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July 29th, 2010

Sitter Soiree, hosted by Nannies On the Go, is an event held in a relaxed setting where parents can meet childcare specialists. At the event, parents are provided with a detailed book, including all the contact information, resumes, and profiles of each candidate. Chocolate Secrets will provide champagne, cheese and exceptional chocolates throughout the evening.

A Sitter Soiree is a perfect event for parents to meet sitters, after school nannies, newborn specialists as well as full time Nannies. These are all professional, pre-screened candidates who can be hired on the spot without you paying any placement fees!

Seating is limited, so reserve early!

Many are concerned with the recent news regarding the economy. So concerned that parents who once were able to stay at home with the children are now electing to go back into the workplace. It has created a new dynamic within families. We are seeing many stay at home parents go back to work for at least part-time positions to supplement the family fiannces.With both parents working, there is an increased demand for finding safe and qualified childcare in the home.

Hiring a Nanny is a critical choice. Most parents are very concerned about who they bring into their home to care for their most important assets, the children.

These are some qualities each parent should be looking for when hiring a caregiver for your family. Watch out for the Red Flags!

Qualities:

Interest: Make sure the candidate shows genuine interest in the child.  Dos he/she try to make your child comfortable with conversation? Do they make an effort to engage the child? Do they greet and say “good-bye” to the children as well as the parents?

Money: While a salary is very important to all of us, the Nanny does not need to lead the conversation with her desired compensation. Her genuine interest should be the care of the child. The last thing a family needs is a Nanny that is taking care of their child solely for the purpose of a paycheck.

Ease with children: Your nanny should never seem uneasy or anxious around children. They should look excited and have an easy way to communicate. If your Nanny seems afraid to hold your baby..beware! This is a red flag.

Qualified experience:  The candidate should have experience working with children that are similar in age to the children in your family. Be sure to ask why she left her last job.  If you find the candidate has jumped from family to family each year, this should be a red flag.

Looks you straight the eye: A good deal can be learned in the first 10 minutes of an interview. Many times we make judgments based on body language as much as the content of the conversation. Maintaining good eye contact demonstrates respect and interest. If they are unable to hold a gaze it can make you wonder about self esteem and honesty issues.

Respect: Families with children live busy lives loaded with challenges. All families are different and the Nanny must respect and understand the rules of each household.

Parents create schedules and systems because they believe it is best for the children. Some caregivers who have their own children may raise their children differently and not share the same values. Make sure your Nanny is willing to follow your rules and keep her beliefs at home. After all, these are your children!

While these represent some of the qualities you should be looking for, intuition still plays a vital role. Don’t dismiss those twinges or doubts you may feel. They can be completely valid. The chemistry between your family and the Nanny can be the deciding factor!

When a child has a runny nose but is nonetheless perky, most parents would ship him off to school or day care. But day care directors would send that kid home about 60 percent of the time, despite the fact that guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics say otherwise.

The day care exclusion guidelines make clear that in most cases, there’s no point in keeping kids home once they’re symptomatic: Children generally spread germs for a few days before signs of colds or other bugs appear. That’s something directors of child care centers are supposed to be up to speed on. Apparently many are not. The new survey, published online in Pediatrics, found that 57 percent of the 307 day care center directors who responded would exclude children from day care with symptoms allowed under the medical guidelines. For instance:

• 8 percent would exclude children with a cold.
• 60 percent exclude children with conjuncitivitis (pinkeye).
• 65 percent exclude children with an upset stomach or mild diarrhea.
• 67 percent exclude children with a mild fever and no other symptoms.
• 84 percent exclude children with ringworm of the scalp, a fungal infection.

Yep, your child can go to day care with all those symptoms, according to the pediatricians. “There’s a lot of phobia regarding pinkeye and colds,” which isn’t justified, says study lead author Andrew Hashikawa, a pediatrician at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “A lot of these illnesses spread before there are symptoms.” As a result, he says, the doctors’ guidelines have been shifting away from having parents quarantine kids with mild symptoms. But waving this new study in front of a day care director who is booting out your kid will probably not do much good. Day care directors need better education on the guidelines, he says, and few states offer them training in dealing with contagious illnesses.

Although the stay-or-go verdict is ultimately up to the day care director, the AAP suggests these three tests for deciding if your child is well enough to attend. They put your child’s interests first, just like you do:

1. Does the child’s illness keep him or her from comfortably taking part in activities?
2. Does the sick child need more care than the staff can give without affecting the health and safety of other children?

If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” then it’s time for a sick day. (I’m writing this at the dining room table while my 6-year-old is home sick, so I feel your pain.)

The third question is trickier:

1. Could other children get sick from being near your child?

The pediatrician’s guidelines say children should stay home with an oral fever of 101 degrees or more, and/or if they have a long list of contagious diseases like measles, mumps, and chickenpox. Children with strep throat should stay home for 24 hours after they’ve started antibiotics. (If my daughter’s strep test is positive, she’ll have to miss the school field trip to the zoo tomorrow, poor thing.) You can find the whole list of illnesses that should keep a child at home at the AAP’s website HealthyChildCare.org.

Ultimately, it’s a judgment call. We’ve all sent kids to day care or school hoping they’d be OK, only to have to come pick them up an hour later. But if more day care centers got up to speed on the reality of kids and germs, perhaps there would be fewer days of work lost for parents, and more days for children to have fun with their friends at day care. Hashikawa urges parents to talk to their center’s director about exclusion policies to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

OurGreatCity.com has chosen Nannies on the Go as Southlake’s Business of the Month for March 2010!  This is a great accomplishment for Nannies on the Go and we are greatful to Our Great City for choosing Nannies on the Go to represent Southlake, TX!!

Nannies on the Go provides solutions quickly… that is our commitment at Nannies On The Go to the multitude of families we serve.  We know how very busy life is for our families and we also know that selective families need safe, qualified childcare with nurturing providers. We secure the highest quality of applicants in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex and take pleasure in providing a unique sevice to all families.

Addtionally, we would like to thank Skipping Stone Studio for taking the professional photos of our team and our families and nannies!

For more information about our services, please visit Nannies on the Go.

Sitter Soiree at Baby Bliss in Soutlake

Our Sitter Soiree held at Baby Bliss in Southlake was a huge success!  Thank you to all who came to meet our wonderful group of nannies.

A Sitter Soiree is an event where a parent and several candidates can meet in a relaxed, comfortable environment and conduct impromptu interviews face to face. The Sitter Soiree offers a detailed book for each parent to use as a guide in the process of finding the perfect nanny or sitter.

Sitter Soiree at Baby Bliss- Feb. 23

Nannies on the Go was founded in 2005 and has experienced an influx of calls over the past two years due to mothers returning to the workplace. For this reason, Nannies on the Go has launched The Sitter Soiree event in an effort to help all families, with varying incomes, find the perfect match for their family needs.

For more information or to register for a Sitter Soiree, please visit http://www.nanniesonthego.net/ or call 817-442-0225.

Please meet the people who make Nannies on the Go possible:

Pictured from left to right: Jennifer, Sharon (owner) and Krissy

It’s a fact. Employees with children miss work.

One study by Bright Horizons Child Care Trends (2002) shows that among parents, 45% miss at least one day of work every six months due to child care issues, and 65% are late to work or leave work early due to childcare issues an average of 7.5 times in six months. Other studies show that working parents with day care and elementary school children miss up to 13 days per year because of breakdowns in childcare arrangements.

What’s more, today’s global economy finds families moving from city to city without immediate resources or family within their new communities. When both parents work, little time is left for researching childcare services and finding good tutors.

At Nannies On the Go and Tutors on the Go, locally owned and operated by Purple Palm Marketing, we can help your employees’ secure trustworthy, reliable childcare and back-up care so that they are more productive employees for you. By working with us, you can offer valuable employees one more benefit that can translate to fewer absences and increased loyalty, plus drive down the cost of absenteeism and turnover.

Our Nannies on the Go services can help when employees are challenged by:

1. Relocating to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and need help securing reliable child care
2. Failing child care arrangements and would prefer in-home care
3. A regular caregiver who is ill or on vacation
4. An ill child who requires care at home
5. A school or childcare center that is closed for holidays

Our placement services offer top-notch, reliable providers dedicated to meeting individual family needs. We conduct detailed background checks and interviews with each candidate, acquiring only the best in the care-giving and tutorial fields.

To learn more about what we can do for your business, please call us at 817-442-0225 or visit our website.

Being a nanny is a career choice created in a grey zone.

There are as many different childcare positions as there are childcare workers. Roles (and rates of pay) can range from, first time supervised babysitter to Executive Nanny. Titles that get thrown about with abandon can also include Mother’s Helper, Au Pair, Nursery/Maternity Nurse, Nanny, Night Nanny, Child minder, Nanny/Personal Assistant, or Nanny/Housekeeper and on and on and on. In North America we seem to flail about defining and redefining the job as each interview presents itself. How confusing!!

So without further adieu lets have a long hard look at what is expected of a “Nanny” and in turn …what a nanny expects!

What is a nanny (usually) responsible for?
1) First and foremost the safety, care and well being of your children.
2) That the house is as clean when she leaves as when she arrived. (This means if you had a huge dinner party and there are mountains of dishes all over…those dishes are not her responsibility. It also means it should not take to two hours to clean up the toys and playdough after she has gone)
Then if time permits… she is responsible for;
3)Children’s Laundry
4) Children’s rooms/tidy/organized/notes left if things are running low
5)Children’s snacks and meals. (Possibly cooking and freezing/labeling baby food)
6)Maintenance, cleaning & care of children’s belongings (highchair, crib, toys, stroller etc.)

* This type of contract would be said to include “only childcare related duties.”

What is generally considered “Light Housekeeping?”
1)Unloading/Loading the dishwasher
2)Occasional family laundry, including folding & putting away.
3)General tidying/straightening
4)Sweeping/light mopping/wiping of kitchen
5)Taking out Garbage/Recycling
6)Refilling water coolers, sugar/salt containers, etc.

What is definitely EXTRA?
1)Vacuuming
2)Dusting
3)Meal Prep for family
4) Errands (mail, groceries, picking up dry cleaning, etc)
5)Ironing
6) Any additional specific tasks (ie; wiping down cupboards, sorting closets etc)

What is usually considered completely off limits?
1)Bathrooms
2)Washing the car
3)Heavy duty cleaning (the oven, inside the fridge, flipping mattresses etc.)

What Every Nanny Wants

A Nanny/Family relationship is intimate and always evolving…it is of utmost importance no matter how close you become with your nanny to always remember that this is her JOB, and to respect that fact.

Nannies also cite families who respect them personally and appreciate the work they do, as being desirable employers. Keep in mind that you should not only respect the nanny, and the job, but also the written contract that has been negotiated. Families who continually to add more and more jobs onto an already negotiated contract are likely to find themselves out a nanny…and quickly. This is one of the most common reasons nannies give for quitting or choosing not to renegotiate a contract with a family.

PAY RATES

Live out nannies can make anywhere from $10-$35 an hour….seriously. This is a pretty broad range.
What factors affect how much a nanny should make?
Have a look at the following variables;
1) How many children?
2) Ages of the children?
3)How much experience/training/education the nanny has.
4) Does the nanny drive?
5)Availability/Flexibility
6) Additional Tasks (see list at top)
7) Type of contract…Part Time/Full Time/Nanny Share …Independant contractor or Employee?
8)How badly the family wants that particular nanny.
9)Where you live
10) Are there any extra perks/bonuses being offered (use of a car, a trip home paid for, paid vacation with the family)

*To read more, please click here.

THE mother was annoyed with her nanny, and she went on the Web to vent. The nanny had fed the children a casserole that the mother had intended to serve for dinner. “Now I have to come up with something else,” she wrote on a popular site for mothers, exasperation radiating from the computer screen.

She might have been looking for sympathy, but she didn’t get much. Responses from other mothers to her query about whether they, too, would be irritated ranged from “If you didn’t tell her it was supposed to be for dinner, there’s no grounds for being annoyed” to “You’re a loon.”

But one really got to the heart of the matter: “A lot of you nanny employers are really bad at employer-employee communications.”

It’s true. Pop culture — stoked by the movie and the best-selling novel “The Nanny Diaries” and now by the newly published sequel, “Nanny Returns” — tends to paint mothers who employ nannies as over-entitled she-devils who pepper their hapless employees with unreasonable orders and micromanage them to the brink of nervous breakdowns. But the reality is different and more curious.

Many mothers who employ nannies are actually overstretched working women, a number of whom (contrary to their professional personas) suffer from an inability to clearly express their expectations and demands to the people they pay to care for their children. The result is a peculiar passive-aggressive form of communication, a less-than-ideal dynamic between worker and boss.

The mother, at times beset by guilt, a touch of intimidation or feelings of her own maternal inadequacy, fails to articulate what she wants from the nanny — and then complains to friends, her spouse or an Internet message board when she doesn’t get it. (The father in many cases steers clear of the whole relationship.)

Lisa Spiegel, a director of Soho Parenting, a family counseling center in Manhattan that tends to cater to urban professionals, witnesses such communication issues all the time. “I’ve seen C.E.O.’s, heads of companies, professors,” she said. “These are women who are very successful in work relationships, but the idea of talking to their baby sitter about unloading the dishwasher will give them cramps for a week.”

Some nascent efforts are beginning to emerge to address this puzzling communication gap. One approach seeks to empower the nanny to take the initiative and draw out the mother on her needs and wants. “The communication needs to be there, and if it’s not being initiated by the parents, it has to be initiated by the nanny,” said Lora Brawley, who lives outside Seattle and is the president of the National Association for Nanny Care, a nonprofit educational organization that aims to promote excellence in nanny care.

A Family Member, Up to a Point

IT’S all about saying what you mean.

While some parents have no trouble telling the caretakers who look after their children what to do, many others find it difficult to act like a boss to someone who can sometimes seem more like a member of the family than an employee.

“We find written communication helps,” said Sheilagh Roth, the executive director of the English Nanny and Governess School outside Cleveland, which has been in business for 25 years.

That can mean leaving a list of tasks for the day, but ideally it means drafting a written contract — or at least a detailed job description — explicitly stating the duties of the position, as well as the family’s obligations regarding vacation time, overtime, holidays and other basic matters that an employee needs to know. Ms. Roth requires a written contract when she places nannies with families.

Both she and Lisa Spiegel, a director of Soho Parenting, a family counseling center in Manhattan, advise scheduling weekly meetings between mother (or father) and nanny. They should be casual — just a chance to exchange observations and suggestions — but they should be at the same time every week so that each party knows to expect them. That way, no one has to stew about whether and when to bring up a touchy issue, because it can always be raised at the weekly session.

Ms. Spiegel said that it’s important for families to remember that their nanny is an employee and not a family member, no matter how much they love the person.

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