How to Level Up Your Childcare/Personal Help (When Money is No Object)
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If you’re a busy working mom, good childcare is a must — but what happens when a nanny doesn’t even begin to cut it? How can you level up your childcare and household management? (Warning: this post is not terribly budget-friendly.)
I’ve wanted to talk about this ever since I read this post from Penelope Trunk (written in 2008 but I first read it more recently than that) about hiring a house manager — an entire position I never knew existed but would love to have if money and time allowed. So if you need more than a nanny, let’s review the “additional childcare options for very busy moms” that I know of (beyond, obviously, getting your husband to be an equal partner and sharing parenting duties)…
Childcare Options Beyond the Nanny or Babysitter
Mother’s Helper
Relatively budget-friendly. A lot of people will hire a teenager or young woman to “help the mother” — the idea is that you will be present and in charge, but the mother’s helper can help manage the kids, clean up a crazy mess, put laundry away, do the dishes, and take care of all those other household tasks that need to be done.
Nighttime Baby Nurse
This is what some moms do when they have a newborn — the idea is that a qualified baby nurse (who specializes in newborns) will stay at your house with the baby to be awake all night to tend to him or her, while you sleep. If you really can’t take the 6-12 weeks of sleeplessness that comes with a newborn, this can be a great option. (Text updated to account for commenters who note that a nighttime baby nurse was very breastfeeding-friendly!)
Second Nanny or Second Babysitter
I’ve heard of this happening in two main situations: The first is when your primary childcare is an au pair, who is strictly limited to a set number of hours a week, but you regularly need coverage outside those hours. The second time I’ve heard of this happening is if you have multiple children — some parents like to have one nanny per child.
Housekeeper
Readers have mentioned this as an ideal option for older children — the idea is you have someone at your home in the hours after school who is providing some supervision for your children while also cleaning and making dinner. Think of Alice’s role in The Brady Bunch (pictured at top).
{related: would you hire a housekeeper or household management?}
Personal Assistant
This option isn’t so much for childcare, but in theory frees you up so you can spend more time with your children yourself. PAs can do family shopping, pay bills, call customer service, plan vacations/make travel arrangements, and sometimes more. (This post on LinkedIn has a good breakdown of the differences between a butler, a personal assistant, and a housemanager.)
Virtual Personal Assistants
A somewhat budget-friendly corollary: these days you can find a lot of virtual help online, whether it’s through one-off tasks on Fiverr, virtual personal assistants through spots like Zirtual or Upwork, or overseas virtual assistants like those mentioned in this classic Esquire piece (reprinted in The Four Hour Workweek and on Tim Ferriss’s site) or mentioned in fiction like Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
(Full disclosure – I’ve worked with a number of virtual assistants over the years for the blog, mostly sourced through Virtual Staff Finder, but I don’t usually give them personal tasks. Once I did ask a VA to make a chart for me of all the local preschools, what the price range was, what times classes were offered, and when the deadlines/application fees are, though.)
{update: I tried to use a virtual assistant to delegate family tasks — here’s how it went}
Housemanager
This is what Trunk was talking about; in 2008 she reported hiring someone to take care of her house for $50,000 a year. The idea is that this person totally manages the house, coordinating cleaning, deliveries, stocking the refrigerator, looking into why your toilet is rattling, etc. (It reminds me of that classic essay, “I Want a Wife.”) More info, from the British American Household Staffing page:
A Housemanager is responsible for one household and and smooth running of the household. A Housemanager will live in or live out and can double as the Butler or Executive Housekeeper in residence in addition to performing the duties of a Housemanager. Some families appoint their Nanny as a Personal Assistant and Housemanager when the children are of school age. A Housemanager will ensure the house is fully functioning by managing vendors, creating and maintaining vendor relationships. A Housemanager in a townhouse may oversee from three to fifteen members of staff and manage their schedules weekly and monthly.
And, of course, when you can’t afford any of these, you play the game the rest of us working mothers play, Do, Don’t, or NOPE.
Ladies, what else have you heard of? What have you considered — or at what price range would you consider bringing in someone else?
The discussion below is great; you can also check out this discussion on Corporette.
Most important factor for parents is to choose quality facility staff for their child. Hire staff who will take care of the healthiest meal plan.
Ok so I realize this could sound ridiculous, but has anyone hired a driver? Or help that is responsible for a lot of driving in addition to other household tasks?
I live in the SF bay area where commutes are brutal (90-120mins in traffic) and I unfortunately do not have access to one of those cool tech buses that take you almost door to door. Public transit requires transfers and is unreliable.
For various reasons (house, preschool, family help) I cannot relocate and even that would be a huge budget increase. If I had basically my own driver I could get a ton of work done in the car, then in between commute times the driver could help my parents run errands or do household stuff. Does anyone have experiences or suggestions on how to make something like this work?
We have had a housekeeper for a few years in addition to our nanny. Housekeeper comes twice a week to do all laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping and meal prep. Some weeks is more, some is less. We pay $14/hr but she’s due for a raise. MCOL. I’d say she averages 8 hours a week.
We have a shared grocery app that is accessible by nanny, husband, myself, housekeeper. We update it constantly and whatever is on there when she grocery shops (on her way to our house) she buys. Nanny will pick things up at Target if they’re on the list and she’s there getting kid stuff. It’s easy to cross something off the list but not remove it entirely so the others know it was purchased. We have a reloadable debit card that we put money on weekly to pay for groceries and cleaning supplies and dry cleaning. She leaves receipts each time so I can see how much needs to be added for next time, or I can check it on an app.
Housekeeper cleans/cuts produce and puts groceries away. Nanny does kid laundry, housekeeper does ours and linens, including folding and putting away, dry cleaning drop off/pickup. She will also do holiday decorations around the house and pretty much anything we ask of her. (Extra walk for the dog, wait for cable guy, backup child care if nanny is sick, wrap birthday gifts, etc.) She’s amazing.
She also starts dinner the two nights she is there. Usually it’s something in the crockpot. Other times it’s marinated baked chicken/veggies that we can warm up.
Both husband and I travel for work, so one of us is gone every night. Add all the sportsy stuff/school activities and real life things and it makes life so much easier. I don’t spend 4 hours on Saturday doing all the laundry and I don’t drag my kids through the grocery store after a 10 hour workday and a 90 minute soccer practice.
We found her on care.com.
For about six months after I came back from maternity leave with our second, we hired someone to come in once a week for a full day. She cleaned the house, but also cooked one meal and prepped ingredients for four more meals. – stuff like chopping and roasting vegetables. We use a meal planning service (Fresh 20) that includes prepare-ahead instructions, so she did all that. It meant that one of us could actually cook dinner in 20-30 minutes, which in turn meant that we could eat dinner before our older kid melted down from exhaustion. She didn’t do laundry, because my husband works from home, which means that laundry is a pretty easy task for him.
This service cost $160/week, and I found the person on care.com. I would love to keep doing it, but while we make pretty good money for our area (180k combined in a MCOL city), we also pay 3.5k/month for daycare and we want to keep contributing to our retirement accounts. So now we are back to a cleaner every other week ($80), and I try to do the prep on the weekends.
Finding care in my area is so frustrating. I’m paying appx $800 a month for before/after school care. I tried to find a local college student etc. willing to pick my son up at 3:45, bring him home, feed him a snack go through his backpack etc. until someone can get home (usually 5:30 at the latest) and I offered $200 a week. Everyone wanted more money, and many of them wanted to do it at their own house or bring their own children along. It was really discouraging. Also, there was no guarantee they could cover the “two hour early release” days etc., so it wasn’t a stable situation.
I really stress about what to do when he’s further in elementary school and a bit older than most of the kids at the daycare center that provides his before/after school care. Having a housekeeper who comes daily and will at least be an adult body in the house seems like a good arrangement, but I guess we’ll have to see what his responsibility level is when he reaches that age.
we went a slightly different direction and hired a home cleaning service that also semi-kondo’d our entire house. they also use all-natural cleaning products. we had to do work too to purge stuff but having them sort through what was left, put like with like, and then organize it all was amazing. they went thru piles of paper and sorted by subject and date so we could decide what needed to stay. we feel so much more ready for #2. without them we would still be trying to get guest room cleared out so that we could move #1 out of the nursery. and i’m due in 4 weeks. instead we were able to move him around new years. best part is now the cleaning crew that comes 2-3 times/month actually knows where everything is supposed to go.
We had a mother’s helper when our kid was two and IT. WAS. AMAZING. Since my husband’s job entails so much travel, I’d be making dinner while my kid did everything in her power to dive had-first into the oven and there was no one around to run interference. So we hired a twenty-something college grad to come over 6-8pm, M-F.
We put a carseat in her car so she could pick up from daycare when I had to work late. She and I took turns cooking dinner while the other played with the kid. She did laundry and post-dinner kitchen cleanup. She eased so much stress, I could spend more time with my kid, and I could actuality go to bed at a decent hour because there wasn’t all that cleaning piled up. I found I really didn’t need any more than the 10 hours a week, but it was nice on the occasional date night that we could call on her because she already knew the drill.
For those wondering about logistics, we found our mother’s helper on care.com. I interviewed the ones whose resumes looked good, then my husband and kid came to meet the top two. Care.com offers criminal & driving background checks which we happily used. Their payroll service seemed over-priced, so we had our tax accountant handle it instead. We paid $10/hr.
I would love someone like this. What would make this post helpful rather than just reminding me that such things exist for some spheres would be details about costs and where/how one hires for this kind of thing. I would be super curious too the kinds of incomes people have who do this. DH and I combined make 250ish in MCOL and I feel like we could totally swing 50k for someone to save our sanity….but we don’t have student loans or car payments, our mortgage is $1500 because we chose to live in a perfectly nice but not fancy neighborhood. So part of me worries about whether we really do have the income (I guess maybe my real worry is that we’ll be judged by the housekeeper for not being fancy/rich enough. Which I know is ridiculous.) but still some baselines would be helpful. Also, logistics.
Short threadjack in case anyone can help-looking for recommendations for food gift certificates for a friend in Seattle who has a premature baby/mom is recovering for surgery. I don’t live there any more and am a little stymied. Mom likes health stuff. Thanks in advance for any recommendations!
A note on night nurses–I had a friend who supported herself this way for several years, and she specialized in triplets–apparently night nurses are more commonly hired by parents of multiples. I can see how they would be particularly sanity-saving in that situation!
We have a nanny who is a nanny when the kids are around and a effectively house manager when they’re in part time preschool or napping. Is this more help than most people can afford? Yes. But it’s a far cry from a staff of 15 and not that much more than a family with two professional, working parents is already paying for childcare.
we have a toddler in daycare and spend about $1000/month (HCOL area) on a housekeeper who comes 3 days a week. she does all cleaning, of course, but also does all laundry, including folding it and putting it away (i try to not feel too judged when she thinks that some of my clothes go in my husband’s closet), as well as all dishes. it has been a great investment for us. my husband and i both often work in the evenings after baby bedtime, and we both prefer spending time on our work than doing dishes. our housekeeper is also much better at these tasks than we are. of course it’s a big expense but it has made biglaw + baby pretty tolerable.
Night nurse can be extremely bfeeding friendly. My night nurse, who I had a few nights a week for 12 weeks, would stay with the baby, bring baby in and wake me up to nurse, take baby away to burp, change, soothe, swaddle the baby back to sleep. So instead of me being up for a hour to do all that, I stayed in bed and was awake for 30 minutes. And if the baby cried, I didn’t hear it.
I nursed to 18m.
Is anyone else a fan of Intolerable Cruelty? This makes the think of the scene in the trial when Klaus the Baron Vonespy talks about the difference between a butler (?) and a majordomo.