How has a nanny share worked for you?
2 Answers
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We share a nanny both with a family who has older kids, and a family with one same-age kid.
Pros:
- Save costs. I belive the going rate for a good, experienced nanny in our area is $15-20/hr, but when we share, we reduce our portion to a little more than half or 2/3 of that rate (depending in our case on who we're sharing with).
- Gain trust. In our case, the family with older kids was posting on our neighborhood list to share the nanny they'd already had for a decade. We met the family, liked them, trusted them, and it was easier then to transfer trust to their nanny when we met her.
- Kids have playmates. Our 3-year-old has a same-age playmate in the other family, which is working out really well. And both of our kids have older boys to look up to, learn from. One of the older boys (the younger of two) enjoys being a big brother to my son. He's teaching my 4-year-old to play catch. And of course, my son LOVES learning from him, playing with him.
- Heads up on what's ahead / friends in the community. By sharing with older kids, more experienced parents (and nanny!), we get to see what's ahead - what elementary school looks like, what decisions are coming, what good activities/parks are in our area.
Cons:
- Control and flexibility. Because we share we can't just ask our nanny to be where we want, when we want. There are some hours of the day when she needs to be with the older kids, taking them to activities, and our children need to be riding around in the car with her. We don't always know where they'll be at pickup because we don't have total insight into the other family's schedule - but we and the nanny all have cellphones, so it's not a big deal. At the beginning of the year, or when changes occur, the three families try to drop each other an email with a heads up. Otherwise our nanny just lets us know what we need to know when something comes up.
- No other cons really - it's an awesome arrangement for us!
What are you concerned about? Good luck!
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We've had different nanny shares before, mostly when our kids were too young to attend school but we wanted them to socialize. The lower cost was an added benefit. We alternated location (our house & theirs). It was a little more complicated to coordinate but we felt it was worth it.
Just choose carefully the family you're sharing with and make sure you talk to the nanny to make sure she's not overextended. When she was our nanny we were sharing with others, it was easier to have more control. When she was regularly a nanny for both families separately, it was harder for us to control the environment in the other household. When coming to our house, they would only bring the one child who was age appropriate to play with our child. When we discovered our nanny was being left with all 5 of their kids, including infant twins (ours made 6), we decided to stop doing shares there.
