Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer A Practical Guide for Finding and Achieving the Gold Standard of Care for Your Child By Tammy Gold, LCSW, MSW, LSW, CEC 1 Table of Contents Introduction: How I Became The Nanny Whisperer Part 1: Nanny Whisperer 101 1. Secrets Of A Successful Match: Achieving The Gold Standard Of Care 2. Nannyology: Understanding Nannies and How they Work Part 2: The Gold Standard Hiring Process 3. Who Are You? Doing a Family Needs Assessment 4. Basic Screening: Finding Candidates who Meet Your Requirements 5. Reference Checks: Can this Nanny do Your Job? 6. Interviews: Meet the Candidates and Ask them to Match Your Story 7. Trials: Observe Your Top Candidates in Action Part 3: Working Together as Your Children Grow 8. The Magic of Training: How to Create a Gold Standard Nanny 9. How to Speak Nanny: Communicating to Bring out the Best in Your Child’s Caregiver 10. Troubleshooting: Nanny Whisperer Strategies for Fixing Common Problems 11. “I Love Her, But…”: Moms, Nannies, and the World’s Most Complex Emotional Bond 12. When it’s Not Working: How to Let a Nanny Go Appendix: Family Needs Assessment Form 2 Part 1: Nanny Whisperer 101 3 Introduction Welcome to Secrets of the Nanny Whisperer! My name is Tammy Gold, and today is the day that finding the perfect nanny for your family just got easier. Whether you’re a first-time parent or a mother of five, whether you work seventy hours a week or twenty, hiring someone to help you care for your most precious possession—your child—can be an incredibly daunting task. The good news is that it no longer has to be. You’ve picked up this book, and I’m here to help. As the founder of my own business, Gold Parent Coaching, and a working mother of three, I am intimately familiar with the issues surrounding childcare because I have experienced them first-hand. While my company offers support and advice for parents on all aspects of raising children, my friends call me the “Nanny Whisperer” because I specialize in what I call Nanny-Family Matching—that is, the art (and science!) of finding amazing nannies and matching them with their perfect family. As a working parent, I know just how crucial it is to have someone you trust who can love and nurture your child while you are gone, and as a mom, I understand that it’s not always easy to share the responsibilities of “mothering” with someone else. But I also know from my own experience that a good nanny is one of the greatest gifts that you can ever give to your child. When a nanny situation truly works, it not only makes for a happier child, but also happier parents and stronger marriages. You owe it to yourself and your entire family to set the bar high—and that’s what this book is about. These days, finding the right person (or persons) to fill your shoes when you are not there, has become every bit as essential as potty-training and teaching the ABCs. Whether you are East Coast or West Coast, urban or suburban, chances are that the majority of the parents that you know rely on some form of regular childcare. There are more families with two working 4 parents today than ever before, and even Moms and Dads who chose to be at home or at home part-time often require an extra set of hands to keep up with the pace and demands of modern parenthood. In fact, statistics show that 50% of all U.S. children are in some type of formal childcare arrangement by the time they are nine months old. Yet while there are hundreds of resources available to tell you how to puree your own organic baby food or sleep train your toddler, there are almost none that teach moms and dads the right way to go about finding a nanny, or how to work with your nanny effectively. Many of my clients come to me as first-time parents because they are completely daunted by the nanny- search process—where to find a nanny, what to expect, and how much to pay—but I also get clients who, despite the best of intentions, have been through five nannies in five years and have no idea what they’re doing wrong. Most parents rely on advice from friends when conducting their search, but without a proven system or strategy to guide them, they end up making mistakes that set the stage for future problems: they prioritize the wrong qualifications, ask the wrong questions, and fail to zero in on what they, as a family, truly need. It doesn’t help that the nanny world is like the Wild West, completely unregulated and often under-the-table; there are no rules, there is no standardized training or hiring protocol, and there is no board or government agency to provide professional oversight. Anyone can advertise themselves as a nanny, and yet I have found that many parents do more due diligence when buying a car than they do when hiring their child’s caregiver. Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than they realize. Science tells us that 90% of the human brain develops by age three, so any person who cares for your child during these formative years—be it a nanny, a babysitter, or a daycare worker—will without question shape your child’s personality. Young children, especially infants and toddlers, learn from their 5 caregivers every minute of every day, which means that everything about your nanny—her demeanor, her physicality, and whether or not she will actively teach and engage your child— will have a direct impact on his or her social, emotional, and intellectual development. If the chemistry between the nanny and child isn’t right, if the nanny is bored or checked out, if there is high-nanny turnover, or if the nanny-parent relationship is strained, there can be real and lasting consequences for the child. Especially during the early years, the difference between an exceptional caregiver and a mediocre one can be enormous. That’s why I wrote this book. After years of working with families and their nannies, I have created what I call the “Gold Standard” Process so that parents everywhere can finally have a sure-fire prescription for finding their perfect nanny and making a lasting match that will help their child thrive. No matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of nanny you’re looking for, this book gives you everything you need to achieve the Gold Standard of childcare: a loving, energetic, totally devoted caregiver who is ideally matched—both personally and professionally—to meet your unique needs and those of your child. My hiring process will allow you to take control, avoid mistakes, and hire the right person. And if you already employ a nanny and it isn’t perfect, the strategies in this book—based on my background in psychotherapy as well as my experience doing Nanny-Family mediation—can help you bring out the best in your child’s caregiver and achieve a whole new level success. HOW I BECAME THE NANNY WHISPERER In many ways, my life has always been about helping parents and their children. After college, I received my Masters in Social Work from Columbia University and began working as a therapist for at-risk children in a New Jersey school. It was while working with these kids—many of 6 whom suffered from neglect and abuse—that I witnessed first-hand the affects that poor caregiving could have on a child, and the critical link between healthy, effective parenting and a child’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. I also realized that it was incredibly hard to undo many years of bad parenting, and that mistakes that had been made with these children could not be easily fixed. The sub-par mothers, grandparents, cousins, and foster families who had taken turns caring for these children had, unhappily, shaped the people they would become. As a student at Columbia, I had been very interested in Attachment Theory, which is the science of how early caregiving influences a child’s life. First developed by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, Attachment Theory asserts that for an infant’s social and emotional development to occur normally, the child needs to form a close, trusting relationship with at least one primary caregiver during infancy and the earliest years of life. Other well-known theorists such as Mary Ainsworth and Erik Erickson confirmed Bowlby’s research with a number of landmark studies that showed conclusively that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact. A mother who is available and responsive to an infant’s needs establishes a sense of security, and creates what calls what Ainsworth called a “secure base” for the child to then explore the world. Erikson argued that a child’s entire identity is shaped by an early sense of “trust vs. mistrust,” depending on whether his caregivers reliably respond to his needs, and provide constant care and affection. In short, infants and very young children need to establish strong relationships with loving, devoted caregivers in order to grow up to be emotionally healthy, happy, stable adults. It was also around this time that I gave birth to our first daughter, Braydin. After years of dreaming about having my own children, motherhood didn’t turn out to be as easy or straightforward as I’d expected.