Two working parents and no nanny - tips please
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Anonymous
| If you and your spouse both work full time jobs, and you have school-aged children, how do you make it work with no family in the area? We plan on using after care and a part-time sitter but it doesn’t feel like enough. Yet almost every nanny post I see is a family giving up their nanny when their child goes to kindergarten. So, I’d love advice from more experienced parents who have managed this. What do you do for snow days, sick days, random days off? If you didn’t pay for a full time nanny during this time, do you wish you had? Or, any other advice you would offer? |
Anonymous
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This mostly depends on budget and the flexibility of the jobs.
If you have two inflexible jobs with evening hours or travel, you’ll need additional help. If you can afford the help, it makes sense to have it even if you don’t *need* it. |
Anonymous
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You sit down with your spouse and mark all the known holidays, teacher planning days, breaks etc on your work calendars. You make a plan, whether it’s one of you taking the day off or hiring a sitter.
For the unexpected days off, you communicate early and often. You’re watching the weather and noting when your kid starts to show any symptoms that would keep them home. You talk it through with your spouse—which day would be easier to work from home, can you each take part of the day, etc. Does one of you have a busier, more intense season at work? You continually work towards balance, as in “I stayed home the past 3 days when Larlo was sick. I have to go in. You’re going to need to reschedule that meeting.” It’s hard, but it’s even more difficult when you don’t talk it through, when you bean count, and when you let annoyances build up. Each parent has to be unafraid to take the time. |
Anonymous
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We paid for our full time nanny during this period and my sister did drivers/part time sitters. So I had a period of several years to compare.
I definitely paid more and it was easier - less coordinating, more consistent care, easier on the parents by a lot. My sister paid a lot less -maybe only 20 or 25% of what I paid so that's the biggest difference. But it was way more work - every year finding a new driver and babysitter, figuring out which sitter could do what days, etc. and also not as consistent care. But one better thing was her babysitters were more like young college kids and my nanny was more like an older experienced nanny so I think my sister's kids liked their babysitters better. Definitely pros and cons, the biggest delta being cost. |
Anonymous
| OP here. Jobs are flexible to a point (no one is a surgeon/pilot, etc) but each could have days where flexibility was difficult. Nanny financially would be possible but it seems like a lot of money for having a child mostly in school. Thanks to everyone who offered insight thus far. |
Anonymous
The job transitions imo from “nanny” to “nanny/house manager.” So there are additional, different duties during school hours. Meal shopping/planning/prep being the main one, and well as laundry and as much kid admin and light housekeeping as you can offload. |
Anonymous
You could always get a temp sitter from an agency for those random days. It is $$$ but probably cheaper than employing a FT nanny/house manager. |
Anonymous
| We both work from home, and have since in some capacity since they were toddlers. It’s doesn’t work without job flexing and no nanny. |
Anonymous
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I have three kids (now 9, 7, and 4), and I have never had a nanny or wanted one. Husbands job is very inflexible (four days off a year and no ability to duck out), while mine is flexible but demanding.
We use full time preschool/daycare for youngest and school/aftercare for the older two. Aftercare is open whenever school is closed, so on the random days off the big kids go there. Summer we do camps with after care. You have to manage a nanny. Hire her, train her, handle her vacation, etc. Then she may well leave for reasons you can’t control and you have to start over. I didnt want that mess and would rather have that money to spend on fun things since I think the cheaper alternatives are both better and easier. |
Anonymous
Am agency? Do you serious not know any teens? By the time kids are in kinder and older, they no longer need specialist care - they need a responsible teen to feed them and keep them off screens. That’s it. |
Anonymous
| If you can limit their hours and plan in advance, an au pair can work for older kids. |
Anonymous
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Kids do aftercare every day, goes until 6pm if needed. Aftercare runs camp days for all professional days.
Our jobs are flexible and we get fed holidays off. Years of daycare (never had nannies) means they have good immunity systems and rarely got sick. |
Anonymous
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I feel like there was just a thread on this. Maybe in the DC schools forum? You should see if you can find it because it had good ideas.
This is what we do: - Different kinds of flexible jobs. I have a job where my hours are extremely flexible (virtually no meetings or calls, so I can shift work to evenings or weekends very easily) but has tight deadlines. DH has a job with very rigid hours plus lots of in-person time, but the pace of his job is much slower and it's easy for him to take leave if he has even a little notice (plus lots of leave because very senior). So I handle surprise days off and he handles many/most of the planned days off. If I have to take a day off because DC is sick, he also helps with evening or will take DC on the weekend so I can catch up on missed work. - Exchange playdates with neighborhood friends. When this works out it's a godsend. We have another family at the same school with whom our kid is good friends. For something like a planning day, each family will take both kids for half the day. Plus couples sometimes divide it further if both are wfh that day (so one partner takes kids to playground for 2 hours, then the other feeds them and sets them up with a craft). When it works, it really minimizes impact on anyone's day. Obviously must be planned well in advance. - Aftercare and camps. You obviously know about aftercare but we use camps not just in the summer but sometimes for longer school-year breaks. Like we had a week off in February and one off in April this year -- we traveled in February and kid did a weeklong camp at her ballet school in April. Yes, these cost money but it's usually cheaper than hiring a sitter and way easier because it gets her out of the house for the day and is more similar to school, so she stays on her schedule. And definitely camps in the summer -- get used to spending December and January setting your summer plans up because things book up early. |
Anonymous
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We use Extended Day for school. This covers weekdays until 6pm and all Early Release days.
Snow days - stay home. Usually I will take a few neighbor kids until lunch and then my kid will go to a friend’s house after lunch for a few hours while work remotely. Kid is sick, we stay home depending on who has less urgent meetings. Random breaks, we sign up for day camps and trade play dates with neighbors. Days off school are not the challenging part. The kid activities that assume I can drive a kid across Arlington and have them fed, dressed and ready for a sports practice at 5pm are the issue. Of course you don’t find out the day/time/location of soccer/baseball/flag football until the week before practice starts. |
Anonymous
Very true and something to factor in when you choose activities. We have some inflexibility around weekday activities so were very conscious of this when picking activities with our kid. We have found that dance or marshal arts are good weekday activities as long as the studio is close to school or our house -- we'll do things that take like 15 minutes to get to. Stuff with regular games or where locations can change, we look ahead of time to make sure we're just looking at a weekend commitment. |