The Nanny Cam Debate

We have a full-time nanny starting this week. I won't get into the sheer guilt I feel about having to leave my son with someone on a daily basis, I'll let you scroll down to my posting "The Nanny Guilt" to read more about that. But my wife is going back to work this week after 5 months of maternity leave, and this is just a fact of our life right now.

A few weeks ago when we hired our nanny, we started wondering how we know he will be alright with her. Background checks, driving checks, reference checks, those are all fine and necessary. But how do we really know what's going on when we're not there? Then we thought about a nanny cam.

You know what a nanny cam is. They can be anywhere and look like anything. Hidden in clocks, teddy bears, even in a mirror! You can watch tape when you get home or live streaming from your computer or iPhone. It's all very easy. I've seen some horrifying stories in the news about parents who have caught their nannies abusing the kids all thanks to a nanny cam. But apparently not everyone feels so great about these little spy gadgets.

Right after we hired the nanny, my wife posted a question on Facebook. Very simply, she asked:

"What do you think of nanny cams?"

You would think that someone just asked about the pro-life/pro-choice issue or evolution vs. creationism, because the holy floodgates of hell opened up and she was chastised! This is quite the hot topic apparently. Some responses included:

"COMPLETELY NOT OKAY!!!! as a professional nanny not cool! If you can't trust u'r nanny then don't have them"

"If you don't trust the babysitter enough to have a camera on her while she is with your son, you definitely need a new nanny."

So I wonder....how do you build trust? With my wife and I, trust was built over time. I saw how she was towards me on a day-to-day basis. With my job, I've built trust with my boss over time. She has seen how hard and competently I work on a day-to-day basis. What if you're not there on a day-to-day basis to see how someone works? What if a camera is the only way to build the trust that your child is in safe hands?

Please let me know your thoughts on "Nanny Cam-gate", I'd love to hear which side of the fence you're on. And please feel free to forward to your friends, all opinions are welcome.

The Nanny Guilt

For the past 5-months, my wife has been a stay-at-home mom. We timed this pretty perfectly. She works in the school system, so summers are already off. Jonah was born on June 9th, so that gave her two and a half months of the summer, and then another 12 weeks maternity leave in the fall.

Fall is almost over, winter is getting close, and next week she heads back to work. I won't bother getting into the emotional turmoil she is going through as each night passes and the dreaded day gets near. I've seen more crying sessions from her than I can bear to watch the one I love go through. I'm not exactly dismissing what she's going through, but the fact is that I'm going through something tough myself.

Starting next week, we have to leave our son with a nanny....full-time....40 hours a week....every week.

Aren't dads supposed to be focused on supporting the family? Bringing home the proverbial bacon? We do what we need to do to survive and give our kids the lives we feel they deserve. I mean, Harvard is going to be ridiculously expensive in 17 1/2 years! Again, a life I feel he deserves.

Anyway, as I've learned over and over and over again in the past 5-months, things do not work out the way I thought they would. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd feel such a profound and gut-wrenching sense of guilt over the idea that another person besides my wife and I will actually raise my son. She will spend more time with him than I ever will get to in any given week.

I try to put this into perspective. He's too young to feel a sense of separation anxiety. We need to work hard now, because life is just going to get more expensive. I still have the weekends. Well at the end of the day it's not enough. But with that being said there's not a lot to be done here. We all make choices and ours is to not have to live paycheck-to-paycheck, but bring home a nice combined salary and make the best of a no-win situation.

But the day I hear him call the nanny "mommy" is the day one of us quits our job.