A rare classified ad
Dana and I are searching for a live-in nanny for our two kids, Lily (age 6) and Daniel (age 2). We can offer $750/week. We can also offer a private room with a full bathroom and a beautiful view in our home in central Austin, TX, as well as free food and other amenities. The responsibilities include helping to take the kids to and from school and drive them to various activities, helping to get them ready for school/daycare in the morning and ready for sleep at night, cooking and other housework. We’d ask for no more than 45 hours per week, and could give several days off at a time depending on scheduling constraints.
If interested, please shoot me an email, tell me all about yourself and provide references.
Obviously, feel free to let anyone else know who you think might be interested (but who might not read this blog).
I’m really sorry to be doing this here! We tried on classified sites and didn’t find a good match.
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Comment #1 September 7th, 2019 at 6:27 pm
Interesting fact: I didn’t know what ‘live-in’ nanny meant, so I googled it… and ‘Aaronson Household’ on glassdoor.com appeared as a search result. An uncommon phrase or Google learned about my blog reading habits?
Comment #2 September 7th, 2019 at 6:30 pm
Have you considered an au pair?
There are agencies to help match you up, and you also give someone that wants to see the US a chance to experience your town. Also, you can avoid the sheer craziness of the legal crap you have to go through to legally pay a nanny (since you are now their employer) vs going through an agency (so you pay the agency and the care giver is not your employee).
I had a friend go the “become an employer” route and another go the au pair route. Granted its a very small sample size, but the au pair was way easier to find a good match, and handle the payments.
Comment #3 September 7th, 2019 at 8:26 pm
Peng #2: The issue with the au pair program is that there are all sorts of rules, like for example that an au pair can’t help with cooking the family dinner, that are dealbreakers for us.
Comment #4 September 7th, 2019 at 9:45 pm
Maybe sacrifice a few years of you and/or the mother’s career and look after them yourself?
I did, since my wife had the bigger income at the time
Comment #5 September 7th, 2019 at 10:17 pm
James #4: Believe me that we’re ALREADY sacrificing years of our careers—and it’s not enough.
Comment #6 September 8th, 2019 at 3:57 am
Is this only for US citizens and foreigners who already have a work visa?
Comment #7 September 8th, 2019 at 4:47 am
Anonymous #6: We can’t organize work visas, so unfortunately yes.
Comment #8 September 8th, 2019 at 6:20 am
I’m old enough to remember when Juliet Mills did that on TV, at least in reruns.
Comment #9 September 8th, 2019 at 2:57 pm
Anything about the nanny state? […Sorry! Just couldn’t help it!! ;-)]
–Ajit
Comment #10 September 8th, 2019 at 5:39 pm
Hi Scott, can we assume that the job is open to both men and women ?
Comment #11 September 8th, 2019 at 6:39 pm
Ajit #9: We have several leads, a couple from this post and a couple from elsewhere. We’re going to interview starting tomorrow. In the meantime, anyone else is welcome to apply.
Comment #12 September 8th, 2019 at 6:39 pm
William #10: Yes.
Comment #13 September 9th, 2019 at 5:45 am
where are you headed for this to be
necessary ? Why not take kids with you ?
Or ask grandparents to babysit ? Perfect
opportunity for them to play parenting roles again.
Comment #14 September 9th, 2019 at 7:12 am
mystique #13: [slaps forehead] Oh, of course! The grandparents! Why didn’t that ever occur to us??? Oh wait — are we talking the same grandparents who we extensively relied upon for years, but who also have lives to live thousands of miles away?
Comment #15 September 9th, 2019 at 8:42 am
Scott #13,
“grandparents who we extensively relied upon for years, but who also have lives to live thousands of miles away”
Hey, that is what we do in India when both the parents are working! Had NO CLUE people did the same in the US too. Interesting!
Comment #16 September 9th, 2019 at 10:01 am
Scott – we used the J1 visa program https://j1visa.state.gov/programs/au-pair to bring in au-pairs from Czech Republic so our son would learn Czech. We had good success.
Comment #17 September 9th, 2019 at 12:06 pm
I’ll be very curious if this works. Some thoughts.
1) Is this the wave of the future? Rather than use classified ads just ask on your blog (or perhaps through facebook or some other way that one person can contact a lot of people)
2) In sociology there is a concept: the power of WEAK ties. That is, people that are weakly tied to you (like blog readers) know people and things that you don’t know, where as your close friends (strong ties) might not be as helpful since they know the same people and things that you know.
3) In the future everyone will have a blog or twitter account and at least 15 followers.
Comment #18 September 9th, 2019 at 3:28 pm
I’m totally unqualified to comment on the topic, but the present post reminded me of the following classic (and apparently very controversial) article
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/03/how-serfdom-saved-the-women-s-movement/302892/
Comment #19 September 9th, 2019 at 4:02 pm
My experience with care.com was great. May be you have already tried it.
Comment #20 September 11th, 2019 at 11:10 am
Scott #5
Does this suggest in some way that it’s better career-wise not to have children? How do most of the other professors at your institution arrange for child care?
Comment #21 September 12th, 2019 at 10:57 pm
Daniel #20: It’s clearly better career-wise not to have children. But then, it’s also better child-wise not to have a career (beyond the bare minimum needed to fund the children). Life is tradeoffs.
While it’s not easy for anyone, many academic couples with kids do seem to manage better than we do. I have yet to determine their secret.