How Many Helpers Do You Have In Your Life?
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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post about money and priorities on Corporette, I thought it might be interesting to ask: how much help do you have in your life? Do you have a nanny, au pair, or other paid childcare worker in your life? Do you have unpaid helpers like parents or siblings who help you out regularly? Do you have a killer assistant at work who you rely on for a lot of gatekeeping/scheduling needs? Do you have a cleaning service, lawn service, snow removal service, etc? Do you use a personal shopper? Do you regularly use virtual assistant services? Do you have a personal assistant or chef, or have you found other ways to get help with those tasks such as hiring someone local to meal prep for you or keeping a subscription to a meal delivery service? How about a personal trainer, or a headhunter who’s been extraordinarily helpful over more than just one job?
We’ve talked about a lot of this on the blog before, but I’d love to hear about your current situation… some of our previous discussions include:
- How to Hire an Assistant at the Office (and How to Delegate To Your Assistant)
- I Tried To Use Virtual Assistants to Delegate Family Tasks – Here’s How It Went
- How to Hire a Personal Trainer
- How to Hire a Cleaning Service
- How to Level Up Your Childcare
- How to Upgrade Personal Services
- How to Hire a Housekeeper or House Manager (inspired by this amazing Medium article listing all the help a self-made millionaire has at home)
- How to Use a Personal Assistant (with tips from a friend who actually used to be a personal assistant to a a wealthy businessman)
- Have Your Parents Helped You In Your Career? (this was a fun discussion, based on a study that found that post-college, 75% of parents were reminding children of deadlines and making appointments for them)
Readers, I’d love to hear from you, though — how much help do you have in your life — from nannies to work assistants to personal shoppers or trainers or more? What has made the biggest impact? Has it changed through the years, e.g., before or after children, marriage, certain jobs, or more?
(Note that there is a version of this post over at Corporette also, but it feels like this might be a very different discussion for parents, so this post is for you guys!)
Stock photo via Stencil.
1 kid, 5, who just started school. I’m an academic and work a plane ride away. I travel 25% of the time (but mostly during university terms) and we have no local family. My husband is government, he works quite strict hours – anything over, he gets to take later on.
Paid help:
1) Wrap around care – less than we need, but enough to keep us ticking over. We have to cover Tuesday from 3 onward and Friday from 12, but kiddo has made friends, so sometimes had a playdate one of those days. And summer / holiday clubs.
2) Weekly housekeepers – 2 cleaners come for an hour Wednesday AM and handle all the big cleaning. Our house is 1000 square feet and they skip the office/sunroom so they can get it done quite quickly.
3) Weekly meal kit boxes for 3 meals a week (and normally they give us leftovers for lunches).
Unpaid help:
1) Assorted friends – we have a few local friends who we exchange childcare with. Have a migraineand your partner is working all weekend? Drop your kids off! I’m stuck on a call and can’t do pick up? Get S and Ju to do it.
2) Grandparents – my parents moved “closer” to us, in another country but a 3 hour £100 plane ride, versus an all day trek from SF to the UK. They have the school calendar on their fridge and aim to be here for half terms.
Two kids – one 20 months, one 4.5.
DH is in BigLaw and travels a fair amount. I have my own big job, but fortunately have flexibility which means I can block time for kids appointments and sign-off by 5 if I make up the work later. I also mostly WFH with the random in-office day or onsite day (likely 1-2x/week at MOST) which helps a TON. We also pare down kid activities (they are currently only in swim, and I otherwise try to enroll in activities that are provided at preschool/daycare), and prioritize family/friend events over classmate birthday parties.
Paid: FT preschool/daycare (lunch + 2 snacks provided), cleaning service (1x/3 weeks), lawn service, pest control, grocery delivery, takeout/food pickup on weekends, peleton app, babysitter when needed
Unpaid help: Local family (including one live-in grandparent – not sure how long this will last but we love it). We moved to our current city largely because of family/community and it has enriched our lives tremendously. I love that our kids have day-to-day type relationships with grandparents, cousins, uncles, aunts, etc.
Paid help: daycare, housecleaner every 3 weeks. We occasionally hire a handyman for projects we technically could do ourselves like repaint our porch (lots of ladders). We are interviewing a babysitter this weekend for the first time since covid!!!
Unpaid help: local grandparents cover a lot of school closure days (they have the kids all week this week when there are basically no camps available) and used to cover an occasional date but can’t right now. One non local grandparents was a tax preparer prior to retirement and does our taxes. My dad often helps us with car stuff like installing a new battery.
1 toddler
Paid help: daycare (most importantly for about 5 extra hours a week than I work so I can get a lot of our life errands done), biweekly cleaner, Home Chef meal kits, take out every Friday and Saturday night. We own a townhome so don’t have to do yard maintenance.
Unpaid help: in town grandparents who can cover a mild sick day if one of us can’t, sibling who’ll trade babysitting with us (but has 4 kids so those are intense trades), out of town grandparents who come to visit q3months and insist we have a date night while we’re in town (love them)
Paid help: nanny, biweekly housekeeper, lawn/garden service, grocery delivery
Unpaid help: ~5 hours spread over the week of grandparent childcare
Despite this, which two big jobs and 4 year old twins, it feels like we are drowning. Modern parenting is relentless.
Oh man, we outsource basically everything. I’m in-house counsel, husband is big law partner, and we have three kids (2,10,12). We have: housekeeper who comes twice a week and also does laundry; full-time nanny (who runs errands while the toddler is at nursery school); gardener/landscaper who comes weekly; weekly pool service; grocery delivery; babysitter for weekend date nights. Basically the only household/family tasks we do are cooking, some minor handyman stuff, and weekend/after hours childcare.
Paid help: tax accountant, monthly cleaners, grocery delivery, Blue Apron, daycare, babysitter once a month. Would like to outsource yard maintenance as well but DH would rather do it himself
Unpaid help: none – grandparents live over an hour away
Two full-time working parents, two kids 7 and 4.
Paid help: daycare and grocery delivery. Occasional date night babysitter.
Unpaid help: a village. We don’t have any nearby family, but we do have friends and neighbors who will watch kids, go for a walk or run with one of us, our kids go back and forth between each other’s houses, etc. and we reciprocate (if you are at our house and it’s dinnertime, you get fed).
DH was in grad school when we had our first. We lived in grad housing and had no budget for any paid help beyond childcare, so we are still kind of in that frame of mind – ‘whoa, we can pay for babysitters and takeout now?’ The flip side was that we had an immediate local network of friends and neighbors all in the same boat.
How do you find cleaners that actually get stuff clean? I have tried a couple of different cleaning services and was disappointed with both. Things that were advertised and agreed upon as part of the service, like dusting ceiling fans, didn’t happen at all. Other things were done halfway. They only seem to want to do the easy stuff like vacuuming and wiping counters that I don’t mind doing myself. I want them to do the annoying and/or difficult stuff like getting the shower sparkling clean and getting the cobwebs out of the corners. It is so expensive that I can’t justify it unless the results are amazing and I don’t have to go back and redo half of it myself.
Oof.
Nanny, housekeeper, yard guy, personal trainer. We also regularly get grocery delivery. We both work fulltime and couldn’t make it happen otherwise. I have local grandparents part of the year who can occasionally give a kid a ride somewhere, but for the most part we manage without family help.
Paid help: Biweekly cleaners – TBH this is standard where I live – only a couple working moms I know don’t have this.
Unpaid help: Me – switched to part time last year (still undecided if this was the right decision), my parents who pick kids up three days a week and drive them to various afterschool activities so that our weekends have zero extra circulars. This is just as much about my parents as it is the kids. Keeps my parents have sitting around watching tv all day and not being active enough. Down side is we have basically no back up if kids are sick as my parents have various medical conditions so cannot care for sick kids.
Paid help: a nanny, grocery delivery
Unpaid help: my parents come up whenever nanny is off for an extended period of time (ex: she went home to her country of origin for 3 weeks this summer). They also spent 7 weeks here following the birth of my first child, and will probably do similar after we have our second.
In loose order of importance to maintaining my ability to work / sanity: Nanny, cleaning service, dog walker, meal delivery services ( Home Chef and Cook Unity), yard maintenance crew (that also cleans gutters in fall, removes snow in winter!), dry cleaning service that picks up and drops off at home
I have actually been wondering if my apparent need for help is reasonable or not. LO is almost 6 months. DH and I both work fulltime. LO’s daycare is through my work, so it’s exactly the same hours– if I get a holiday or early afternoon, daycare is guaranteed to be closed. And I feel like I’m completely drowning and deferring an unacceptable level of responsibility. We only ever have time for the absolutely immediate tasks, basically food, dishes, and laundry, and those are rarely done well or before the last minute. I never have time for things like changing sheets, cleaning bathrooms, or paying bills. Much less things like getting the leaky roof fixed before winter.
DH has started pitching in more after lots of serious talks, but our standard of living still seems to be so last-minute and unhealthy. And yet I feel like I never have a minute to spare (writing this whole pumping at work). How do other people manage?
Paid help: daycare and a biweekly cleaning service.
Unpaid help: My parents live a mile from us and we spend a lot of time with them. For now, they mostly replace paid childcare (they pick our kid up early at daycare frequently and keep her home from school occasionally). We don’t use them for sick days because we don’t want to get them sick, and we typically plan vacations around known daycare closures. I’m so happy they’re nearby and my kid has a close relationship with them, but in terms of how much help they are to us, it would be a lot harder to give up our cleaning service than their help. That said, we expect to lean on them more once we start elementary school. The plan is for them to provide aftercare at least 2-3 days per week.