The other mothers

The media often focuses on this guilt mothers feel about leaving their kids with someone else. What are some of the positive things that women -- and children -- get from having nannies?

Well, there are developmental experts who say it's really important for a child to be able to form a bond with an adult outside of the parental unit. I'm telling you, when I read that I was just clicking my heels in the air. It was just nice to know that there might be some quantifiable developmental plus in my kind of having forced this dynamic on my kids.

We also know that mothers bring a lot of baggage to their kids, especially if they're high-achieving, ambitious moms who expect a lot. We all bring a measure of concern and anxiety and desire to every interaction with our kids. Are they coming along OK? Are they doing OK socially? Are they learning their alphabet fast enough? Are they giving us loving-enough hugs when we leave in the morning? We all have our concerns that I'm sure we wear on our faces when we deal with our children. The nannies aren't counting on [the kids] getting a high-powered education that's going to make them successes in the corporate world. I don't think that's really on their list of hopes and dreams for the day. And I think it can be quite fabulous for [children] to be cared for for long periods by someone who doesn't bring that kind of baggage to the relationship.

What are some of the ugly truths you discovered about the nanny-parent relationship?

The ease with which some mothers would talk about their preference for one ethnicity of nanny over another made me pretty uncomfortable. They like Caribbean women or they don't; they like Filipinas or they don't. They think Latinas are "cheerful" or they don't. And there are mothers who maintain a sort of delusional notion that their nanny is with them for the fun of it. And sometimes that can lead to exploitive behavior, with the mother rolling in late without telling the nanny or offering up the overtime because "she's there anyway" and "they're having such a cute time together" -- and losing sight of the fact that this woman has rent to pay.

What's your feeling about the effort in New York to pass a minimum-wage law for domestic workers, including nannies?

I think it's a great idea. It's just shocking to learn how systemically unfair the situation is. All sorts of workplace abuse can be rampant in private homes, because who's checking?

How do fathers feel about nannies?

You'd think in this day and age that fathers would be as affected by the presence of a nanny as we are, that they would be as involved as we are in child rearing -- since we do have these great, well-adjusted feminist dads these days, wearing Snuglis and going to play dates -- but the reality is, the brunt of the childcare still falls to the mother. If something goes wrong with the kid, [people] are going to look to the choices the mother made to see what went wrong. And there's just no sense in which a father is hiring someone to be his proxy when he brings a nanny into the home. The nanny is a mother figure. So as a result, it's the mother who's overseeing the relationship and managing it.

Nannycams: pro or con?

I support any mother doing what she feels she needs to do to provide care for her kids. And if her anxiety is so great about hiring a nanny that she has to get another set of eyes on the situation, fine. But it does not appeal to me at all. I never considered getting one. My feeling was that if I felt I needed to spy on [my nanny] maybe I wasn't there yet psychologically, maybe I wasn't adjusted sufficiently to the idea of a nanny to actually have one.

I also could never have a moment's peace if I knew the filming was going on at home and that I was going to be perpetually on the lookout for offenses. I interviewed a [mother] who told me, horrified, that her nannycam revealed that the nanny would take a lunch break and not interact with her toddler while she ate her sandwich. I don't feel like she should have to, frankly. This is an exhausting job -- if anyone turned a momcam on me, I'd probably be carted away. The nanny's got to go to the bathroom, she's got to have lunch, she might have to talk to a friend on the phone at some point during the day -- we all do in our offices in midtown. Why should she not be able to do that, as long as the child is safe and OK? There's a fair amount of trust you have to have in the woman whom you've hired, and at a certain point you have to let her do her job.

How would you respond to critics who might say, "Boohoo, you can afford a nanny in the first place, why all the bellyaching?"

Well, because the word "nanny" has such a fusty, Mary Poppins vibe about it, it's easy to imagine that hiring one is an incredibly fancy choice made by people with tons of options. And that's just not the reality anymore. The vast majority of women I interviewed, they struggle. No one's going to miss a meal, but these are middle-class women who work crazy hours, for whom day care is not sufficient coverage, and women who don't live around the corner and up the street from their sister or mother as they might have in another era. We're really on our own out here, a lot of us, in the cities of America, working these demanding jobs in careers that we may or may not like, because we have to have two salaries.

And women should not have to apologize for the fact that they want to work in the first place. It's all about striking compromises and minimizing the times and the ways that you disappoint the various people in your life. I believe that life should be a rich business. I believe that my kids, anyway, get a kick out of the fact that I work and have kind of a neat job, and that I'm an energized, busy mom with places to go and stuff to do in which they frequently participate. I think that way of life, one that includes a wonderful nanny, can set a nice example for our kids.

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