June 16, 2005

Whose Nanny?

It's the happy shiny flipside of passive-aggressively treating your nanny like a housekeeper: "affluent parents facing growing demands on their time" are expanding the nanny's portfolio to include managing their own travel and events planning, remodeling, even putting the slides together for their presentations.

Of course, if you have to ask how much it costs... ah, what the hey. Judging by the size of the rock on that Palo Alto nanny's finger, the $75,000 salary mentioned in the article is just where the negotiations start.


Taking Superparents In Hand
[nyt]

4 Comments

Whoa. In addition to five children, this DC ìmotherî has the nanny managing the landscapers, the interior decorators, the chefs that deliver meals for the week, even her childrenís psychologists all while she is divorcing her husband? And you say ìsheís a surrogate meî? Honey. Sounds like you need to spend a little more time at home working on your marriage and parenting your kids and less time at the office. She is not a "superparent." The woman she hired is parenting. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I AM a working DC mother with a nanny and I ask her to do nothing more than love and care for my child which she does very well.)

That is an amazing display of consumerism as a religion. When you earn enough to pay 75,000 a year for a nanny, your emphasize is not on your children's lifes'. You are essentially paying somebody to be a parent in your stead. It's not the same thing if you are struggling to bring home a paycheck and have no choice but to put your kid(s) in day-care. I understand and sympathize with that situation. But if you have a full-time nanny at that income level, then you could probably afford to cut back a bit and invest your time with your children (there's no ROI that can compare to that kind of investment).

These are just my personal thoughts. A bit of background so you know where I am coming from. My wife and I were married in August 2004 and our son was born in Dec 2004. I am 21 years old. I hold an IT career position at an international defense company in Washington, DC. I make enough that my wife can be a stay at home mom and we live more than comfortably. I live in an affluent area where I suspect this nanny thing happens more than the average US citizen could fathom. I've seen many of my friends family's torn apart by their dad's/mom's workaholic tendencies.

It's a sad state of affairs.
-dvsDave

Geez, this Gabriel woman is the type of person that made my teeth grind when I lived in DC.
It sounds like the proper term for her is "baby host" not "mother". She has the Nanny meet with her child's psychologist? WTF?
I shudder to think what the kids will be like when they reach adulthood.
Also, no mention of Ms. Alphonse's family, I guess we assume that she doesn't have one, (and how would she have time?) although that is not the case for many nannies, who have to deal with their surrogate kids and "superparents" in the daytime and their own families at night.

$75k? I want to be a (that) nanny. I'm a new dad and I'd love for someone to pay my that much to raise my kid and do all the things around the house that need to be done.

But then again, for $75k would I have to sleep with one of the parents? I'd already be doing everything else.

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