When Ja’Nay Ford Hill, 31, and Ryon Hill, 32, of Dallas got married in Colleyville, Texas, in 2022, their 200-person ceremony included four children: two flower girls and two ring bearers. After the ceremony, the children were relocated to the venue’s bridal suite, where they were supervised, fed and entertained for five hours by a babysitter Ms. Hill had found on Care.com.
“We knew that we wanted alcohol, and for our guests to have a good time at the reception,” Ms. Hill said, adding that she had been to weddings where children felt like a distraction. She didn’t want that. “Your wedding is a time where you can be selfish,” she said.
Ms. Hill is not alone. Of 4,000 couples with 2024 wedding dates, 79.5 percent are in favor of kid-free weddings, according to the Zola First Look Report, which will be published on Dec. 11. But child-free weddings present invitees who are parents with a difficult choice: Find child care or decline the invitation.
The former means finding a sitter to stay home, possibly overnight, with the children, paying for a sitter to travel to the event with them or trying to find someone at the wedding location, “which can be challenging,” said Tiesha Sinouthasy, the founder of Peace of Mind Nannies, a child care agency in East Providence, R.I.
But more brides and grooms are budgeting for babysitters for their guests’ children, hiring child care through online caregiving registries like Care.com or SitterCity.com and local agencies like Peace of Mind, which has seen a steady increase in requests over the last three years, or personal connections. (At Care.com, on-demand babysitting jobs for weddings doubled in 2023, compared with 2022.)
Paige Tatulli, 33, an automotive publicist in Weehawken, N.J., and her fiancé, Michael O’Hare, 37, feel confident in their decision to omit children from their August 2024 cocktail hour and wedding reception in Monroe Township, N.J. The couple are inviting 270 guests — about half of whom are parents — and “we see a wedding as an excuse for everyone to let loose,” she said. “We want to make sure they get a night out to enjoy themselves with their partner and their friends.”
