Nanny share pros and cons

This is my fifth post in a series on finding child care.

As I have explained previously, when I first returned to work, we placed Littles in a nanny share. Maria, our nanny, watched another girl named Dani, who is about 18 months older than Littles. Maria also brought her daughter, Gali, who is almost exactly 4 years older than Littles.

I wrote quite a bit about our nanny share in a post back in February. Overall, the experience was fantastic. Hubby and I are already thinking about trying to find something similar when we have another child.

Still, I went in thinking that it would be perfect. It was not. Now I understand that no child care situation is perfect. (Including having one parent stay at home!)

In retrospect, the root cause of the handful of complaints that I did have was that I made a lot of assumptions.

Caregiver style
Probably the biggest assumption I made was that Maria would fully defer to my desires on all aspects of Littles' care. She did not. Our biggest disagreement, as I described in my February post, was over how to get Littles to sleep for naps. Maria let her "cry it out" -- something that I was very much opposed to. I told Maria that I didn't want her to do it, and she did it anyway. In that case, I must admit that it worked quite well and does not seem to have had any negative long-term impact on Littles. But I always worried that Maria and I would disagree on something else major, and that I would have to defer to her again.

Lesson learned: Every child care provider has his or her own "style," as does every parent. Some providers are more willing than others to adjust their "style" to fit a parent's. Now I know to ask providers about their style, and to sniff out how willing a provider is to change their style to suit mine.

Breastfeeding
I had assumed that I would be able to mostly breastfeed during the days when the nanny share was at our house and I worked from home. This would have greatly eased my pumping load.

But I never discussed this with Maria before we started. Within a week, it became very apparent that this was not going to work out. Part of it was that Littles seemed to do better when she took bottles exclusively during the day -- I think she got confused when I saw her to nurse and then "left." But I also think that Maria could have been more supportive. For example, she sometimes didn't want to "bother" me at work, so she simply gave Littles a bottle without telling me. Unfortunately, that seriously messed with my schedule, because I was waiting on Maria to bring Littles to nurse, and didn't realize that I needed to pump instead.

If we do a nanny situation with future babies and I'm still working from home, I plan to discuss my desire to nurse as much as possible ahead of time, rather than springing it on the nanny on the first day.

Conserving my "liquid gold"
I also assumed that Maria would treat my expressed breastmilk like I did. This one is hard to explain if you've never pumped. Pumping moms often call expressed breastmilk "liquid gold," because it is! It takes so much effort to get it out that you don't want to waste a single drop. Maria certainly didn't waste breastmilk on purpose, but I think she could have conserved it a little better than she did. For example, she often gave a bottle late in the day (around 4 PM or even later, when I picked Littles up between 5 and 5:30 PM), rather than waiting for me to get there to nurse.

A few other minor quibbles that I had:

• We had some struggles with Dani, who was very jealous of Littles. For example, if one of her parents said hello to Littles, she would scream, "No Littles!" She also scratched Littles on multiple occasions. This did not really bother me, as I knew Dani was being disciplined appropriately for her behavior and the scratches were not serious, but it really bugged Hubby.
  
• The two older girls watched TV. Not a significant amount, just a half hour of cartoons before their nap and occasionally a little at the end of the day too, and Maria usually gave Littles a bottle or played with her while the older girls watched TV. But we try not to have the TV on around Littles at all, so even half an hour was more than I would have liked.
  
• Maria generally worked 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM. She was usually happy to come early or stay late on the occasional days when we needed her to, but I always felt bad making her do that. After all, she has a family and a life of her own. On those days, I wished we were at a daycare center, where I could drop off at 7 AM and know that Littles' teacher wasn't there just because of us.
  
• There was not much structure to the girls' days with Maria. They walked to the park when the weather was nice, and the rest of the day was spent in unstructured play. This was fine -- even preferable -- for Littles as an infant, but it might have become less desirable had we stayed with Maria as Littles got older.
  
• One oft-cited con to a one-caregiver situation like our nanny share is that you have no backup if the caregiver is sick or unavailable for any reason. Luckily, as I've mentioned before, we have excellent backup child care through our jobs, so this was not an issue for us.

That said, there were many pros to our nanny share, and they far outweighed the cons!

Individualized attention
I cannot stress the importance of this one enough. Littles got so much love and attention! Part of this goes back to Maria's caregiver "style" -- this was definitely a positive aspect of it. She always reached out to hold Littles the moment I walked through the door, gave her lots of hugs and kisses, and generally made sure that she interacted with her as much as possible. Littles really bonded with her. Gali was like a miniature version of her mom, always talking to and playing with Littles. Dani, like most 2-year-olds, was mostly wrapped up in her own little world :), but Littles loved watching her dance, run, and play. I think that interaction and bonding was really important to Littles as an infant.

One caregiver to bond with
I also think it's really important for infants to have the chance to bond strongly with one caregiver. In a daycare environment, an infant room might have three, four, five or more teachers in and out over the course of a day. I liked that Maria was Littles' only caregiver, that she didn't need to give me daily written reports because she could just tell me everything about Littles' day, that Littles had lots of consistency and familiarity in care. Some moms don't like this because they think their baby will start to prefer the caregiver, but this never happened. Littles loved Maria, but she never forgot that Hubby and I are her dad and mom!

I remember coming to pick Littles up one day, a few weeks before we moved. Maria had given her a Doodle Pro to play with, and as Maria and I caught up on her day, Littles attempted to figure out the Doodle Pro -- she kept trying to draw with the wrong end of the magnetic wand. Finally, she figured it out and scribbled a clear black line on the pad. She looked at me with a big smile, clearly proud of herself, and then gave Maria the same smile and the same look. It was in that moment that I could see just how well she had bonded with Maria. It made me happy that she spent her days with someone she loved so much, and who loved her so much.

Social interaction
Littles absolutely loved Dani and Gali. She got a huge smile on her face every morning when they came running over to say hello. I think she enjoyed the nanny share much more than she would have enjoyed being alone with a nanny. The nanny share offered a great balance between social interaction and individualized attention.

Interaction with older kids
Dani and Gali interacted with Littles in a much different way from either adults or other babies. For example, from the day we brought Littles home from the hospital, we used a bouncy chair that had a little dog toy attached to it. If you pulled on the dog toy, it played a song. Littles hadn't figured out the dog toy when she started in hte nanny share, but within a week, Gali had taught her how to pull on the dog toy to make it play the song. Another baby would not have the awareness to show her that; an adult (like me!) would have no interest in pulling the silly toy over and over to show Littles how it worked. It took an older child to do that.

Comfortable surroundings
Littles got to spend two days a week in the familiar environment of her own home. The rest of the week, she was in a similar home-like setting, with the benefit of access to Dani's extensive toy collection :) Far different from the busy environment of daycare. She does great in these environments now, but I think it was good for her to get used to them gradually, rather than all at once as a young infant.

Convenience
Not having to pack up all of Littles' stuff on the two days when the nanny share was at our house was wonderful! Also, the flip side of "inconveniencing" Maria by asking her to come early some days was that I didn't have to inconvenience Littles on those days by waking her up to go to daycare. Oftentimes, on the days when Maria arrived at 7:30 AM, Littles was just waking up as she arrived.

Cost
We paid about the same for Maria as we would have paid at a daycare center -- and much less than we would have paid for a dedicated nanny. Yet we got a much lower caregiver to child ratio and greater convenience.

Cleaning
We paid Maria $35 extra each week, and she cleaned up as the girls napped. This was a nice little side benefit, and far cheaper than a cleaning service. She also did things that our old cleaning service didn't do, such as putting away clean dishes and folding Littles' clothes.

Conclusions
We really lucked out with our nanny share. As inexperienced parents, we didn't even know what questions to ask in our interview with Maria. But we went with our gut, and ended up finding a wonderful situation for Littles. It wasn't perfect, to be sure, but Littles was safe and very loved, and that's all a parent can ask for.