The Baby-Sitter's Club Just Turned 40. What Better Time to Reflect on What this Series Did for Millennial Women?

The Baby-Sitters Club recently turned 40, and when I heard this news, I found myself reflecting on how much this series meant to me…and how ahead of its time it truly was.

Many millennial women will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that this series shaped so many of my early ideas about friendship, passion, ambition, and just…girlhood.

For the uninitiated, The Baby-Sitter’s Club is a book series about a group of teen girls who band together to form a club that offers baby-sitting services within their community (as the title suggests!).

They call it a club, but it’s really a whole business: They have positions, meetings, policies, and more. And they earn money, which is something we rarely show young girls caring about, especially in media from the '80s.

This book series — which also spawned a TV show, a movie, and a modernized TV reboot — put girls in the driver’s seat. It also featured diversity. As a daughter of Asian immigrant parents, I never felt truly represented until this series featured Claudia Kishi. Like me, she didn’t fit the stereotype…and reading about another Asian girl who hated math and loved art made me feel so seen.

There was also Stacey McGill, the glamorous math whiz character who had type 1 diabetes and helped so many other young girls with similar diseases feel less like…well, freaks. 

There was so much to love about this franchise, especially for what it did for a generation of girls who lost themselves in this fictional world. So many of us millennial women first learned about entrepreneurship from The Baby-Sitter’s Club. We learned that friendships could contain friction and envy and weather ups and downs…yet it managed to teach us these lessons without leaning into the petty drama or frenemy tropes that characterized so much millennial media. 

This franchise showed us examples of girls just…going after the things they wanted. That mattered then, and 40 years later, it still matters.