A Child Is Hurt While You're Babysitting: Liability in Canada

If a child is hurt while you're babysitting — or while your teenager is babysitting someone else's kids — liability turns on whether the supervision met the standard of a careful and prudent parent, and a child's injury claim in Canada can run from a few thousand dollars for stitches to six figures for scarring or lasting harm. One more thing most people don't know: because limitation clocks for minors are generally paused until the child reaches the age of majority, the lawsuit can arrive a decade after the sleepover.

This one runs in both directions, so here are both scenarios, the standard courts apply, and where your home policy quietly stops.

The scenarios#

Two composites, drawn from the fact patterns Canadian insurers and courts actually see:

Direction one — a child hurt in your care. You're watching your neighbour's four-year-old for the afternoon. While you're inside making lunch, he follows your kids onto the backyard trampoline, lands wrong under a bouncing nine-year-old, and breaks his femur — surgery, casts, months of physio. The family is gracious. Their lawyer, retained a year later, is less so: the claim alleges negligent supervision and an unsafe premises, and reserves the child's right to claim for long-term effects.

Direction two — your teen babysitting elsewhere. Your fifteen-year-old daughter babysits for a family two streets over. While she's settling the baby upstairs, the three-year-old pushes a chair to the counter, reaches the kettle, and suffers scald burns to his arm and chest — treatment at a burn clinic, pressure garments, permanent scarring. The family's claim names your daughter for negligent supervision. The demand letter arrives addressed to your house.

Who's liable, in which direction#

Note what that second row means: your home policy usually follows your kids. A resident teen is typically an insured under the family policy, and personal liability coverage isn't confined to your address — it generally travels with the insured person to the client family's kitchen.

The standard: a careful and prudent parent#

Canadian courts commonly measure adults supervising children against the standard of a careful and prudent parent — a benchmark developed in cases about schools and borrowed widely. It scales with the circumstances: a prudent parent watches a four-year-old near a trampoline, a pool, a dog, or a hot kettle far more closely than a nine-year-old reading on the couch. The younger the child and the sharper the hazard, the less "I stepped inside for ten minutes" holds up.

Two more features of child-injury claims tilt the field. Young children are rarely found contributorily negligent — courts don't expect toddlers to look out for themselves, so the supervising adult's conduct carries the whole analysis. And the prudent parent standard is applied in hindsight, with the injury already on the X-ray.

To be fair: the standard is prudent parent, not perfect parent. Children get hurt during competent, attentive care, and an accident without negligence doesn't create liability. But establishing that in litigation takes lawyers, discoveries, and sometimes years — which is a cost problem even when it isn't a liability problem.

What a child's injury claim costs#

Ranges reflect the general pattern of Canadian child-injury claims. Estimates for orientation — not quotes, not predictions:

Child claims have a long tail. Scarring on a child supports damages for the decades it will be visible; a head injury claim includes future care and lost earning capacity measured over a working lifetime. And because minors' limitation periods are generally paused until adulthood, the family can wait to see how the child heals before suing — meaning the trampoline afternoon you've half-forgotten can resurface when the child turns eighteen.

Where home insurance responds — and where it drifts#

For casual babysitting, the personal liability section of a standard Canadian homeowner, condo, or tenant policy is built for exactly this: it typically defends you and pays covered claims up to the limit, whether you're watching the neighbour's child at your place or your teen is sitting two streets over. The babysitting money itself isn't usually the problem — insurers generally don't treat a teenager's pocket money as a business.

The drift happens with scale and regularity. Homeowner policies exclude business pursuits, and child care can cross that line:

The boundary between "grey zone" and "excluded" is drawn by your policy's wording and your insurer's underwriting, not by common sense — so if you're providing paid care on a regular basis, ask your broker where your arrangement falls, and get the answer in writing. A home daycare needs its own coverage; no amount of hoping converts a business exclusion into babysitting.

How umbrella coverage changes the outcome#

A personal umbrella policy adds $1 million to $10 million above your home policy's liability limit — typically around $200–$300 per year for the first $1 million and $50–$75 per additional $1 million (estimates based on typical broker pricing, not quotes). For babysitting risk it matters three ways:

1. It covers the household, generally including the teen sitter, wherever the sitting happens.
2. It answers the long-tail claim — the severe injury with sixty years of future care attached, which is precisely where a $1 million home limit fails.
3. It keeps the defence funded after an underlying limit exhausts.

Same caveat as the home policy: an umbrella layers over your personal liability. It extends casual care coverage; it does not insure a daycare business the underlying policy excludes.

The bottom line#

Watching other people's children is one of the most ordinary things Canadians do — and one of the few where the injured party has sixty years of future damages and a paused limitation clock. You don't need to stop hosting sleepovers or let your teen turn down sitting jobs. You need supervision that would satisfy a prudent parent, honesty with your insurer if care has become regular and paid, and a liability limit sized for a child's worst-case claim rather than a scraped knee. Two of those three are free. The third costs about a dollar a day.