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In a fascinating essay on Motherlode called “My Nanny, Myself,” a working mom explores her relationship with her daughter’s nanny. They seem very different: a white lawyer from New York and a Latina mom from El Salvador. But J., the anonymous lawyer who penned this piece, feels they’re not so different after all.
A single mom, she has to leave her baby with a nanny all day so that she can go to her job at a law firm. The nanny herself knows a thing or two about leaving kids for work: she left her son behind in El Salvador when she came to the States to work, and did not see him for 8 years.
To J., these experiences make them more alike than different: just two women who have to be apart from their kids more than they’d like to earn a living.
While there’s a lot of moving, thoughtful introspection here, I’m having a hard time sympathizing with a mom who sees her long days at the office as at all akin to being forced to emigrate to another country without your child in order to find work to feed him.
New York’s nannies may soon enjoy the labor rights other employees take for granted. Both halves of New York’s legislature have approved a bill to extend basic workplace protections to domestic workers. The governor is expected to sign a reconciled version of the bill soon.
This measure will affect about 200,000 workers in the New York metro area. That’s a lot of people getting new labor rights. Will it impact someone in your home?
Sandra Bullock’s estranged husband Jesse James has been in the news for months, ever since his cheating scandal broke. In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Nightline this week, he blamed his infidelity on the abuse he received as a child. After a stint in rehab, he came out saying, “I grew up with a huge amount of shame and fear and abandonment on my shoulders from a very young age and I think, you know, the way my mind rationalized [cheating], ‘Well, you know, I might as well do whatever I can to like run her off cause she is going to find out what I am anyway and leave me anyway.’”
Vicki Mabrey countered that many people who were abused as children go on to be faithful adults. So is it that there are real excuses for cheating, or do men who cheat need an excuse? British psychiatrist Dennis Friedman, in his book The Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do The Things We Do, thinks that men who were raised by nannies have a natural instinct to cheat. He believes that being cared for by more than one woman as a child introduces men “to the concept of the other woman.” Continue reading »
A British psychiatrist and author says that moms who employ nannies are setting their sons up for a life of secret trysts, office hook-ups and embarrassing voicemails left for women with funny names.
Boys who are cared for by nannies, Dr. Dennis Friedmans says, are at a greater risk for becoming serial womanizers. Continue reading »
Their first novel blew the lid open on the world of the Park Avenue parent and the nanny who actually raises their kids. Now the authors of the Nanny Diaries are back with take two – Nanny Returns.
Twelve years and one marriage later, this Nan dishes up a reminder that the people who raised those kids don’t forget them. Continue reading »
What’s the new trendy accessory for metropolitan moms? Not the $800 stroller, not the Gucci diaper bag, it’s the nanny…the Tibetan nanny that is. Continue reading »
I have never been a “real” nanny–one who works full or even part-time over the long haul of a family’s life with small children. I have never employed such a nanny either. But having both been a semi-regular baby sitter and having employed several of same since I started working part-time when my first child was about a year old, I am just connected enough to the industry to appreciate the stories of real nannies in Tasha Blaine’s revealing profile of the job, Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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