This is Seth Smiley of the Smiley Law Firm, and today’s subject regards the safety of letting your babysitter drive your kids around. Many babysitters are young adults, and we need to consider a few things about how competent they are to drive your kids around, insurance issues, how far we can trust them, and legal liabilities.

There are certainly risks to allowing someone that you don’t know all that well to drive your kids around town, and there is also risk from the perspective of the family of the babysitter. I am a personal injury lawyer, and I have seen cases with accidents involving teen babysitters driving, and the outcome of an accident can get messy.

In one case, a teen was driving some kids around who ran a stop sign and hit one of our clients. It turned out that she was only in town for the summer and was from another country. She had a driving license but didn’t have her own car insurance. The outcome was that we had to go after the car owner, which was the parents of the children in the car. Their insurance had to pay for the negligence of the teen driver.

It illustrates that you need to be aware of the insurance situation regarding babysitters. If your child is working as a babysitter, you should call your insurance company to check that her driving another person’s car with children in the back is covered under your policy.

Similarly, parents who employ a babysitter need to know how far their car insurance covers them. Young adult drivers represent a higher risk and are susceptible to distractions such as mobile phones, so their responsibilities when driving around kids needs to be explained to them clearly.

As parents, you might like to test your babysitter’s driving skills and also satisfy yourself that they will behave responsibly.

If anyone has any points to raise or stories about this situation, please comment below. If you have had something happen to you, or you have legal points you wish to raise privately, feel free to email me contact@smileyfirm.com

Thank you.