what they're capable off; something seriously bad could potentially happen. This is why I believe that the impact in new and digital media something is a bad thing as it can lead to dangerous apps being made and since a lot of people believe the things which are uploaded on the internet, they could believe anything which can be misleading to the audience and users.