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\n Illustration: Brandon Celi\n <\/p>\n
A horror story has been making its way around New York City\u2019s robust nanny community this fall. The source was a post made to a popular Facebook group, the Nannies of New York City, in November. An experienced nanny, whom we\u2019ll call Julia, wrote that she had recently been hired full time by an Upper West Side family. The father worked from home \u2014 not ideal for most child-care professionals but manageable. The red flags proliferated from there. On Julia\u2019s first day, she learned the parents expected her to stay indoors with their toddler all day. Pretty unreasonable, but all parents have quirks, and a job is a job. Then the father started joining in when Julia did crafts or puzzles with the child and even hovered over diaper changes. Sometimes, she and the toddler would just be \u201chaving fun laughing doing nothing\u201d and the dad would come into the room and suggest they study the ABCs instead.<\/p>\n
Now this was untenable. They had to start getting out of the house. But when Julia suggested outings like museum trips or playdates, she was denied on the grounds that the toddler might get sick. Finally, several days into her new job, she was granted permission to take the child to the park with a strict 90-minute cap. She hadn\u2019t eaten since arriving for work that morning a few hours before, so on the way to the park, she popped into a store with the child to grab a snack. She knew the parents were tracking her via an AirTag on the stroller \u2014 a once-dystopian-sounding practice, now commonplace and unremarkable \u2014 but she didn\u2019t anticipate just how intensely they would police her movements. As soon as she set foot in the store, Julia received an anxious phone call from the mother. She was fired the same day.<\/p>\n
Some of the roughly 26,000 members of the Facebook group were outraged and suggested Julia take legal action; some encouraged her to publicize the parents\u2019 real names to prevent others from suffering the same fate. Others were unfazed. The group, formed about nine years ago by Brooklyn resident and nanny Michelle Wreesmann, was designed as an outlet for a workforce with no HR channels. Since its founding, caregivers have used the forum to solicit advice on pay raises, contract templates, and CPR training. But in recent years, there has been a growing volume of nannies venting about parental behavior that could be classified at best as bizarre and more accurately as hostile and alarming. The parents Julia described were all too familiar a type: anxious urban millennials fixated on their child\u2019s intellectual enrichment, emotional well-being, and immune system, who treat the nanny as a vessel for their own rigid preferences and expectations. \u201cIt\u2019s ok good riddance! They did you a huge favor!\u201d one commenter replied to Julia.<\/p>\n
To be a working person is often to be in a perpetual state of gripe, inventorying the unreasonable demands of your boss or your clients and lamenting your industry\u2019s march into chaos or oblivion. But it truly seems there has never been a worse time to be a nanny in New York City. As the COVID babies head to preschool and kindergarten, a critical mass of the city\u2019s nannies are looking for work for the first time in a few years, and they\u2019ve found a radically altered landscape. There are new expectations around nearly every part of a child\u2019s life: nutrition, sleep, education, mental development, screen time. The new generation of parents is anxious and uncertain but also wants to exercise control over everything \u2014 a brutal combination. There have always been demanding families, especially among the rich, and nannies and parents have long had to negotiate to find a comfortable middle ground. But now, parents are simultaneously so insecure and so overstuffed with ambition and the pop psychology of child-rearing from years of consuming parenting content online that they\u2019re treating nannies not as seasoned experts but as automatons deployed to optimize their children.<\/p>\n
Everyone knows an insecure boss is the very worst kind. But to make matters worse, many of these nervous boss-parents are now working from home, allowing them to monitor every move their nannies make. At the same time, according to many nannies I spoke to, these parents, facing the same sharply rising cost of living as the rest of us, are often unwilling to pay for what they\u2019re demanding. All told, the nanny-parent relationship is under an unsustainable amount of pressure. Something\u2019s got to give.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt used to be an autonomous role,\u201d said Jo Barrow, the CEO of Nannies by Noa, a \u201cbespoke, high-touch\u201d nanny agency in New York City. \u201cYou didn\u2019t hear about stay-at-home moms or work-from-home parents having nannies back then. If they were going to be home, they would manage the kids themselves.\u201d Now, Barrow said, about 85 percent of the families she works with have at least one parent at home.<\/p>\n
There are still unicorn dream families \u2014 those who pay well, trust their nanny\u2019s judgment, and just want their kids to be safe and happy. And outlandishly demanding parents aren\u2019t exactly new; nannies have always had to deal with employers who seem only a step or two from making New York Post headlines, especially among the \u00dcber-rich, who provide the highest-paying jobs in the city. Barrow recounted a classic edge case: \u201cWe had a gentleman once who called us and said he needed a Hebrew-speaking nanny who would prepare vegetarian meals and might be interested in learning to fly his plane. I said, \u2018I don\u2019t know about that.\u2019 But we actually found her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now even the \u201cnormal\u201d parents \u2014 from the middle class and the regular rich \u2014 have become extraordinarily particular. Many have gotten in the habit of laying out exhaustive expectations in their child-care contracts. In one posted on the Nannies of NYC group this fall, the parents specified that their nanny should focus on \u201ctalking and singing frequently to encourage language development, including during meal time and diaper changes.\u201d They elaborated on this in mind-numbing detail. \u201cExample: Singing abcs while changing diaper\/brushing teeth, explaining what the babysitter is doing (I am changing your diaper, wipe wipe wipe or we are scooping your food etc.)\u201d Shocker: These people were tyrants about screens, too. Millennial parents know how easy it is to get sucked into your phone while at work, and caution around phone use is perfectly reasonable. But these parents wrote as if the phones were strangers in big white vans. Phone use by the nanny was not permitted at all except in an emergency, and even in an emergency, the phone should be used \u201cdiscreetly and out of the child\u2019s view.\u201d An image springs to mind of a parent tensely surveilling a nanny via baby monitor or in-home security camera, on alert for the appearance of a screen within the screen.<\/p>\n
Even the more laid-back parents have their own brand of neuroses aligning with whatever parenting trends their social-media algorithms are serving them. Stephanie, a former New York City nanny who started her own nanny-parent matching agency in upstate New York during the pandemic, recently worked with a couple who were actually pretty chill, she said, with one glaring exception. They wanted to hire someone who\u2019d be willing to practice \u201celimination communication\u201d with their infant \u2014 a growing parenting movement gaining traction among the more granola moms of Instagram, in which the traditional diaper-to-potty-training trajectory is swapped out for something much more labor intensive. It involves noticing a baby\u2019s subtle cues and then \u201ccatching\u201d pee or poop in the toilet as it\u2019s happening, often from the earliest days of a child\u2019s life. For a nanny, this could mean monitoring an 8-week-old baby for grunting or changes in body positioning and then ferrying the infant to the potty for \u201celimination\u201d at just the right moment. A nanny may come into this kind of job with 20 years of experience implementing the pediatrician-approved guidelines for potty-training kids between the ages of 2 and 3, only to have that knowledge totally tossed aside because a first-time parent watched a few well-edited Instagram Reels.<\/p>\n
The insecurities and perfectionism of these new parents also lead to intense oversight on even the fundamentals of the job. \u201cThere are a lot of parents that get an experienced nanny and then they micromanage them to the smallest, most irrelevant detail,\u201d said Joana, a 43-year-old nanny in Manhattan. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Hey, can you make sure you mash up the food?\u2019 Like, okay, does she really think I can\u2019t handle this basic thing that we do every day?\u201d Things were different even a few years ago, Joana added. \u201cBack in the day, we didn\u2019t even really have schedules \u2014 it was more about following the baby\u2019s cues.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always said, \u2018Never wake a sleeping baby,\u2019\u201d said Karla, a 40-year-old nanny in Brooklyn who has been in the business for about 15 years. But when she took a new job caring for an infant at the beginning of the year, the parents pushed her to wake the baby up from his nap before he woke naturally, arguing he would sleep better at night. \u201cThat baby is angry the whole day because he or she is tired,\u201d Karla said. When she tried to reason with the parents, she said, they would reel off some wisdom read in a book or passed along by a friend. They seemed preoccupied with everyone else\u2019s approach. \u201cThey come with, \u2018Oh, well, my friend is doing it that way.\u2019 It\u2019s not about your friends,\u201d Karla said. \u201cIt\u2019s your baby.\u201d The infant\u2019s mom works from home in the family\u2019s relatively small apartment and can\u2019t help but peek at the baby monitor throughout the day, even while on work calls. When the baby does wake up on his own, she rushes, within moments, to alert Karla.<\/p>\n
Sasha, a nanny to a toddler and an infant in Manhattan, has found these hypervigilant parents are also often ruder than parents of the past. Last summer, she walked away from a gig for the first time in her entire 20-plus-year nannying career. For what was originally billed as a part-time job, her hours quickly ballooned to 60 to 70 a week, and the mother grew increasingly demanding and finicky. At the same time, Sasha felt a complete lack of respect from her employers. \u201cUs nannies,\u201d she said, \u201cwe\u2019re practically living in your house because we\u2019re there ten, 11, 12 hours a day. Your home is like our second home.\u201d But the mother, she said, \u201cwould talk to me in such a rude way in front of people that it was embarrassing. I\u2019m a grown woman, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
She quit and found a job with a new set of parents, and the atmosphere is much more sustainable. She still deals with power struggles every day, though. One of the biggest challenges she has faced recently is the move toward more permissive parenting. A mother herself, Sasha summed up her own approach to parental and adult authority concisely: \u201cThe adult with you is always in charge.\u201d Her new employers \u2014 perhaps influenced by gentle, therapized parenting \u2014 do not share this outlook. \u201cIt\u2019s like he\u2019s in control, and he\u2019s 2 years old,\u201d Sasha said. \u201cIt\u2019s not supposed to be like that.\u201d She added that the child\u2019s mom tells him, \u201cYou can have snacks whenever you want.\u201d One day when Sasha was trying to get the boy out of the house and he started begging for a fruit-pur\u00e9e pouch, she asked him to get into his stroller first. His mother, overhearing the exchange, emerged from her office and handed the kid a pouch. Nannies talk often about how gentle parenting and its various offshoots have created a wave of unmanageable kids. The dissonance is rich given how much rigor these parents apply to managing their nannies. As one nanny wrote on the Nannies of New York City group page, \u201cNONE OF THESE PARENTS WANT TO FACE THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR UNTRAINED RUDE KIDS.\u201d<\/p>\n
Joana told me her decades of experience have made her shrewd and selective about which families she\u2019ll take a job with: Work-from-home parents are a deal-breaker. For one, she said, the household is simply more peaceful, the babies more contented, when there is one voice of authority at a time. She has also noticed a serious downside for at-home parents who insist on helicopter-managing their nannies. Their own work suffers. \u201cThey watch their nanny watch their kid,\u201d she said. \u201cAt that point, you might as well just watch your own child.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore COVID, I loved being a nanny,\u201d said Louise, a 51-year-old Brooklyn resident who has been living and nannying in the city for 23 years. \u201cI go in, the parents would go out.\u201d For a while, she had such independence at work that she would sometimes tell her friends, \u201cOh my God, it looks like the mom forgot she had a kid.\u201d All that changed in 2021, when Louise took a job with a family whose micromanaging and nervous energy gradually became too much for her. The mother, who had installed cameras around the apartment, became increasingly difficult to please. Louise was earning $25 an hour, the standard for one child, but the parents, like many being squeezed by inflation, wanted more for less. While $35 is the standard minimum rate for two children in New York \u2014 more if housework is expected \u2014 Louise\u2019s employer offered her a raise of one dollar per hour and said the new rate would have to include family laundry. Louise told me, \u201cShe sends me a text saying, \u2018If I have to pay you $26 an hour for two kids, there will be expectations.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Adding insult to injury, the mother had started declining to pay Louise for days when she made the impromptu decision to take the child to visit family. In most full-time nannying arrangements, parents agree to pay for a guaranteed number of hours per week, month, or year, even if plans change. As tensions rose, Louise noticed the mother would communicate about important matters, including pay raises, only over text. \u201cWe used to sit down and talk,\u201d Louise said. \u201cBut nobody communicates verbally anymore.\u201d Multiple nannies mentioned parents talking to them less and hiding behind a digital barrier, adding to the impression that they thought nannying could be treated like just another service job in the gig economy, rather than a personal, familial role nurtured over years.<\/p>\n
The child in this family was also having behavioral issues. One day when the grandfather was visiting, the child started throwing stuff on the floor. The grandfather got fed up and announced to the mother, \u201cYou created this monster,\u201d and left the house. Louise herself was becoming prediabetic with high blood pressure. She felt the tension and disrespect emanating from the parents were compounding both her health issues and the child\u2019s problems. \u201cI think I was scared of her,\u201d Louise said of the mother. \u201cThe two of us just couldn\u2019t agree.\u201d One day, Louise came to work lightheaded. She called a friend in tears. \u201cMaybe I\u2019ll just go work at a store. I\u2019m a citizen,\u201d she said. Many nannies aren\u2019t and don\u2019t have the same options. \u201cI\u2019m thinking, Should I really still be a nanny? This is not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Louise was not alone in contemplating an exit. This year, she said, a number of her colleagues have left child care to pursue new careers, with many of them becoming home health aides. Karla told me her current family will be her final one; when the infant she\u2019s caring for reaches school age, she plans to return to the interior-design studies she paused years ago. She thinks it has the potential to be far less emotionally fraught. Barrow, the Nannies by Noa head, told me the job has become about managing a whole family rather than simply taking care of a child. \u201cA new candidate really needs to be able to read the temperature in the room. You know, Mom\u2019s got a call coming in, Dad\u2019s got a thing, the kids are crying because they can see their parents in the next room but they can\u2019t have them,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s all this sort of push-pull going on.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next time Louise\u2019s employers left town to visit relatives, she started interviewing with other families and considering retail jobs. By the time the parents got back, she\u2019d found a short-term gig with a new family. She walked into the new arrangement with trepidation. What kinds of bizarre demands and hostile micromanagement awaited her now? But her new employers seemed to be just \u2026 normal. They had only one child, a baby, but paid her what the previous family offered for two. They seemed to genuinely respect her. \u201cThis family showed me there are still nice people out there,\u201d Louise said.<\/p>\n
Deb, a Brooklyn nanny who started in 2004, began planning her escape before things reached their current boiling point. In 2020, several months into the pandemic, she enrolled in nursing school and began a punishing double life as a full-time nanny and full-time student. In her early days watching kids, she said, the parents were \u201cmore personable, and they gave you a sense where they cared about you as an individual.\u201d The nanny-parent arrangement was more likely to be a deep, long-term partnership. The new parents, she observed, \u201ccare about what you do but not you as a person.\u201d They were more likely to drop a nanny out of the blue, she said. Deb also wanted more mental stimulation from her work. She\u2019d felt forced into nannying in her first years in the city because of her immigration status, but she is now a documented permanent resident. \u201cI thought my potential was being underutilized,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n
This fall, she left her final nannying gig and started taking nursing shifts. She marveled at how straightforward her new employment was. The weather was getting cold, and she remembered what it was like to camp out at the freezing local library all day with the kids and other nannies \u2014 she was often told to stay out of the house while the parents worked from home. Now she has health insurance and access to pension benefits, both of which are available only to a very tiny and lucky fraction of nannies. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to say to my friends,\u201d she told me, \u201c\u2018Guys, nannying is shifting. You gotta think of the next move.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Illustration: Brandon Celi A horror story has been making its way around New York City\u2019s robust nanny community…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3208,4683,37113,37114,37112,9,24,55,54,56,233,16828,36319],"class_list":["post-73226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-childcare","tag-family","tag-gentle-parenting","tag-millenials","tag-millennial-parenting","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-parenting","tag-self","tag-the-child-care-tab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}