It’s usually tough to make headlines if you’re a nanny, unless your charges happen to be a movie star’s kids and you have a fling with their celebrity dad. But today’s Los Angeles Times puts Margoth Enriquez, a 38-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, who is a nanny in Los Angeles, on Page One in a story called “Mommy Shift Begins as Nanny Shift Ends.”
Enriquez lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her husband, who works construction, and their three kids — a 3-year-old daughter and two teenage sons. She works full-time as a nanny for a stay-at-home mother of four for $550 a week, and she hardly represents the bottom of the child-care food chain. While she’s working, her own 3-year-old daughter goes to a baby sitter, which costs $125, about one-quarter of her salary.
In other child-care news, in Salon’s own pages, don’t miss Priya Jain’s analysis of what a recent spate of studies about day care really means.
