On college campuses, students are often looking for opportunities to babysit, and many faculty are in need of babysitters to watch their children. Duke University student Sydelle Bernstein founded the startup Students Who Sit to facilitate connections between those students and faculty for babysitting opportunities.
Bernstein had previously been babysitting in Durham, but the cost of transportation was often more than the actual wages she earned for babysitting. She decided to turn inwards and look for babysitting opportunities on campus, at which point she recognized the demand for a new approach and a new platform.
“There are student sitters like myself who struggled to find opportunities to babysit, but then simultaneously you have faculty, staff and professors with children who were struggling to find reliable sitters,” Bernstein said. “So, it almost felt seamless to connect these two underserved communities.”
Students Who Sit enables faculty and staff at colleges to browse student babysitters at their respective institutions and book babysitting sessions with them.
A trusted community marketplace
For Bernstein and the startup’s president, Ann Marie Flusche, Students Who Sit is not just a babysitting platform, but a trusted community marketplace. Safety is key when it comes to babysitting for both babysitters and parents leaving their children in the care of someone else; Students Who Sit is specifically designed to ensure safety and peace of mind for both parties.
When babysitters sign up for Students Who Sit, the startup’s team personally interviews each potential babysitter. This is a holistic process wherein the team not only analyzes a prospective student sitter’s experience with children, but also their motivation and passion.
“We want to make sure every sitter we’re sending is someone that we trust, that we have talked to and that we honestly adore and love and are excited to send into homes,” Bernstein said.
All users must also verify their account with their educational institution’s email address—such as @duke.edu or @ncsu.edu—to confirm that they are a member or alumni of the institution.
Flusche said that because babysitters and parents are affiliated with the same college, there is an added layer of inherent accountability for both parties to create a safe, positive babysitting experience.
The fact that all users are affiliated with a university also means that what starts as a babysitting job often turns into a mentorship opportunity, Bernstein said.
“A lot of the time, sitters are going into homes with parents who may be working in a field that they’re studying,” she said.
The Students Who Sit team has developed several unique features to simplify the process of booking a babysitting service.
Parents can search through potential babysitters by selecting specific filters such as whether babysitters are certified in CPR, or if they are undergraduate or graduate students. Once a babysitting service is booked on Students Who Sit, the babysitter and parent can then communicate within the platform.
Simplifying the booking of babysitting
This month, Students Who Sit will launch the newest iteration of the platform with several new features designed to further simplify the process of booking babysitting services.
Currently, the team manually books babysitting services between babysitters and parents. The new platform will allow for automatic bookings once parents have confirmed their desired babysitter and date.
Expanding on parents’ current ability to search through babysitters on the platform, Students Who Sit will use AI to automatically suggest babysitters to parents based on their preferences entered when signing up for the platform.
If a babysitting service is canceled, a waitlist of other babysitters available at the time of that service will now be available so that parents are not left scrambling to find childcare at the last minute.
The new features are all part of Bernstein and Flusche’s plan to build strong, structured systems for Students Who Sit before expanding further. As of this writing the platform is only available for those affiliated with Duke University but has already amassed over 500 babysitters and 1,000 parents looking for babysitting.
QUICK BITS
Startup: Students Who Sit
Co-Founders: Sydelle Bernstein (CEO), Ann Marie Flusche (President)
Founded: 2025
Team size: 8
Location: Durham, NC
Website: studentswhosit.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Once Students Who Sit has been fully built at Duke, Bernstein said the startup does plan to expand to other universities. The startup will recruit ambassadors at college campuses across the country to run their respective campus chapters of Students Who Sit, and the startup has already heard from several interested students.
“We don’t foresee having to go out and search for these ambassadors,” Bernstein said. “We’ve had a ton of inbound already.”
Bernstein said she thinks Students Who Sit can capture a $500 million market through the babysitting platform.
“It’s as much building for the students and creating flexible job income opportunities for them as it is for parents, because we saw the need on their end trying to find flexible childcare,” Flusche said.
