When you hire a teenaged girl to babysit, who drives her home?

The rules we set for my 15 year old daughter include that only the mother can pick her up and/or drive her home. This was also covered in the Red Cross babysitting course she took. We all thought it was pretty standard.

My daughter had been hired to babysit tomorrow night, for a family she has worked for several times. Tonight, the mother called and told her that plans had changed, and the father was going to pick her up. When my daughter told her about the rule, she lost the job. It wasn’t that the mother couldn’t pick her up, she’d already said she would manage to do it. She called back an hour later and said that even though she understood why we have the rule, it made her ‘uncomfortable’, so she was going with someone else. (This is a man we’ve never met, so it wasn’t anything personal.)

What are your thoughts on the rule? Is it abnormal? Would you be offended by the rule if you were hiring a babysitter?