Did you have a nanny growing up? Not just a sporadic babysitter, I mean. Personally, I've never considered myself as someone who would hire a nanny. The concept has always struck me as so... inequitable. My best guess is that there's a heavily proletarian side of me that has never gotten comfortable with the thought of subservience in certain social dynamics. I *think* the reasoning goes something like: If I'm capable of doing something myself, then I should always aim to do it myself. I almost never identify with the natural counterargument: that if my time is more valuable than the cost to hire help, that I should engage that help instead. Maybe it's because I never really think of my own time being inherently more valuable than someone else's. And the irony is that I use the word "proletarian", which might lead you to assume this is was ingrained in me from my years in China, but the DIY attitude is more probably from the Fresno years, when my family were truly working class. Anyways, some examples of my anti-domestic servitude mindset that come to mind:
1/ I've always avoided having my shoes shined. It's easier to avoid on the West Coast, but was quite common to when commuting into Manhattan/Grand Central, from what I remember. The visual of a guy sitting up on a high platform with a shoe shiner down hunched over below, buffing those shoes... it just doesn't play well in this millennium.
2/ I don't have a gardener/landscaper. Back when I had a lawn, I used to mow it myself. Nowadays, I just split the work (leaves and pruning) with my wife, who's the real green thumb at home. This probably reached a peak a few years ago when we were installing raised beds, which I built at home, as well as the mistake of having two cubic yards of soil dumped on my front lawn, then hauling it one wheelbarrow at a time, uphill, to the beds in the back yard. Just ask my back.
3/ Over the years, I've skimped on plumbers, electricians, HVAC specialists, etc. because I've tried to tackle tons of work myself. Not every single problem, of course, but there's nothing that I won't at least try to fix myself first: broken washer, furnace won't blow, stove won't light, fridge broke, clogged drain, etc. If I can give it a shot, I always do. That has extended to my work life, where no job was ever "beneath" me. I'm specifically thinking of our multiple toilet failures. Some others had urged me to just leave it be and call in a pro, especially since it wasn't my personal toilet. But it literally never crossed my mind to do so, since I knew what the problem was, how to fix it, and was faced with waiting for a pro's schedule to open up, paying them, and losing our team's work productivity in the meantime.
Ok, back to nannies. Knowing the above, my attitude toward the whole concept of hiring nannies is likely the culmination of all these proclivities. As full-time parents, my wife and I take our kids out to play fairly often. And especially when we're back in the Bay Area and hunting down one of the few large, more comprehensive playgrounds, we're inevitably surrounded by lots of kids accompanied by their nannies. In true Bay Area fashion, these nannies gather together and merrily speak every language except English. For some parents, I can venture a guess that the language exposure is part of the appeal. In any case, the Myanma usually crowd together with the Myanma, Hispanic with Hispanic, and so on. There's a little party here, little party there. The kids, depending on age, might speak some of the nanny's language (which all things considered is a much better thing vs. choosing to speak in broken English).
I get it, the parents are working, and good options for daycare are both thin and competitive. Sometimes it's just easier to simply pay some young lady with questionable work authorization status under the table a below-market wage (if one can stomach 50-70k below-market for those outside Silicon Valley). But what are you really getting? In most cases, and from nearly every case I've been able to casually observe, it's not much. Maybe the parents just need the bare minimum, which is "please keep my child alive for the nine hours a day". But really, not much beyond that. I've seen kids lick the floor while their caregivers are happily chatting away with other nannies, with hardly a care. I've always reserved a fair amount of silent outrage for free-range parenting, but imagine paying someone gobs of money to free-range your child. Worse, this is all assuming that you don't hire someone who abuses your child. (Disclosure: I grew up watching months of Hard Copy coverage of the Louise Woodward case)
There's also a bit of judgment attached (sorry), which is that the whole point of bringing a child into this world — the point of being a parent — is to care for them, be responsible for them for a certain amount of time before they can manage on their own. It's not easy, and it's not meant to be easy. So I can't help but wonder the extent to which hiring help to care for your child is cheating at being a parent. And I do mean that in a very pejorative sense. There's no perfect scenario here. Most people in the world need to make ends meet, and can't afford to just stay with their kids all day. I mean, even if they could swing it financially, they probably can't stand to be with their own kids 24/7. But that's not what I'm talking about, and not who I'm talking about. It strikes me as difficult to reconcile that these parents can afford hired help, and in some cases, even live-in help, along with everything that luxury entails, to not be able to take some time off and spend a few precious years with their kiddos. It's time that money can't buy, and years that can't be repeated.
I've known quite a few friends who either hired or grew up with nannies. And yet the concept, if you couldn't tell, is still so foreign to me. To borrow a more well-known reference from Crazy Rich Asians, it's like Rachel Chu meeting her boyfriend's nanny at that dinner party, utterly confused why the old lady wasn't his actual grandmother. If I had to distill my opinion into the simplest terms, I lead with what's best for the child, and I can imagine few scenarios where being under the care of a parent is the inferior option when compared to hiring a helper. To be fair, I do know of a few seemingly well-adjusted folks who had excellent nannies or helpers growing up. Keyword here is "seemingly", since I can only speculate what the relationship with their parents (or lack thereof) might be. As a parent faced with this decision, are you going to miss out on a larger paycheck? Probably. Kneecap your career advancement? Almost certain. Sitting on your hands and slowly going insane listening to too much Cocomelon? You bet. But my babies are well worth it.
Deserving of a P.S. here: Among the nanny elite, I've generally noticed two camps: the families that hire young, attractive women, and those that opt for another demographic. I've never met anyone who hired a "manny" (though I've seen it occasionally in the news). For that first cohort, there's always the slight danger (let's face it, it's not slight) of the "Dad had an affair with the nanny" issue. More famous examples, on account of their celebrity status, abound. I mean, there was even a TV show whose entire concept revolved around this phenomenon. Of course, they skirted around the morally unsavory territory by making Maxwell Sheffield a widower. Shoutout to the Von Trapps, too.
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