Nannies in America : Training and Need Spur the New Movement That Focuses on the Matter of Having Quality Child Care in the Home

All I want is someone who shows up at 7, leaves at 7 or 8, is on call on weekends, is good at cooking, cleaning and taking care of the kids. And never takes a vacation.

--Sarah Weddingham

Texas attorney Sarah Weddingham hit the nail on the head. And about 200 nannies and placement and training specialists at the International Nanny Conference this weekend at Scripps College in Claremont loved it.

What working mother or father, after all, doesn’t dream of a Superperson to keep the home clean, happy and tranquil, while parents claw their way through the hard world outside? It’s a simple enough request for the placement agency, a simple enough expectation for the lucky person employed. At $150 a week, of course; that is, if this person has training, experience and references.

It was easy enough to define the issues at the nanny conference: the image and the unavailability of the American nanny and what that has to say about America’s social policy for children.

The answers were pretty clear too: comprehensive training and a heavy-duty campaign to educate the public (among them possibly the nannies themselves) that a nanny is neither an elitist commodity found in wealthy households nor a glorified baby sitter--but a professional. And, perhaps, national competency standards like those in Great Britain, where two years of instruction, a formal written exam and minimum hours of hands-on experience are required before certification by a National Nursery Assn. Board.

Most conferees were convinced that the fact they were gathering and organizing indicated something big was happening. Or as Weddingham, founder of the Center for Leadership and Life Skills, said in her keynote address:

“The changes that are taking place in society, the prevalance of the two-income family and the single-parent family, has created a tremendous need for the services you are providing. You are here at the birth of an idea. And it’s tremendously exciting.”

Deborah Davis, editor and publisher of the National Nanny Newsletter and elected Saturday night as the first president of the National Assn. for Nannies, referred to that idea as “the American Nanny Movement.”

It’s a movement so young, said Davis, who teaches early childhood education and child development at Cal State Los Angeles and the Claremont Graduate School, “that old-timers in the field of training and placing nannies have only been around for three or four years. And even in that period, there have been tremendous changes.”

So young is the movement too that no one seems happy with the name. Nanny--it just doesn’t do it. The people who would be nannies think it’s a diminishing term, Davis said, and those who would hire one think it’s elitist.

But even as preferred terms were bandied, at least one placement-training specialist thought the question moot: “You can hate it or love it,” she said, “but one thing’s for sure, the word nanny put us on the map.”

And now, semantics. Definitions come from June Art, who since 1967 has run a Beverly Hills placement agency specializing in professional domestics:

--”First, there is the baby nurse. She’s a trained nurse who for up to three or six months provides round-the-clock care for the newborn baby.

--”Now comes the nanny, she takes the infant through preschool. She has been trained in everything from child psychology to arts and crafts and child development. She works on a one-to-one basis with the child. She can live in the home or not. Either way, she should not be doing housework nor should she be reporting to any other member of the staff other than the parents. Because she spends so much time with the child, the nanny becomes a surrogate mother. But she has to be careful not to supplant the actual mother.”

--”Now, the au pair is a young woman with a little exposure to children, maybe through her own brothers and sisters or by baby-sitting, who visits this country to be social and have a good time. She comes into the home and does a little of this, a little of that. She goes out every evening. It’s like having another member of the family.”

--”The mother’s helper is incapable of handling complete supervision, works under direction and is an adjunct to the mother.”

Later, Art added: “When I talk with people who are looking for child care in their home, I spend about one-third of the time trying to educate the family.

“And what I always ask them is: “Would you take your Rolls-Royce to a Honda mechanic?”

Newsletter publisher Davis comments: “The nanny movement has really risen in the last three years from consumer demand, from people saying: ‘I don’t like what’s happening in my child’s day care.’ For nursery schools are rare now. The child is there from maybe 6 to 6 in a place where the mother has no control. And the reality of the situation is, this country has no social policy for children. There are no standards. We’re 50 years behind. That’s one of the most shocking things I think you can say.”

Ronald Oldenberg, a Honolulu-based attorney specializing in immigration law, was the bearer of bad news, but at least one-third of the conferees wanted to hear it.

They crowded into a classroom meant for 40, leaned against walls and sat on the floor when the chairs all filled and interrupted with so many questions that half of Oldenberg’s presentation was shortchanged.

Oldenberg’s subject: the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which, he reported, makes it criminal to hire anyone who is in the country illegally and requires all employers--including the homemaker--to verify an employee’s status and maintain the records for three years.

Lots of groans as Oldenberg explained the mechanics of the act. It all sounded complicated and confusing. It was also a good adjunct for Linda Kelley, consultant to Outrigger Hotels of Honolulu, who’d conducted an earlier workshop describing “My Search for the Perfect Nanny.”

Oldenberg has been Kelley’s attorney during her two-year effort to bring a British nanny to her home in Hawaii.

Hard to Find

The Kelleys’ application to bring the nanny to the United States was denied on the grounds that it was felt there were qualified American workers for the job. Kelley said she continued to contact American domestic-placement agencies, but none could find a two-year trained nanny who was willing to relocate to Hawaii. Many didn’t even respond to her request, she added.

“It’s currently a very bewildering situation for the nanny employer in the United States,” Kelley said, “because there is no reliable way for the employer to really know what he or she is getting when finding an American-trained Nanny. This is due to the wide variety of nanny training available . . . , the different and invariably too short training periods and the unestablished record of performance of the schools doing the training.”

In 1985, there were 12 accredited nanny schools in the United States, only one of which requires as much as a year of training. There were 600 nanny graduates from these schools, although many more were graduated from shorter and non-accredited programs.

Lingering over Friday’s lunch, the nannies admitted that it’s a nanny’s market, that their talents are in great demand. Still there they sat discussing issues they wanted to raise the next day at Eva Harkness’ workshop, “From the Trenches.”

Basically, said Glendale nanny Jennifer Palmer: “You’ve got to decide right from the beginning what you will take and what you won’t.”

Otherwise, well, that’s how problems get started and how you get trapped: like with long hours, sometimes two weeks without a day off. Or taking care of five preschool children and still being expected to dust and vacuum in any spare time.

Need to Network

What they need, Palmer and Colleen Fordrey, a nanny from San Diego agreed, is to network, just to talk with someone else in the same business. And they need training. A quality nanny doesn’t just walk off the street; training is needed in CPR, assertiveness, family dynamics, water safety. And, they need the time off to take that training.

Harkness, who for the last four years has alternated between being a nanny and administering a training program for nannies at Grossmont College in El Cajon, said the issues all came down to one thing: “Respect--for the profession as a whole, between the employee and the employer and self-respect. Self-respect, well, it came out in that workshop. Self-respect is one of the guidelines to being a successful nanny.”

Davis, closing her workshop: “My advice to you people who do the placement is: Court the nannies. We need to create an image that will draw young women to meet the need.”