The Nanny State

In the The Nanny Diaries: A Novel, the tyrannical mother imposes stringent rules on the nanny on what she is allowed to feed her son. No sugar, no hot dogs, everything fresh and home made. It's time consuming work, complains the nanny and if the mother was watching her kid all day, there's no way that she wouldn't sneak off to McDonalds once every couple weeks.

Well, life imitates art, and the Times has an article on food regulations and the nanny.

“It’s not unusual for parents to make a huge list of what is and isn’t allowed,” said Genevieve Thiers, who is the founder and chief executive of Sittercity.com, which matches more than 150,000 baby sitters with parents. Her site receives so many queries about food, she said, that she is preparing to post an online worksheet on which parents can specify diet preferences.

Parents are more aware of dietary concerns that they were years ago, and this food scrunity is just part of the movement towards more intense parenting that affects all aspects of child rearing.

Nannies, meanwhile, find it demeaning “when parents are overly scrupulous,” said Julia Wrigley, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, because they are implying that the sitters do not know or care enough to feed children properly. “The deeper emotional issue is how much judgment and authority the caregiver can exercise,” she said.

Sitters can hear a parent’s dietary requests as criticism of her education level, cultural traditions and personal eating habits, and as harbingers of extra work.

As more women work, the rules of childcare are increasingly up for debate. How much should you regard nannies as professionals and allow them the freedom to make about decisions about food and discipline? Should nannies be paid more as the responsibilites increase? Isn't parental oversight a good thing for the kids who really don't need to have a constant diet of fries and treats? Most people were not raised by nannies and have no traditions or rules of conduct to fall back on.

I admit that these debates make me very nervous. When I've dropped my kid off a sitter's house, my philosophy is that it's her house, her rules. I never step into these matters. If I am unhappy, I find someone else who is more in line with my thinking. However, if I have a sitter at my house, I have some rules here. I usually feel sorry for anybody watching my crazy kids, so I make the rules very light, like don't let them play in traffic. I don't make them impose the TV and computer rules. But then again, I never have anyone here for a full day, five days a week.

Comments

[Lisa V]

We so rarely had sitters, we always had a "save yourself" rule. If they had to let them watch tv, watch tv. If they let them eat junk food, so be it. Though we rarely had decent junk food. I figured if she kept them safe and happy, everything else was secondary.

My daughter actually babysits for someone who doesn't want her to watch TV after the kids are in bed. So she takes a book. But we both think it's stupid. She only babysits for them when she really needs the money. It's not that she cares that much about tv, but the parents feel way too controling.

[Kai Jones]

Are they paying nannies more for doing all this extra work, and having the expertise to choose and prepare nutritious food for their kids? Seems like exploitation to me.

[Guest]

In some countries (France for example), there is no separation between what the [French] sitter might know and what the parents might desire. It is sensibly one and the same. Maybe they are just a generation behind, and the french kids of the future might only know McDonalds and craps shite pseudo-food. Exploitation is what the purveyors of pseudo-food do to their customers, not what someone might demand of their paid assisants.

There is thing called common sense, and it seems America as a nation has lost a rather lot of it.

[bj]

I think that folks who think they can treat nannies (or teachers) as some kind of cogs that they can control remotely are doing eveyone in the relationship (including the children) a huge disservice. My rule is that I have to find someone whose child-raising/teaching beliefs are sufficiently in line with mine, that I am comfortable with their making moment by moment decisions, and even offering me advice when necessary.

But, of course, someone who cares for children full time has to share more of the idealogy than an occasional babysitter, which in turn limits the available pool of candidates.

bj

[s]

Just a quibble: You wrote: "As more women work, the rules of childcare are increasingly up for debate."

But really, 'more women' have been working for a good long while now. This sort of hyper-vigilance, about food and other things, is (supposedly) a relatively recent phenomenon. Could it be that, rather than more women working, there are more women being made to feel GUILTY about working, and attempting to mitigate that guilt by pushing the caregiver to do or not do x y or z?

You mention in passing "...the movement towards more intense parenting". Until I get good clear evidence that "intense parenting" is indeed something that children need to thrive, I (working mom w/babysitter) will politely opt out of taking on the guilt burden.

[Allison]

honestly, whether or not more women are working, "nannies" still aren't the norm. daycare does not equal nanny.

doesn't this just speak of a tiny tiny sliver of society? the urban professionals on the coasts who feel that anything short of organic soy beans hand picked by hemp are a travesty? come on, that's not the norm. It may become the norm, but whenever I see reports of the overly hovering and involved yet working parents, the demographics weren't exactly wide. the new york times' circulation supports my point.

I think the cultural point is apt: the people who shop ar Whole Foods are apparently concerned that the nannies they hire don't atomatically shop there themselves. hm could it be because they can't afford it? or that illegal aliens don't get why paying more for that organic spinach is reasonable?

culture matters--and subconsciously or consciously, the parents recognize that their children are determining the culture to which they belong from the nanny. so they need nanny not to convey too many low brow tastes.

[ricki]

I wonder...if these moms (or dads) were the primary caretaker of the child (rather than the nanny), would THEY bother with the uber-organic produce and the "no sugar must pass my child's lips" rule?

Or is it because they can "force" another person (well, until the nanny quits or commits some other act of "treason") to do it?

I've known controlling people in my life, and I tend to think that people with that high a degree of anal retentiveness directed at a "worker bee" are NOT doing it to benefit whatever situation, as they are doing it to wield power. And it's not very attractive. And it drives a lot of "worker bees" to passive-aggressive retaliatory type behavior....

[Laura]

The Times recycles the same articles every six months. The theme of the meanie, uptight mom is a favorite. I usually ridicule them for that, but I get tired of being a broken record.

I admit to huge insecurities with delegating child rearing to others. I had no role models in this department and am not quite sure when to step in and when to hold back. I'm looking forward to next fall, when my youngest starts kindergarten full time and I can arrange my schedule around his school.

I also worry about putting a tip in the tip cup at Starbucks, so I recognize that I'm rather neurotic.

One more point... The micromanagement of nannies isn't just a nanny thing. The trend in high end daycares is webcams, so the parents can watch their kids and their caretakers from work.

[Tamar]

Hi there, I'm new to comment but not to the blog - which by the way, re: a few posts back, I love precisely because you refuse to make it look easy, Laura. Anyway, while I quite agree that the meanie mom theme that refuses to die is annoying, I do think there's something worth considering in this NYT article. Though I personally think the "only organic, no sugar" routine is overkill (and possibly enforcable only by delegating it to someone else, as another commentor aptly noted), I wouldn't be thrilled with a caregiver giving my (currently hypothetical) kids daily meals of entirely processed food, either. While an organic apple verses a conventionally grown apple may be a class issue, a McD's hamburger verses simple homecooked chicken is not.

[Kai Jones]

Since this is about *nannies*, not daycare or at-their-home caregivers, the nanny can only feed the kid what food you bought at the grocery store, so what's the problem? Only buy food you'd let your kid eat.

The "mean mom" NYT article style is about wealthy woman, to whom I always want to say, "just because you know people who have more money than you doesn't mean you're not rich." Middle income ends at around $70,000 per year...that is the *top* of that range, not the bottom.

[B]

The article struck a chord, even for a (I thought) non-uptight nanny-employer like me. When I hired a wonderful, loving, energetic woman to care for my son, he was on (pumped) breast milk, so I didn't really think to ask about her food. Now he's 16 months, and we're starting to have (small) issues. Do I want to make a major case about it, to the point of arguing with a woman my son adores, the only person besides me he's really comfortable with? Clearly not.

I have a preference for wheat bread, and I'd prefer that he not be pumped full of either sugar or artificial sweeteners. And her opinions differ. So there we are.

Certainly I'm not religious about either preference. But it all comes down to: is he worse off in some way, say, developing a long-term sugar addiction, because I want/prefer to be at work than with him 4 days a week?

And if I worry about it, then I've got the normal guilt thing going, and I start feeling like I've irrevocably screwed up my second job again (off into stream of consciousness - oh God, shouldn't it be my first job? The fact that I reflexively refer to taking care of my child as a second job means that ... yada yada yada.)

I think my point (I'm two beers in, and the child has only been in bed for 45 minutes, so forgive) is that some of us who employ nannies are conflicted and guilt-ridden and prone to occasional hysteria anyway. And the conflict of child-abandonment-guilt versus oh-god-I've-become-the-oppressive-employer-guilt will lead to wacky results from time to time. So we'll read the stupid article, even if it appeared last year in slightly different form.

[Henry]

I'm a little baffled. A nanny works in the parents home. Why shouldn't the parents set reasonable food rules if the parents provide full support (consistency and a full cupboard). Neurotic micromanagement is one thing, a nanny sneaking kids candy bars is another.

I admit that we don't press babysitters or relatives to maintain our rules (oy, the kids' grandmas, deliverers of ice cream, marshmallows, and brown sugar).

But I don't think it's so hard to sympathize with parents who are concerned about limiting the amount of junk their kids eat, or about caregivers bribing kids with snacks.