How much babysitting are you willing to do for a sibling before it becomes a part-time job they should pay you for?

Any favor done to an extreme can cross the line between helping someone out and downright working them for free. Even people closest to you, and often especially people closest to you, can use your «services» for their personal gain.

There are plenty of services people find themselves doing as a favor to friends and family, when in actuality, they should be paid for their time and effort. Everyone has an IT person in the family who fixes every technological problem and advises before anyone decides to buy a new printer. Before they know it, they spend hours every week helping different people with IT issues, without getting anything in return.

Similarly, as soon as your siblings start having children of their own, babysitting becomes a favor that they ask of you almost every week. As far as they are concerned, you should be happy to help them and spend some quality time with your niece or nephew, so there really isn’t a reason for them to offer anything in return for the time you spend watching their kids.

And even if you truly are happy to do it, if you don’t set up boundaries, your sibling is bound to take the nice favors a step too far and turn into free labor.

That is exactly what the mother in the story below is trying to do to her devoted sister, who turned to Reddit’s r/AITA community in order to get an outside perspective on her family situation. On one hand, this sister wants to be there for her nephew, and genuinely enjoys every minute she spends babysitting him. On the other hand, she shouldn’t be expected to drop everything and come to her sister’s aid whenever she calls, and if too busy to babysit, it shouldn’t be such a big deal.