Hiring a nanny today a lot more complicated than hoping she’ll drop in on an umbrella
Ah, the family nanny.
Just the word evokes visions of kindly, somewhat phony baloney women with pinned-up hair who sing silly songs with made-up multi-syllabic words, who levitate with umbrellas and who call the children they look after by pet names like “guvnah.”
Ah, but today’s nanny is no Mary Poppins.
Today’s nanny, officially termed a private household worker by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a bather, a dresser, a feeder. A supervisor of play, a washer of clothes, a preparer of bottles, a changer of diapers. An instructor of foreign language, a child education specialist, a nutritionist.
Moreover, though, today’s nanny is in high demand.
There are no hard statistics as to how many nannies are employed in the United States. Estimates, extrapolated from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2004 data, suggest there are nearly 500,000 child care workers in the U.S., predominantly women, who may be employed as nannies. But hundreds of thousands more, paid under the table, undoubtedly missed that head count.
