It started with somebody’s mother.
Mitlea began with one woman’s mother in Blacksburg, Virginia. She had raised her own children, and by the time they had children of their own she was the person everyone called. Not because she advertised, and not because she was cheap, but because she had done it all before and it showed within about ten minutes of her being in the house.
Her friends were the same. Women who had spent decades looking after children — their own, their neighbors’, their grandchildren — and who were still, quietly, the most capable people in any room with a toddler in it. Between them they could have looked after half the town. Nobody outside their own street knew they existed.
Meanwhile the families across town were scrolling through apps full of strangers, hoping the person who showed up would know what to do when a child would not settle. The people they wanted were four streets away and had no way of being found.
Mitlea is the introduction that was missing.
What we hold to
- Experience is the thing
- A person who has raised four children through fevers, fussy phases and bedtime negotiations knows things that cannot be taught in an afternoon. That experience should be the headline on the page, not a line at the bottom of a form.
- A claim has to be earned
- Nothing on this site is estimated. A badge appears because a person at Mitlea looked at evidence. A review exists because a family completed a booking. If we have not checked something, we say so rather than implying we have.
- The caregiver keeps her rate
- She sets the price, and she is paid all of it. Mitlea's fee is added on top and charged to the family. A marketplace that funds itself by quietly shaving a grandmother's wage is not what we are building.
One town, to begin with
Mitlea is new, and it is only in Blacksburg, Virginia. The first caregivers are people we know by name. We would rather one town where the introductions are good than a map full of pins nobody has met.
If you are in Blacksburg and you have spent years looking after children, we would like to hear from you. If you are somewhere else and you wish this existed there, tell us — that is genuinely how we will decide where to go next.
Write to hello@mitlea.com. A person reads it.