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[quote=Anonymous]We've had a nanny for two days a week for about five months whom we like well enough. About 1.5 weeks ago my nanny mentioned at the end of the day that she and my four-year-old son cut down some bamboo in our backyard because my son wanted to build a house with it. I was really surprised and told her not to do it again. I finally went out there over this past weekend when the weather improved where we live and saw what they had done--they had taken pruning shears and cut down every piece of bamboo in a five-foot stretch! My husband thinks the nanny agreed to do it because the nanny and my two-year-old daughter wanted to have better access to pet the neighbors' dog through the fence. We were flabbergasted at the poor judgment. Now we literally have no bamboo along a certain stretch of our fence. I spoke with her again about it this morning and said it was not ok and not to do it again, and that they (including my apparently very persuasive preschool-aged son) were not allowed to use the pruning shears. And that they are not allowed to pet the dog through the fence ever. (A bit of background info--a couple months ago we paid gardeners to thin out our bamboo, but there is no stretch where we removed all of it.)

Well, at the end of the day today she showed me a house they built in the backyard using rope they retrieved from the garage. They cut up (using kitchen shears this time) a brand-new long rope we had in the garage and used it to tie pieces of the old bamboo together. Getting the rope and cutting it up is the issue, not the kitchen shears/old bamboo.

I am going to have a serious conversation with my nanny the next day we see her about these judgment issues. I suspect she is letting my son tell her what to do--he is obsessed with building stuff, and is possibly lying to her that he is allowed to do XYZ. (We've now had a conversation with him, of course.) She may also have assumed my husband and I are fairly relaxed about all this because we are happy for our son to build structures out of cardboard boxes and play in the mud and such. But to cut down a part of our backyard, and then to cut up a brand-new rope from our garage? I can't imagine this is an issue but I will mention that she doesn't speak English well (that I know of) and we all speak to each other in Spanish (which I'm decent at but am certainly not native). Anyway, my husband thinks this is a huge red flag and wonders how we can even go forward. But I'd like to see where a reset conversation takes us since I like her otherwise. And all of this is very sudden--she's never shown such a lack of judgment before. Thoughts? What would you do? I certainly see now that I need to be clear about things I never would have imagined needing to tell anyone, like not to destroy our property, but I don't even know what I need to spell out now.[/quote]

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