Hiring In-home Help

Hillary and his blueberry eyed clone, the B-man.

We have been through quite a change lately. My husband, who has been a stay at home dad for a little over three years, got a very out of home job. He's working 10 hour days, 4 days a week and one of those days is Saturday. This means we need child care 3 days a week and that I am parenting alone, much more than I was.

I researched our child care options - an in-home daycare, a daycare center, preschool with before and after care and a nanny. Initially I figured a nanny would just be way out of our price range, what with paying employer taxes and, well, I just never imagined us as nanny people. Not for any real reason, but just as I never imagined us living in Canada, I didn't see us with a nanny. But I was having a really hard time finding a daycare that allowed us to keep all of our parenting choices in tact. Cloth diapers, for example. Daycare centers do not give a crap (no pun) about the amount of plastic in our landfills from disposable diapers. Also, most places make you pay for the whole week, even if your kids aren't there. Preschool with before and after care turned out to actually be way too expensive and Marlowe was mostly too young for the programs.

It turns out that an in-home nanny for three days a week was really the most cost effective and we get to keep our family values - vegetarian/organic meals, no screen time, daily outside play, cloth diapers, etc... With the help of Care.com, which was really useful and I highly recommend it, we began the search for a nanny in our price range. 

I was a bit overwhelmed by the response to my ad at first. How did I start to whittle down this list? Luckily I have a friend who had a great set of questions for me to use. (She also gave me a sample contract and tons of information on the whole tax thing. I'm happy to share, with her permission, if anyone is in need, just email me.) 

I responded to all of the potential candidates with a short email providing them with our hourly rate, times we needed them and a little bit about us as a family. I work from home, that turned some people off, so it was a good detail to throw out there before we got too far into the game. After a written exchanged I gave them a phone interview and if I still was considering them I brought them in for a short paid trial with the kids. 

I expected it to be a hard process for the obvious reason - these are my kids. I not only want them to be in capable, safe hands, but I want them to be cared for in a manner that I would care for them. I want them to be intellectually stimulated by someone who knows how to have fun and has a deep well of patience. What I didn't expect was to be emotionally involved with the woman who interviewed. 

This job would help them in different ways, pay for food for their kids or help them pay for school or save up for their first apartment. While weighing what was best for my kids first, I have to admit, I thought about how my decision would change their day to day lives. 

In the end, I didn't choose the woman who had a kid, because I decided that being so steeped in her own ways of parenting, which I learned were unlike mine, I didn't feel she could separate from them and treat my kids differently from her own. And while I know she'll find another job, it was hard for me to turn her down for the same reason I decided she wasn't a fit for us, the fact that she had a kid. 

Uncle Ben, from Spiderman, said, with great power comes great responsibility. Our little part time nanny position isn't changing any lives here, but I felt the weight of the power to choose who to give a weekly check to for watching my kids and who to send back to the trenches to look for work again. I like to think I chose wisely. Time will tell.