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Rebecca :
Fran, I found your book The ABC's of Hiring a Nanny; How to Find a Nanny Without Losing Your Mind a thorough guide to the ins & outs in the search for this important addition to a family.
After I'd emigrated from England in the 1960s & was a very lonely, lowly secretary living at the YWCA, I got a call from a sister of a sister of someone I'd met at my brother's wedding in Ohio who offered me a job as a live-in nanny (that's what they called it) to their 4 children under the age of 10.
I got room (it was the ironing room & I was expected to do the family's laundry) & board (what & when the family ate - helping their cook with meals) & once I'd packed the kids off to school, I would dash to my 9-5er.
It was, actually, just what I needed - apart from getting a ghastly case of The Mumps at the age of 23 - family life & domestic security while new to the country. I even got to travel by train with the family to Colorado during ski season, all expenses paid. Was I really a nanny or an “au pair”? What are the differences?
Fran :
In all senses of the word & occupation, you were not an au pair. An au pair is an individual that is allowed to come into this country under a special visa for a stay for 13 months: 12 working for a family & the final one to tour the country at her leisure. Once the visa runs out at the end of the contract the au pair no longer has the right to live &/or work here & becomes an illegal alien. She cannot become a citizen without leaving the country & returning under another visa.
The au pair stipend is now $250 a week, way below the nanny wage in many parts of the country. There are five au pair agencies in the U.S. to which the parents pay huge fees. Often the fee & the stipend end up being ¾ of what a couple would pay a nanny, without the tax burden. It clearly states in the au pair agreements that children are not to be left in the full-time care of an au pair. Louise Woodward was an au pair who cared for her charges full time. By the end of that trial I was very tired of hearing about the so-called “nanny trial.” When nannies are in the news it is generally bad news or about an employer who didn't play by the rules.
You were a nanny, however, nannies today have much higher salaries, better quarters, better hours & their household duties are strictly limited to the children. If you take a look at some of the agency & nanny websites on www.abcnanny.com you will be overwhelmed by the salary range & specific duties of nannies & the perks, such as a car.
Being a nanny is a full time job & you would never be able to have a 9-to-5er. I made twice as much as a nanny plus room & board, than I did in many of my private sector jobs.
Rebecca :
Nowadays, it is very different - I didn't know CPR or any medical skills, I simply had a good way with kids & an affinity with an orderly life. What are the major pitfalls for parents looking for a nanny?
Fran :
One of the biggest pitfalls is relying totally on the nanny placement agency to investigate your applicant & present true information to you. Regardless of the agency information, parents must interview the candidate & conduct a thorough background search.
My first child was born in 1960 & I learned many safety & first aid procedures first hand by raising my children. I took CPR in high school as part of a lifesaving course in swimming. While I have taken CPR & infant CPR several times over the years, I have never had to use it. By using things I learned in grade school & acting fast, however, I was able to react to a life-threatening incident involving a 2 year old who pulled a barbecue grill down on himself. It is vital that a nanny should have a headstart with CPR & first aid training. She should be able to produce any certificates she boasts of & perform any skills she claims - such as swimming.
Rebecca :
In your chapter on The Needs Assessment you ask a lot of questions to help parents figure out exactly what their needs are, is hiring a nanny really only for the rich?
Fran :
The Needs Assessment helps the parents determine what responsibilities & interaction they want with the nanny during & after hours. I cooked but I love to cook although it was not part of the job.
Hiring a nanny is not just for the rich especially as the economies in this country vary so much. In New York a family income of $250,000 a year is not even upper-middle class. Of course in Ohio it's a fortune.
The emergence of the American Nanny, because a woman wants to break the glass ceiling or provide a better standard of living for her family, has created a market for nannies way beyond the wealthy & celebrity.
The objective of The Needs Assessment is to give parents an opportunity to look at what they need & want. It is a tool for designing a very individual personal job description. People often hire a nanny before they determine what they need & that can make life very difficult for everyone.
The questions in the personality profile come from real life observations. I created a survey for parents & nannies when I decided to write a book. This survey revealed a lot about the lack of knowledge of the first months of life on the part of both nannies & parents. Several young nannies said they thought SIDS was a rock group. The Needs Assessment questions are designed to help parent employers to write the plan & dictate the process from the beginning. It contains useful material for developing the interview questions, doing reference checks & designing documents.
Rebecca :
How do parents find nannies? Are there agencies?
Fran :
Traditionally nannies were found though nanny placement agencies only. As the market developed & the demand became much greater than the supply, parent employers began doing independent searches.
There are over 500 agencies in the US. www.abcnanny.com is the appendix to the book & offers a directory to agencies & nanny training schools. Only one of my positions was secured outside of an agency. I ran an ad & the response was overwhelming: 150 responses in 3-days!
Section Two deals with hiring an agency or doing an independent search. The client/agency agreement in the back of the book gives you an indication of some of the problems that arise if you do not investigate the agency.
Rebecca :
Section Four: Into the Pool and Don't Drown is all about The Interview Process & you walk us through many facets to interviewing applicants. What should parents pay particular attention to, what are some Red Flags?
Fran :
If you carefully screen the candidates based on their application & documentation, we suggest you will have good material for the interview. It is vital you verify all information regarding employment, residences, immigrant status, education & driving record. Check the information during the interview against the documents & check the reference answers against all previous information. Be sure you have a home of record. If a residence, employment or reference cannot be verified, do not count it in your final evaluation.
Red flags: one-sided interviews, slow return of documents, inability to check references particularly letters of reference.
If you have to pull information out of a candidate it could imply she is as ill- prepared for the position as she is for the interview.
When you are interviewing an agency candidate it is important to go over what the agency has presented at the very beginning of the interview. An agency sent me out on an interview where the client wanted to interview at least five applicants. The agency had promised the job to their first candidate. I went to that interview with an asking salary advised by the agency. The family was very frank with me, they felt that I was the better candidate but they could not afford the salary the agency had advised me to ask for. I was furious. The family realized after interviewing the next candidate what the agency was doing. They offered me the job, but I had found another one already.
Parents need to pay attention to the demeanor of the candidate. Do the applicant's communication skills back up her profile on paper?
Rebecca :
While reading a biography of Queen Elizabeth's father, the author noted that the nanny to the two royal sons was a lifetime employee. Those days, when nannies stayed with families forever are long gone - why?
Fran :
It is very difficult to compare the American Nanny, or the modern day nanny to the nanny of Royalty. Often needs change & there are many kinds of nannies: live-ins; live-outs; part-time; full-time; occasional etc. Nannies in many parts of the country work for several years, often until the need for a nanny is replaced by the need for a short after-school commitment, until the parents come home. America families often move & nannies find they can not move with them.
Most initial contracts are for a year. Agencies offer guarantees for 90 days & feel they have no obligation to the family once those 90 days are completed.
Often families change nannies because the cost of the same nanny year after year becomes a problem with raises & benefits that price her out of their range.
The American nanny is not a third parent, nor a parent replacement.
Rebecca :
Hiring a nanny is not like hiring a babysitter, what responsibilities do parents take on when they employ a nanny?
Fran :
The two most important are; paying on the books & hiring a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant, everything else comes from this. Incidentally I feel that hiring a babysitter should entail the same background investigation as a nanny whether the sitter is a friend of a friend, a teenage neighbor or a classified respondent.
Citizenship verification is the responsibility of the parent employer & not the agency. Section Six outlines the many forms & publications needed when employing a nanny or any household employee for that matter. www.abcnanny.com allows the parent employer to download the forms in the privacy of their home 24 hours a day. The agency/client agreement in the book outlines the many disclaimers on agency applications. There are some questions about the social behavior of nannies, like drinking under age, driving while intoxicated etc. The family that does not insure the automobile the nanny drives on duty & off can be held liable for damages if the uninsured driver gets into an accident.
All states require workers compensation. Families that do not provide this can be charged with negligence if an accident occurs on their property. Even illegal aliens have successfully sued parent employers for damages through workers compensation. In a nutshell, pay on the books, make a legal hire, insure drivers & buy workers compensation.
Rebecca :
What has been the funniest or worst story you ever heard about hiring a nanny?
Fran :
When I decided to write a handbook for hiring that parallels nanny hire to private sector hire, I realized that stories were not appropriate. Instead every single question in the Needs Assessment, every statement & observation are backed-up by my research into the issues surrounding childcare & my personal experiences.
Shortly after I started my book, several books were published about hiring nannies. Those books should have been best sellers; they were not, basically because they were more anecdotal than factual.
People hiring nannies need to know what to do & what not to do. Many of those books, like How to Hire a Nanny by Elaine Pelletier was based on one experience, the job search & hire of her nanny in Colorado.
ABC's covers many different perspectives, one of which includes understanding the various economies in the country & its prerequisites. Three murders of innocent babies on the east coast during my ten year tenure are the rare horror stories but I met several nannies through play dates that openly admitted they had falsified documents to get their jobs.
One lovely nanny who worked full-time for a prominent New York family was leaving after four years. This was in 1991 & she made $525 a week, had an apartment in the city & beautiful quarters in the guesthouse on their vacation property.
I was there on temporary assignment assisting the major domo at the vacation home, during the transition of her leaving. I also provided some childcare & often the nanny invited me to read with them; I am a story lady from way back & with my kids, I always acted out the stories as a reading tool. In giving the nanny parts in the books I quickly discovered she could barely read.
One of her duties was to tutor the 12-year-old boy with learning disabilities. He also had severe asthma & the nanny was responsible for giving & charting his medication. When I asked about her reading she was not insulted, instead she asked me to help her. She told me that her sister had taken her driver's test for her & she had falsified her educational background. She had also stated she knew CPR & had a Certified Lifesaving certificate: she could not swim. Background searches are crucial.
I have a two-year secretarial certificate from a business school; I also have an associate's degree as a paralegal. I have 5 children & 9 grandchildren & have lived in 2 foreign countries & several states. One agency that sent me out on an interview changed my application information by combining my experience & education to give me a degree in early childhood development. I became suspicious about the questions the employer was asking me. I am very proud of my achievements, but I am who I am & I don't need to present false information.
The funniest story I have is when I was leaving a position I offered to try out the two final candidates for a day. The first young lady was very nice but she did not realize she did not have to get in the tub to bathe the baby.
I worked for wonderful people that treated me very well, I have hundreds of warm & funny stories but The ABC's of Hiring a Nanny is a handbook so I leave the stories to my personal memories.
Rebecca :
The ABC's comes with a CD - why?
Fran :
The CD is crucial to the book. The ABC's of Hiring a Nanny forms on the CD are ready for filling out & printing whenever the parent employer needs them.
Rebecca :
What are your next projects & do you have any PR appearances you'd like to mention?
Fran :
We are preparing a proposal to send to Congress to change the language in the IRS Household Employer regulations.
We also want to propose that the parent employer be entitled to deduct the employers social security contribution like self employed individuals do.
I give talks at local libraries & do presentations at bookstores. I hope to do about 20 of these in the summer on the East Coast.
I'm a Nanny; not a Ninny a book, will be published at the end of 2001.
We are developing our site into a portal for parents looking for childcare.
We are looking at projects concerning step-parenting & elder care that can be presented in the same format.
Thank you, Rebecca, for giving me so much space! Incidentally ABC's was the best-selling nanny book of 2000 on Amazon.Com. If you check some of Fran's Favorites on our site you will get an idea of just how big the nanny industry is & how needed is this book!
Rebecca :
You're welcome, Fran. Taking care of our children is the #1 job in our lives & The ABC's of Hiring a Nanny is a vital tool for any parent - it gives us so many ideas about safe & competent at-home childcare & the Law.
(Published March 11, 2001)
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