In the The Nanny Diaries: A Novel, the tyrannical mother imposes stringent rules on the nanny on what she is allowed to feed her son. No sugar, no hot dogs, everything fresh and home made. It's time consuming work, complains the nanny and if the mother was watching her kid all day, there's no way that she wouldn't sneak off to McDonalds once every couple weeks.
Well, life imitates art, and the Times has an article on food regulations and the nanny.
“It’s not unusual for parents to make a huge list of what is and isn’t allowed,” said Genevieve Thiers, who is the founder and chief executive of Sittercity.com, which matches more than 150,000 baby sitters with parents. Her site receives so many queries about food, she said, that she is preparing to post an online worksheet on which parents can specify diet preferences.
Parents are more aware of dietary concerns that they were years ago, and this food scrunity is just part of the movement towards more intense parenting that affects all aspects of child rearing.
Nannies, meanwhile, find it demeaning “when parents are overly scrupulous,” said Julia Wrigley, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, because they are implying that the sitters do not know or care enough to feed children properly. “The deeper emotional issue is how much judgment and authority the caregiver can exercise,” she said.Sitters can hear a parent’s dietary requests as criticism of her education level, cultural traditions and personal eating habits, and as harbingers of extra work.
As more women work, the rules of childcare are increasingly up for debate. How much should you regard nannies as professionals and allow them the freedom to make about decisions about food and discipline? Should nannies be paid more as the responsibilites increase? Isn't parental oversight a good thing for the kids who really don't need to have a constant diet of fries and treats? Most people were not raised by nannies and have no traditions or rules of conduct to fall back on.
I admit that these debates make me very nervous. When I've dropped my kid off a sitter's house, my philosophy is that it's her house, her rules. I never step into these matters. If I am unhappy, I find someone else who is more in line with my thinking. However, if I have a sitter at my house, I have some rules here. I usually feel sorry for anybody watching my crazy kids, so I make the rules very light, like don't let them play in traffic. I don't make them impose the TV and computer rules. But then again, I never have anyone here for a full day, five days a week.
Recent Comments