How much does everyone spend on a birthday gift for their nanny? Our nanny is new-ish (5 months) and her birthday is in 2 weeks. I'd love to get her a gift but am unsure on how much to spend. We plan on giving her a Christmas bonus about a month after her birthday so I'd prefer to give her an actual gift. How much do you spend (or receive if you're a nanny) on your nanny's birthday?

Even though our nanny is relatively new, I want to show appreciation. She has mentioned a few things she likes that I've taken note of so I have a couple of ideas.

Curious what is a typical grace period for arrival? Our nanny is typically 5-12 or so minutes late each morning (my guess is related train times) We WFH but also go into the office so typically have to wait until she arrives to go get ready.

Sometimes when she arrives we are still getting baby ready for the day etc. (but I don’t think that excuses the timing)

We have GH, and we make sure to be home / come out to relieve her at least 10 mins before the end of the day. Occasionally as we are chatting she leaves +5 mins after her end time etc. but I’m always with baby at that point and feel like I make it clear that she should go.

Any advice? We have a shorter day on Fridays and am debating adjusting start time by ~10 or 15 mins each day to have additional time on Fridays..

\Delete if not allowed**

Hello fellow nannies and parents!

I'm excited to share that I've launched a new online resource for both nannies and nanny employers called Nanny Toolkit.

As an experienced professional nanny, I created Nanny Toolkit to help nannies and families establish clear expectations and navigate employment relationships confidently. I independently run a blog on the site where I offer advice to both nannies and employers based on industry standards and my own experiences. There are a few articles up already, and more are in progress!

My store also offers customizable nanny contracts, addenda, supporting forms, and resource bundles (“kits”), most of which have been reviewed and revised by a licensed attorney.

I put a lot of time, effort, and resources into this, so I’d love for you to check it out. I hope the site can be useful to you in some way!

Her experience further proves my point. Hmph.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT9U6bq7qXxE8-tgjkT/

I’m returning to work after a one year maternity leave. I’m going to be working from home but have hired a nanny to be here during LO’s awake hours while we wait to get off a daycare waitlist. We’ve never had childcare so I’m not entirely sure how this goes, as far as what they do while they’re here and what normal asks would be of them.

I’ve started doing a bit of prep like coming up with meals I can make in advance that she can easily serve or reheat, making sure there’s lots of toys and activities available.

Here are some questions I have:
\- Do you normally instruct the nanny on what you’d like them to do with the child during that time or do they take the lead?

\- Should I be giving an overview of how we do things like cleaning up after meals, how he prefers the food to be fed to him, etc?

\- Is it reasonable to request she stays in the living room with him while I work in my office upstairs to help minimize noise?

\- What are some ways I can also make her more comfortable?

Sorry if these seem dumb or obvious… I think my postpartum anxiety is rearing its head a bit, haha. I just want it to go seamlessly and I’m a little worried that LO will struggle a bit being with someone new and knowing I’m here but unavailable.

Affected Poppins parents, I wonder how your day has been.

There was a post 11 days ago about this data breach. Those working in IT understood the gravity but others shrugged at it or accused me of being a “sales person” for some lawyers.

Today I suddenly got 10 calls and sms on my phone, all by loan sharks trying to sell me loans. Pretty aggressively insisting that I should take their offers. One mentioned that I had “applied at LendingTree.com for a loan” - i had never heard of that website before.

I have the bad feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg. I need to lock down everything and I suggest all other affected to do the same.

If you’re wondering about suspicious activity lately - this breach is the reason why.

I'm looking at going back to work after maternity leave but we're on a waitlist for daycare right now. We're looking for a short term nanny but aren't sure how short term. Is there a certain website you've found reputable or are Facebook groups safe? I'm also interested if there are other groups I could post in that may have better answers!

Just a heads up, a Facebook page called Nannies and Mommies(public page) is taking screenshots of posts in here to create discussion on their page.

They are not editing out user names or subreddit name. Be aware when posting!

I’m hoping to get some outside perspective on some possible red flags with our nanny. We have a baby boy with developmental delays and some additional care needs. Our nanny is a retired lady who moved here to help care for her grandchild who has special needs, but he’s older now and doesn’t need her as much.

She is great in so many ways. She is meticulous and thoughtful about my son’s care, follows instructions, goes above and beyond, happily does extra household tasks, and is flexible with scheduling. She understands our son’s developmental delays and is really good with him. She and I get along well. She had good references and a clean background.

But she seems to be getting really over-attached and it’s getting awkward. Some of the things that have concerned me:
- Texting me after hours with curiosity questions related to our son’s care (I appreciate her desire to understand but not at 8:30 pm)
- One morning she told me she was so excited to see my son that she got up early
- She literally cried when my husband told her our son took a bottle (he’s tube fed and we’re doing feeding therapy, so it is a big milestone for him)
- Bringing unsolicited little gifts like breakfast or hobby-related items
- Last week she texted me in the evening saying she thinks about us nonstop - the other things I could kind of explain away but that was concerning to me

I try to maintain the boundary by being courteous but not reciprocating. Part of me thinks she just really loves having a grandma type role without the emotional baggage of a mother-daughter relationship, or maybe she’s just kind of a “pick me” person. My husband is more cautious and alarmed by it. Open to all perspectives and advice!

We recently hired a house manager/nanny and there have been a few things that have happened that have peaked my spidey senses. Am I overreacting or are these things I should address?

- arrives 5-15 minutes late 50% of the time
- forgot to change toddler out of pajamas all day (we are not a pajamas as clothes household)
- starting week 1 kisses my toddler multiple times a day in front of me
- starting on her first day helped herself to all of our snacks and food
- left multiple tasks half finished at the end of the day (for example emptied the trash but didn’t replace the liners, set items outside to move into garage and left them overnight)
- neglects to vacuum family room despite it being on her “everyday” task list and me calling it out specifically

Overall none of these things scream red flag, but many of them seem like odd judgement calls (eating food, kissing kids, etc).

EDIT: Thank you all for your thoughtful replies. I am going to take your advice and have my husband and nanny write down clock in/out times. Husband says he’s happy to do it. I’m going to ask the mods to lock the post as I’m getting overwhelmed by the comments.

This is something small, but it’s really getting on my nerves. In the contract, it states that each week, our nanny is to send me her timesheet. Every Sunday, for months, I have had to ask her to send the sheet. I’m getting tired of asking. I asked her once to set up an alarm on her phone to remind her to send me the sheet. That worked for 1 week. I asked again for her to set an alarm. Once again it only worked once.

Do I need to ask her to set an alarm a THIRD time? I seriously don’t want to be that person that gives real warnings for something so trivial and simple. My husband thinks I should get it go so we don’t build ill will. I’m sick of texting her and reminding her, like a parent would have to remind their child.

I’m thinking of sending the following: “Hi nanny, I didn’t receive your time sheet this week. Our contract states that you will send me the time sheet each week. On two previous occasions, I asked if you could set a weekly alarm to remind yourself to send me your time sheet. In the future if I don’t receive your sheet by Sunday evenings, I will be estimating your hours to the best of my ability for that week’s payroll and any corrections can be made on the following paycheck”.

(By the way, the above estimation of hours is how my state says to handle the situation when employees don’t submit a time sheet. You obviously are not allowed to withhold pay if an employee does not submit a time sheet. The employer has to do their best to pay for hours worked).

I don’t know if I’m venting or just wanting to know if I’m a bad person for this. I think it’s a little of both.

In 2025 we started our search for a nanny and we interviewed and hired our current nanny. Our contract mentioned that if either party wants to cease the arrangement we have, at any time, we would give two weeks notice. So she would give us two weeks if her needs changed and couldn’t be resolved, and we would give her two weeks if our needs changed, obviously unless it concerned a safety issue. Something like being negligent with our child would warrant immediate termination. Our needs changing would not warrant termination, but rather giving the nanny notice. We also knew we would need someone to care for our child for the duration of time we lived in this particular city. We put that in the agreement that we needed someone until (end date).

Over the course of the last year, the nanny became very comfortable with us. Some of it is good because she’s like a member of the family. Some of it, not so good. Nothing that causes safety issues- but for instance she wouldn’t take the baby to the park because SHE “wasn’t feeling up for it.” I understood that some days are harder than others- I don’t always give 1000% at work if I’m feeling slightly off. We are all human. But it started turning from 1-2 days per month to every other day. This was a gradual thing, so it didn’t feel as much of a huge issue until I really sat back and started counting the days she didn’t want to give her all.

Phone use was another example. We put in the contract that we wanted limited phone use while the baby is awake. When the baby naps, she is free to do whatever she’d like. I put limited because I know she has kids and if they need her for something mid day (forgotten lunch, school pickup etc) they could reach her. That slowly turned from “urgent matters” to “oh my friend called to talk about our other friend for a few minutes.” Or sometimes it was her kids calling to complain about something that wasn’t urgent.

She also stopped cleaning up after baby, or would just do the bare minimum. The play area would be left the way it was when they were done, or food would be left on the floor after meals/snacks. She also would leave more of a mess in the kitchen after making her meal when the baby napped. It would be wiped but not cleaned.

The biggest issue was that she started wanting to take the baby on her errands. It went from a small errand here and there to weekly errands, and some times daily errands. Kids doc appointments, forgetting something at home and having to run back, picking up medications or groceries- and she would alway say “the baby needs to get out of the house anyway.” It felt like every errand fell under the guise of “well the baby likes stopping by (place) because…”

I started feeling like the salary we give her (we gave her what she asked for so I know she wasn’t feeling underpaid) was going toward her living her life, while at the minimum keeping our baby safe. I didn’t see the value of having a nanny anymore.

There were two or three incidents where she had dramatic moments where she freaked out in front of my child as well. They weren’t dangerous and she did not freak out at my child- just more reacted poorly to her own child or spouse on the phone giving her bad news (failing grade or whatever).

An opening for a child care center came up and we opted to take it. I also deferred starting our child at the daycare by a few weeks to give her extra notice. I ended up giving 4 weeks notice plus two weeks severance.

When I told nanny this, she did not react in the way I thought she would. I know she was thinking she would have this job until we moved away from this city- but unfortunately our needs changed. Our baby is no longer a baby and is needing more. She doesn’t do much with our child and our child needs more exploration, and more activities than what she has at home. Admittedly some of this is our fault as we do not have much for our child to do at home. We have paints, a play kitchen, some toys, and books. I’m just feeling like if we have a caregiver at our house our child would learn to do things around the house (fun cooking, fun baking, age-appropriate cleaning) along with the toys and crafts we have. Our house isn’t well organized (that’s on us as NPs) and we realized this and decided we need our child to have a space for all these types of activities. Plus it’s hard to organize and clean when you constantly have nanny and baby in the space at all times. All this to say, I caught her off guard. She seemed like i fired her for doing something wrong. I was just giving her notice that we had a tough decision but this is what’s best for our child. She didn’t say a word. I told her she could have the rest of the day off and then left our house without saying a word.

We gave her notice on Friday and then Monday she gave me less than 30 min notice that she wouldn’t be coming to work. She didn’t say anything the whole weekend and then on Monday told me she couldn’t come to work because she needed to do things for a job hunt. It felt petty. I explained that in the future I’d appreciate more notice if she needs to job hunt, because I felt that I was being fair in giving her notice but she didn’t extend me the same courtesy.

Right now I’m excited to have our child enter a new chapter in their journey, but I cant help but think that I’m slightly a jerk for catching her off guard. How do people give notice? Did I do it incorrectly? I stuck to the contract so I thought it was fine. Her reaction seemed immature to me, but I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. The only thing that makes me think this was not the right way was because she believed that she had a job as long as we were in this city.

Hi! I’m not an employer but a nanny seeking some guidance from employers on how you would want your nanny to handle this situation!

My nanny mom is super type A and I feel like the household chores have slowly gotten out of hand, but I also don’t want to offend her because her mind is very list and task oriented. When we agreed to $25 an hour, i was taking care of the kids (2 toddlers) and like every other day she would text me asking for help with something like making the guest beds, doing the dishes, or folding the kids laundry. About 2 months later she shared a list with me in the notes app of things to do while the kids are sleeping but told me not to worry if i couldn’t get them done in time bc the kids should be my top priority (and for the most part the chores did have to do with the kids).
Now (almost a year later) she’s created a printed checkout list that i have to make sure gets done before I leave and has a bunch of random stuff on there that doesn’t have to do with the kids like bringing the garbage bins up from the street and emptying out the kids toy bins when they are napping to reorganize the toys (the bins are where their toys go when i clean up after them so this is different from picking up after ourselves).

It’s not that any of the chores are particularly hard but she’s never once asked me if it was okay for her to add something, she’s always just added to the list and then expects me to see and do it.
Another issue is that I’m in school and when I registered for my classes, the kids were napping for around 3 hours and this checkout list didn’t exist. I took on a heavier course load knowing I usually had some downtime during naps. I obviously never expected or relied on being able to do homework every single day but now between their shorter naps and the list taking up most of that time, I almost never have the chance to do any at all, and it’s starting to catch up to me. We originally agreed that if I had some downtime for homework I was okay working 9 hour days, but now I’m essentially working 9 hours straight with no real break. This means that I am having to take a day off from my other job and lose money there, in order to get my schoolwork done.

My Nanny Mom is not a bad person at all and I definitely don’t think she’s trying to make me feel like this. I know she is paying me to be there and is probably looking to fill my time and get her money’s worth, but i think there is a difference between normal nanny duties and continuously adding household tasks that weren’t part of the job I agreed to. It’s just getting to a point where it’s not sustainable for me without making more money. And it’s also not what I signed up to do. I want to be a nanny, not a household assistant.

I want her to understand that I’m not asking for a raise but for more money in exchange for more work she’s tasking me with. If she decides she doesn’t want to pay me more, I have to tell her that I’m either cutting the list in half or that I just can’t work for them anymore, which would break my heart because I’ve been with them for a very long time and love the kids more than anything.

I guess what I want to know is how would you want your nanny to approach you if they were feeling like this?

Received the Poppins data breach letter and planning to switch to a new provider. Has anyone gone through that process. How easy is it?

I want to pay our nanny on the books, but I'm surprised by how big the gap is between off-the-books and on-the-books rates.

What's the current going hourly rate in NYC?

For reference: we have a baby and a toddler. The toddler is in school until 3pm, so she's mainly with the baby during the day and both kids in the afternoon. Hours would be 35-40 hrs/week.

I'm happy to pay on the higher end because we really like her — I just want to get a sense of the range.

Our nanny is starting tomorrow for our 3.5 month old - we’re starting off overlapping with grandma for a week, then 90% of the time at least one parent will be home, 75% of the time both parents will be home, and once in a while grandma may be here.

A few questions since this is our first time:

1) We’d specified in the contract and JD the expectation that she’d meal prep for us 1-2x per week assuming she has time after the baby duties are done (simple stuff like throwing 1 protein and 1 veggie in the oven) - I can see how this gets easier as the baby is eating solids. Has anyone had a nanny who was able to do this easily? Any advice on communication / managing expectations?

2) How did you handle breaks for nannies? If neither of us were home, I’m assuming she’d have to manage her own time and energy solo. With one or both of us home, I’d expect that if we want to spend time with the baby, that should free up her time to either do baby admin duties or meal prep. Is that fair?

3) What is typical to be communicated for lunch/snacks? It feels weird to get or make lunch for ourselves and not feed her, but I also don’t want to set a precedent where I’m making food for her everyday. Could this be wrapped in the meal prep some how so whatever she makes for us she can eat too? Do nannies prefer to bring their own food from home?

4) While we’re usually home, we do both travel at times and may have schedule changes. We’ve agreed to communicate schedules for the week the Friday before. Because grandma also sometimes comes in and out, is it reasonable to shift the 40 hr mix once in a while - ie come 8a-6p M-Th and take Friday off since grandma will be here

EDIT: thank you everyone for input so far. We’ve nixed the 4th question entirely based on feedback.

TIA!

Hi all, new NP here & I’m currently in the process of hiring a PT nanny for our baby. I’m a former nanny and misjudged how much time and effort it would be to list the position, go through candidates, and schedule interviews, nevermind the actual interview process. Postpartum has been really challenging for me, so I’ll note that this probably feels a whole lot harder just because of where I’m at right now.

We had someone lined up that we really liked and it ended up falling through because of scheduling, so I began the search again. I wasn’t having much luck on care, even after paying for membership, so I decided to take to my local fb group. Within a day, I had a brand new pool of candidates and instantly connected with someone I felt was going to be a fantastic fit for our family and what we’re looking for.

We chat over the course of a day or so and I suggested setting up a working interview for a few hours (where we’d obviously pay for her time). I figured this would be perfect because we’d have time to chat and get to know each other, plus she’d get to spend some 1-on-1 time with our baby. She excitedly agreed, so I asked her how she wanted to go about background check / references, asking whether she’d prefer to get it out of the way prior to our working interview, or wait until after. Side note: it was mentioned in the job posting that the ideal candidate had a clean driving record/comfortable driving children, was willing to complete a background check, and provide 2-3 references.

When she said she wanted to do it asap, I realized that we had connected over fb and I wasn’t sure how to complete a background check outside of care. I’m already paying for the membership anyways, so I asked her to apply to the job listed on care (clarifying I didn’t need a full application, more so the connection to her profile to request background checks and whatnot) and she said she would, but it’s been over a day and she still hasn’t sent her “application.”

I know from my own experience nannying / industry standards that background checks are typically completed post interview. But does this apply to working interviews? Was it weird for me to ask her about background checks and references ahead of time? As I mentioned at the start, I’ve been struggling a bit postpartum so I could be overreacting to her not applying yet. The logical part of my brain says she’s probably just busy this weekend and will get to it eventually, but I can’t help but wonder if it was off putting to ask about these things too soon, making it feel rushed? Looking for opinions from both NPs and nannies!

I have a 10 mo that has been in daycare for the last 5 months but it has been rough with them getting sick so often. I feel like I have to take off work half of the time to take care of them. I’m debating about getting a nanny. But I am not sure if I can afford one.

I would need at least 6 hours a day and can survive on that. I think I could afford upto 30/35k a year. Is this possible? I know it depend on on area (in Texas). Just curious if this is something I can even consider or am I wasting time?

So excited that the FAMLI (Maryland Department of Labor's Family and Medical Leave Insurance) is now active! Starting Jan 2028, any W2 employee will be able to take paid leave, paid for by the state of Maryland. So glad that my nanny will be able to take paid leave if she needs it!

This is one of the reasons why I insist on paying over-the-table!!

https://paidleave.maryland.gov