Racial Bias in Nanny Share Arrangements

[Anonymous]

That cash pay is so problematic. My next door neighbor had a nanny the kids loved, paying the required taxes. Nanny wanted to go cash pay off the books. Neighbor said she could not do it because she was an attorney in government. Offered to pay all the employee share of tax. Nanny wanted cash. They split.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I had a nanny share arrangment fall apart. You might be better off. I did my search while expecting too. Maybe you are too late?

OP again- last response before I go offline for the morning. 😂

Sorry to hear that. We started three months before the end of my mat leave which I thought was plenty of time, so this is sobering to hear. At this point we are toying with starting with our own nanny and just seeing if we can still try to find a share family down the line. We’ll see!

That’s where I think you should’ve started. It’s easier to create a nanny share situation if you already have a great, willing and vetted nanny instead of trying to swoop in on an existing situation without being an exact fit. Once you have an established nanny, it may be easier for you to call the shots on pricing and the time split as well.

Also to your point that people looked you up and saw that you were black. That’s far fetched. a lot of black people speak a whole octave deeper than everybody else so it’s often easier to tell someone is black by their voice than it is to tell if someone is any other race. They likely already knew that but were interested and you guys didn’t work out for other reasons.

[Anonymous]

Oh racism could be a factor.

Perhaps Jack and Jill would be a good network for finding families to share.

I only had one on one Nannie’s. That was hard enough. If I were parenting a little one today, I would go day care. And a one on one for say first 18 months to two years could be a compromise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I had a nanny share arrangment fall apart. You might be better off. I did my search while expecting too. Maybe you are too late?

OP again- last response before I go offline for the morning. 😂

Sorry to hear that. We started three months before the end of my mat leave which I thought was plenty of time, so this is sobering to hear. At this point we are toying with starting with our own nanny and just seeing if we can still try to find a share family down the line. We’ll see!

That’s where I think you should’ve started. It’s easier to create a nanny share situation if you already have a great, willing and vetted nanny instead of trying to swoop in on an existing situation without being an exact fit. Once you have an established nanny, it may be easier for you to call the shots on pricing and the time split as well.

Also to your point that people looked you up and saw that you were black. That’s far fetched. a lot of black people speak a whole octave deeper than everybody else so it’s often easier to tell someone is black by their voice than it is to tell if someone is any other race. They likely already knew that but were interested and you guys didn’t work out for other reasons.

I don’t think any of us can know what the basis is fully for your predicament, and whether and how much it relates to race. In any event, one thing to check if you haven’t already is what pops up when you’re and your spouse‘s name is googled. For anything like this, once I had the full names, and possibly address, I would do a Google search. Sometimes this can pop up weird things that could be a flag to someone thinking of such a close personal relationship as sharing childcare. As context, I do this check myself, for myself, husband and kids, as I have a colleague who wound up with some strange stuff out there that could have been misinterpreted.

[Anonymous]

It’s not because you are black. There’s something else that is not matching up. Schedule, hours or pay.

[Anonymous]

Welcome to being a minority in a white/UMC community. This is the norm. If I had to do things over again, I would have raised my kids in a more diverse (both racially and economically) neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

I’m not sure it’s all because of your race. There are a lot of interracial couples/families in this area. Nanny share is so rare that if I were entertaining it, race wouldn’t be the main factor. It’s probably something else not matching up (and race is a minor part of it). Most likely the share part is just too difficult to realistically implement, and they backed out after talking through the details with you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. I think we expressed a lot of flexibility (open to either hosting or having it at their house, flexible with start and end time, and open to discussing/exchanging ideas on how their days would typically look, etc). It’s true that you can never really know what other factors are at play. I just feel a bit stuck now and trying to find a solution based on my gut feeling about what appears to be the issue.

We had decided on nanny share because we wanted our child to have a bit more personal attention and naively thought it would be a little easier to arrange given that it seems to be the most common childcare arrangement in the neighborhood from what I’ve gleaned…

Is this a poorer neighborhood? I don’t understand why a one on one nanny would be prohibitively expensive unless HHI was really low. I’ve also never heard of anyone with a nanny share.

Are you really this out of touch?

[Anonymous]

I know 3 couples within 5 blocks of my house who do nanny share. Very common these days. Nannies are more motivated in the share since they get much more $$, and parents save as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I could use some advice. We are an upper middle class black/white interracial married couple trying to find ideal childcare for our first child before we go back to work. Where we live in DC nanny sharing is very popular and we know many people in the neighborhood who have been able to find a family to partner with with ease and in little time. However, we’ve been struggling for a while to find a similar arrangement for our fairly easy-going, sweet-natured infant. All of the people in the neighborhood we know who have done nanny sharing (and had assured us it would be easy to organize something similar for our family) have been white and the demographics of the neighborhood are such that there are very few non-white couples around us with the means to pay a lot for childcare (this is also born out by the demographics of the daycares and private preschools in the neighborhood). We’ve had good initial phone conversations with a few families who seemed to promptly ghost us once we gave them enough identifying information to be able to look us up and see what we look like.

I’m a little frustrated that I naively did not see this coming and now we may have to pay a lot more than we anticipated for a one-on-one nanny until a spot at our preferred daycare maybe opens up.

Has anyone ever navigated something similar? Any advice for networks we could potentially tap into to find similarly situated families? It would have been nice to find a family in our neighborhood but we now accept that we may also need to tap into our adjacent/surrounding communities for the right fit.

You remind me of a woman I once worked with. If someone said hello to someone else before saying hello to her then she screamed discrimination.

[Anonymous]

I am white and hired my own nanny while waiting for daycare to open up (spending more than I took in for a few months, as I was already paying daycare for an older child and because I had to purchase a standalone worker's comp policy). I did not want to go through the drama of finding a share for only a short time (it's two separate employers that need to get along with each other and the employee). I would have been open to a share with anyone if I hadn't wanted my kids together in the same daycare/preschool long time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think nanny shares are difficult. Would you want two different bosses with likely different expectations, schedules, contracts, etc.? No, thank you. One doesn't have to be a racist to decide that sharing your nanny is not in your or your employee's best interest. If you look for racism everywhere, you're likely to find it.

Except everyone is okay with having two bosses as long as both are white, so there’s that…