Woobie / The Baby-Sitters Club

Just about all of the major characters get their fair share of woobification.

The Club members and their families

The Spiers and Schafers

• Mary Anne in the early books was shy, prone to tears, and severely overprotected by her dad; there's also the fact that her mother died of cancer when she was just a baby, so Mary Anne can't remember her at all. In later books, it is heavily implied that she suffers from depression and anxiety. In a book about admitting secrets, she confesses to having spent some time in therapy, and appreciates how much it helped her. To top it all off, her house burns down in the final book in the main series.
• Mary Anne's father Richard gets this possibly even more than his daughter. As mentioned above, he lost his wife Alma to cancer when Mary Anne was a baby. As a result, he became so overwhelmed with grief that he couldn't properly care for an infant, forcing him to let Mary Anne live with her grandparents for a while. Then, when he was ready to take Mary Anne back, her grandparents didn't want to give her up and briefly fought him for custody (until they realized that father and daughter belonged together). It's also revealed fairly early on that Richard's parents both died by the time Mary Anne was in first grade (and he, like his daughter, appears to be an only child) - meaning that Mary Anne was all he had left (until Sharon, Dawn and Jeff came into the picture, that is). No wonder he was so overprotective of her!
  • Also add to that: his father was a mailman and it's said that Richard grew up in a less economically privileged household than his high school girlfriend Sharon, and her parents disapproved of them so much that they made Sharon move out to California, hoping they would grow apart (which they did until she moved back). It also adds to the strict rules Richard had for Mary Anne: he was prejudged for his background and had to work harder than his peers to get any respect and approval.
• Sharon, on that note, probably has a case of it: her parents split her and her very loving and kind boyfriend up because they didn't like that his family was working-class. She was made to move away to California, where she married a man she liked, but then their marriage falls apart and they get divorced (it's also implied there was a reason she didn't like him staying out of the house late) and she moves back to Connecticut where she has to depend on her parents for property and start over with a job. Also both her children end up feeling homesick for California and move back with their father (with Dawn switching back and forth several times). What also hurts is that when she tells Dawn and Jeff about the divorce, both of them initially blame her for it. It's also mentioned later on that she had a good friend that died when they were teenagers.
• It's easy to feel sorry for Dawn, who can never have her family in one place. Heck, she usually can't even have them in one time zone.
  • By extension, her friend Sunny, who loses her mother (in the California Diaries books) to lung cancer when she is just 13 years old. And she has to witness every moment of her mother’s final hours, to boot.
• Jeff never got a proper period of adjustment in Connecticut, even when he had some friends in the Pike triplets. He couldn't handle the move nearly as well as his mother and sister so it took a rather short time for him to want to go back home to California.

The Kishis

• Claudia has her moments, such as on the occasions when she feels misunderstood by her family (and isn't just being a paranoid Bratty Teenage Daughter for once) and when she can't get the grades she wants, no matter how hard she tries. And then she loses Mimi, her beloved grandmother, who was like a second mother to her (as well as the only member of her family who truly understood her), in Claudia and the Sad Goodbye.
  • Her mother and Aunt Peaches also both qualify. Their mother has a stroke and later dies; Peaches suffers one miscarriage before she carries a pregnancy to term (announcing it when she is six months pregnant after that experience); and Claudia's mother wanted to be a writer but didn't feel she was capable or talented enough to fully pursue it as a career and contents herself with being a librarian and reading books that reflect what she wanted to write.
    • It seems to be a running theme with the women in Claudia's family. Janine admits that she feels inadequate compared to her pretty and popular younger sister; she seems to be looking for a boyfriend who will like her for who she is, and she later undergoes a break up from her first boyfriend that really hits her hard.

The Pikes and Ramseys

• Mallory, due to her Butt-Monkey status. Her bullying got so bad that it utterly ruined her public school experiences and when she expressed interest in going to a boarding school, her siblings and best friend treat her like a pariah for wanting to leave (though they eventually reconcile and admit they just don't like the idea of her leaving because they're going to miss her).
• Jessi, due to the racism she suffered in her earliest appearances. When she's talking to the Pike kids about being teased, she refuses to tell them what names she's been called, just looking tired and saying it's "Nothing as cute as 'spiders'." (This refers to a nickname the Pike kids were once called due to there being eight of them, like the eight legs of a spider.)
• Nicky Pike has his moments, mainly when the triplets are being mean to him.
• Jessi's sister Becca, like the rest of the Ramseys, faced an enormous amount of prejudice after moving to Stoneybrook. None of the other kids would play with or even talk to her - or, in some cases, their parents wouldn't let them. Things improved for her when Charlotte (who, per Jessi, saw no reason NOT to play with Becca) found the courage to step out of her shell and introduce herself.
• Jessi and Becca's little brother Squirt is just a baby when he's badly injured in a car accident. It's hard to say how that might impact him as he gets older. Lest we forget that he was also born prematurely, which was why he was nicknamed Squirt.

The Thomases

• Kristy, due to her dad not being around, amongst some other family problems. Made worse in the movie.
• In the books, it turns out that Charlie was badly affected by his father leaving the family; he even had his father neglect to acknowledge his birthday (not even a call) and he also carries anger issues against his father well into his late teens. As Kristy observes, being forced at the age of ten to step up and effectively co-parent his younger siblings with their mother was extremely hard on him.
• David Michael starts the series as feeling like he's too little to do much of anything with his much-older brothers. He improves as the series continues and he gets to be a big brother to Andrew; but then his father, whom he barely remembers, comes back into the picture briefly and treats him like he doesn't even exist. We don't see him saying much about it to Kristy, but try to imagine a little kid who wouldn't be affected by that.
  • David Michael gets a moment of this in the very first book; it's part of Kristy's inspiration for the club. David Michael's regular baby-sitter canceled suddenly, and Kristy and her older brothers have prior commitments and can't stay home to babysit him themselves. (Their usual arrangement is that each of them are responsible for him after school one day a week, with a baby-sitter taking the other two days and their mom presumably not working weekends.) Kristy's mom spends the evening trying to line up another baby-sitter on short notice, while David Michael feels guiltier and guiltier that his mom is having to go through so much trouble because he's not old enough to take care of himself yet— Kristy notices that neither he nor their mother are really eating their dinner, and just letting it get cold. In fact, Kristy's mom doesn't find a baby-sitter for him— but since Kristy's prior commitment was a paid babysitting job for Jamie Newton, and the two families are shown throughout the series to be good friends, she ends up calling Mrs. Newton and asking if it'd be all right for Kristy to bring David Michael along while she sits at their house.

The others

• Stacey, due to her sad backstory, being frequently hospitalized, and dealing with her parents' divorce (not to mention the fact that she often mentions feeling a bit neglected by her dad due to his workaholic tendencies).
  • Stacey's parents not only go through an acrimonious divorce but it's revealed that they had problems being able to have another child. Their only child has a chronic illness and the fear of Outliving One's Offspring is looming over their heads constantly.
• Abby and Anna, due to their father's death and, later, Anna's scoliosis.
  • Their mother also, though this is shown to a lesser extent. We see it the most in Abby's Book, where she is so distraught over her husband's death that she is barely able to function. Abby comments that it felt like she and Anna had lost both of their parents.
• Although Shannon doesn't get a lot of mention, it's clear that her home life isn't exactly peachy. She even says in The Baby Sitters Remember that she felt her parents "lacked each other", and Shannon's Story shows that her mother can be a helicopter mom.
• Logan definitely qualifies as well, thanks to the incessant teasing he has to endure from his football teammates. He also has a baseball coach who treats him badly, and his father wants to send him to military school. At one point, he mentions in his narration that his father is uncomfortable with the fact that he babysits, and doesn't really respond whenever he tries to tell him about, say, a funny thing that happened during a job. In his father's mind, he's involved with the club to impress Mary Anne, and that makes it okay.

The sitting charges

• Charlotte Johanssen's classmates hate her for being smarter than they are, and as a result she's lonely and frustrated. At least her situation improves when she's allowed to skip a grade and finds a best friend in Jessi's sister Becca.
  • She is very much this in Little Miss Stoneybrook ...and Dawn. She was already unhappy because her favorite sitter Stacey (who was like a sister to her) recently moved back to New York; then Claudia convinces her to compete in the Little Miss Stoneybrook Pageant, even though Charlotte is very insecure and reluctant. As a result, during the pageant, her Performance Anxiety causes her to forget everything on stage and run away in tears. After her failed performance, she starts crying so loudly that Claudia needs to call Charlotte's parents and take her home. Even worse, that's the last time Charlotte appears in that book (she wasn't the main focus), although Claudia later has a My God, What Have I Done? moment and tells her friends that she apologized to both Charlotte and her parents many times.
• Corrie Addison's parents dump her and her brother off in classes, with sitters, and wherever else they can as often as possible so they can have time to themselves. She feels rejected a lot, and though this does improve some, one of the mystery books shows that it's still an ongoing problem when her brother begins acting out in response to it.
• Joey and Nate Nicholls from Claudia and the Terrible Truth are perhaps the biggest examples of this. Claudia quickly discovers they are hiding a terrible secret - their father is both verbally and physically abusing them. Fortunately, Claudia finally tells her mother, who is able to help the boys and their mother escape.
  • One can't forget the boys' mother; not only was it clearly agonizing for her to see her sons being hurt repeatedly, but it's strongly implied that her husband was also abusive towards her, at least verbally, and thus she was likely afraid of him - hence why she didn't try to step in.
• Jenny Prezzioso is treated like a spoiled brat by almost all of the other members except for Mary Anne (and even she seems to regard her as a bit of one) except... she's really not a bratty child compared to other, more favored charges (Karen Brewer, for example). She can be difficult at times, but the sitters seem to have more of a problem with Jenny liking to be clean and wear fancy clothes than with anything that actually needs to be corrected, like when she throws tantrums or is mean to other kids (usually Matt Braddock). What ups the woobie factor for her is when her baby sister is born and diverts attention away from her, especially when Andrea winds up getting into modeling and commercials while Jenny doesn't quite make it as far. To top it off, she's only four years old and being treated like this by older children who more than know better than to act this way.
• Susan Felder from Kristy and the Secret of Susan. She’s an intelligent non verbal autistic girl who’s been in and out of boarding schools. Her parents are clearly ashamed of her, to the point where they believe her future is “bleak” and her mother openly hopes that her unborn second daughter will be born “normal”, which gives off a Replacement Goldfish vibe. And if that’s not bad enough, her babysitter Kristy is Innocently Insensitive and tries to get the other kids to play with her, only for them to treat her like a freak and either shun her or treat her like a circus act. The poor girl just can’t catch a break!
  • It doesn't help that Kristy believes that Susan doesn't even understand or care that she's being treated that way because she doesn't show any reaction. Since this book was written, it's been speculated by many professionals that autistic children may understand a lot more than they show, but just can't express it due to communication difficulties.
  • Even worse in the French-Canadian edition. In the English edition the name the parents choose for their second child is Hope; possibly because the equivalent isn't a common name in French, the name they plan to use is Desiree (French for "much desired").
• Rosie Wilder in Claudia and the Genius of Elm Street, a child prodigy whose parents force her to take tons of extracurriculars and constantly push her to be perfect at everything she does, to the point that even things she enjoys doing are no longer fun. She doesn't have any friends at school because everyone either hates her or is jealous of her. (It doesn't help that her personality is prickly to the point that even fellow genius Janine is only able to put up with her for so long.) When she (understandably) has a tantrum about just wanting to do things like a normal kid, her mother's only response is to tell her to behave and stop yelling because her vocal cords need to stay in shape. She also represents her grade in her school's crossword-solving contest and wins in front of the entire school. A few kids in her grade cheer her on but is booed by most of the kids, causing poor Rosie to break down in tears and ask Claudia and Mary Anne why everyone hates her so much.
• Norman Hill in Dawn's Big Date. He's bullied by nearly everyone because he's overweight and eats his feelings in response. The other kids refer to him as "Enormous Hill" and even his own family dumps on him. His older sister spies on him and tattles whenever she catches him eating anything he isn't supposed to, and draws nasty pictures that she hangs on the refrigerator for him to see. His parents are obsessed with him losing weight but do nothing to help him except harp on him and threaten to send him to fat camp. They keep all kinds of junk food in the house, go to the gym themselves while leaving Norman at home, and worst of all, their response to him bringing home a great report card is that someone smart should be able to lose weight. It is so bad that Norman confides to the babysitters that he believes they don't love him. The babysitters encourage him to stand up to his sister and tell his parents that their nagging just makes him want to eat more. His sister begins being kinder and his parents remove the junk food and stop talking about his weight.

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