Reply to Finding the right nanny to grow with us

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[quote=Anonymous]We kept our nanny for 13 years. We would have kept her for longer but she got an opportunity to move into a corporate role which we encouraged. Our kids were tweens and teens when she finally stopped. With that background, my thoughts:

- Be prepared to always pay above market. If you have an excellent nanny, other people will notice and she will get job offers from them. Make sure you are always the more attractive option. This includes things like vacation and flexibility in scheduling. 
- Have a career plan for your nanny as the kids age. I would discuss this at the outset. Do you want her to move into household management? Food and meal prep? What will she do when the kids are in school? Will you pay her to take a class or get a certification that she can put on her resume to show her expanded duties?
- You need to have regular career discussions with your nanny over the years. Remember, staying with one family for a very long time is a career risk for a nanny. She becomes more vulnerable to changes in your family, and loses references that are not one family. She also risks having her skills tied closely to one family. You need to mitigate that. We used to have regular career discussions with our nanny, including offering to pay for classes to bolster skills we needed in house management. We also worked with her on her transition into a corporate real estate job, which was a good fit for her because she was able to show a solid history of house management. She is doing great at that job now and will be able to carry that sort of job through retirement. 
- I think your focus on BA is misplaced. There are plenty of excellent nannies without BAs and many duds with them (I have seen them). What is important in a nanny are communication abilities, organization, emotional stability and love, and patience. That is largely orthogonal to whether someone has a BA or not. 
- You need to look for a nanny explicitly who wants to shift her role in the family as the kids grow. Some nannies have no interest in household management. Well, what is your nanny going to do when the kids are in school if not household management? 
- You need to think about what tasks you want a nanny to take on for you while kids are in school and talk with the nanny when you are interviewing. Families are different this way. I never wanted our nanny to do things like manage doctors or volunteer at school or organize tutors, but on the other hand, I happily handed her vacation planning and closet reorganization. I would talk about this in the interview.

Good luck! A great nanny relationship is a blessing and we are still in close contact with our nanny, who comes to all graduations and will undoubtedly be at my kids’ weddings. [/quote]

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