The Baby-Sitters Club

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Like most girls my age growing up, I read "The Baby Sitters Club" book series. My grandparents bought me the books from garage sales. I even had the trivia board game. The series and this movie follows seven girls from all different backgrounds. You had Mallory (the bookworm), Mary Anne (the quiet girl), Dawn (the environmentalist), Stacey (the New Yorker girl who loved to shop), Claudia (the creative artist), Kristy (the tomboy), and Jessi (the dancer). These seven girls operate their own baby-sitting business in their small town of Stoneybrook.

This series doesn't do a great job of playing up stereotypes. Dawn wears flowers in her hair and long, flowy skirts. She is also always seen munching on some all-natural healthy food. Stacey is the pretty girl from New York who loves to shop. Mallory is the bookworm with glasses and the need to dress like the stereotypical "nerd". Kristy is the tomboy who plays sports and wouldn't be caught dead in a dress. Claudia is the artsy Asian girl with an ecclectic fashion sense.

What the movie fails on with stereotypes makes up for in addressing issues that young teen girls face. Stacey struggles with hiding her diabetes from the boy she likes because she feels that he will see her as weak. She is also dealing with wanting to date this boy, who is 17 while she is only 13. I didn't like, however, how this movie addressed that issue. The movie saw it as being ok for a 17 year-old boy to date a 13 year-old girl. At the end of the movie Stacey becomes all excited to see this boy the next summer when she is 14. What the movie fails to address, however, is that the boy will be 18 and be considered an adult. A girl seeing this movie will soon be looking for her 18 year-old love of her life without realizing or even caring about the maturity gap in such a relationship.

While Stacey is dealing with her diabetes and an awkward summer romance Kristy deals with her estranged father returning to her life. Throughout the film you watch Kristy trying to live up to the expectations that her father had of her. She gladly put on a dress for him when she would have normally never worn a dress. She also snuck around her friends in order to spend time with her father. He made her promise that nobody know he was in town, except for Kristy's best friend, Mary Anne. This movie shows that girls not only try to fit in with their friends, but with their family too.

The character Mary Anne also had some faults to her. Mary Anne is portrayed as the "quiet girl". She is also the only girl in the Baby-Sitters Club to have a boyfriend. In a society that treasures girls who are quiet and keep to themselves, giving Mary Anne a boyfriend is almost like rewarding her for being so quiet. Throughout this movie though the mean girl in the story is trying to steal Mary Anne's boyfriend from her. Whenever the mean girl advances Mary Anne either calmly tells her to stop or Mary Anne has one of her friends put the mean girl in her place. During all of this Logan, Mary Anne's boyfriend, is noticing the mean girl. This image depicts the idea that boys like it when girls are quiet but they also like girls who have a bad streak to them.

Like most teen and pre-teen movies geared towards girls, there is the typical threesome of popular girls trying to ruin the fun plans that the girls of the Baby-Sitters Club have for their summer day-camp for kids. These girls consist of "Cokie", the main popular girl, and her two brainless henchwomen. The two girls that attach themselves to Cokie are girls that allow Cokie to make all of the decisions for them. Their popularity relys on what Cokie is wearing or how she is acting at that very moment. This cookie-cutter representation of what it means to be popular is very volatile for girls self-esteem. It teaches girls that in order to be popular you have to be mean and throw out every representation of who you are as an individual. By the end of the film Cokie's sidekicks realize how cool The Baby-Sitters Club is and decides to not help Cokie with her destructive habits.

After seeing this movie again after not seeing it since I was a young girl I've come to appreciate it for what it is. I believe that this movie was one of the better positive movies for girls for when it was made (1995). This movie and the book series it's based off of gave its audience seven different girls that they could relate to in some way. My personal favorite of The Baby-Sitters Club is Claudia. She's as much of an individual that I always wanted to be a strive to be.

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