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How to poach-proof your nanny relationship

A good nanny is a prize, one that other families may stoop low enough to try to steal from you. Nanny poaching can happen anywhere from the school gate to your own garden gate and it can be anyone including your next door neighbour or anyone close friend.

Some will say that a nanny who allows herself to be poached wasn’t happy in her job anyway. After all when you’re in a content and committed relationship you’re not casting around for a better partner! If you do sweep the room occasionally it’s just eye candy, and while your nanny might periodically flick through job ads it isn’t necessarily a sign of discontent. Poaching is more dangerous. Poaching is the equivalent of someone coming up to you in a bar, buying you a drink or six while whispering sweet nothings in your ear and ultimately enticing you to come home with them.

You can’t stop someone coming up to your nanny and buying them that drink, but you can make sure their sweet nothings fall on deaf ears and here’s how…

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Child development: Piaget

Jean Piaget (1896-1902) focused on a child’s cognitive development and was the first psychologist to study cognitive development closely. He used the term Schema to explain how a child learns to understand the world around them. What a child does influences how they think about the world, and the new information they gain from redoing the activity changes how they think, modifying or extending the schema. Development is a process of reorganising these schemas and allowing a child to progress to the next stage of development.

When a child is in a state of equilibrium their schemata can explain the world around them. Children have to have assimilate, or gather, information about the world to explain what is happening around them according to their existing schemata. As they experience new things they cannot explain using their existing schemata Piaget felt they were in disequilibrium and needed to modify their schemata to create equilibrium, a leap in development. The process of modifying schemata and finding equilibrium is called accommodation.

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Child development: Freud

One of the first child development theorists was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud believed that all children had innate, basic aggressive and sexual desires, and the way that parents and other adults dealt with these desires would determine a child’s personality when they were grown up.

According to Freud babies are born with a selfish ‘ID’ which only cares about gratification of selfish urges. Later a child develops an ‘EGO’ as they learn that not all of their wants and desires can be fulfilled. The Ego is more realistic than the Id but still self-centred. Last to develop is the ‘SUPER-EGO’ which works with the Ego to control the Id and represents moral values. The Super-Ego is capable of acting altruistically and suppressing the desires of the Id and Ego which are self-serving.

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Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes

Ever wondered what NNEB training was like 50 years ago? A far cry from now, Pam Weaver’s memoirs talk about her first job as a nursery assistant in a children’s home, her training and post-qualifying experience as a nursery nurse there and then her time as a private nanny, stints as a maternity nurse and her training on a neonatal unit.

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What would Fiona do?

We were kindly sent a copy of Fiona Cooke’s ‘What would Fiona do?’ to review. Written by a practising maternity nurse, Fiona combines her midwifery training and years of experience with a gentle and compassionate tone to inform and guide new parents (and childcarers) through the first few months.

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Leaving your nanny job

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye….All good things must come to an end.

It’s cliché but it’s true, and this time of year is often a time when jobs end. Moving on is part of nannying, children don’t stay young forever and the summer before starting school is often a natural break point, but that doesn’t make leaving your charges behind any less painful.

Work with the parents to prepare your charges for the transition. It’s very distressing for children to suddenly learn that it’s their beloved nanny’s last week with them. You need to give children time to process the change, ask questions and be reassured. Pretending that it isn’t happening will only make it harder in the long run for both you and them. Your charges will pick up on your feelings through your notice period no matter how much you try to hide it.

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Summer maths

School may seem a long way away but you can keep those mathematical skills ticking over and even developing, all while having fun.

Count – forwards, backwards, every which way. Start from different numbers and don’t be tempted to go on from 20 all the way to 100 if you don’t need to. At an early age this means saying a sequence of numbers to 5 or 10 but back that up with counting out concrete objects 1…2…3 and the understanding that ‘3’ relates to the total number of objects as well as what you say when you put the third object down. Bring this in naturally, for example you’re pouring drinks for your charges and their friends – ask them how many they need, get them to count out the glasses, count as you’re pouring the drinks. Count the number of petals on a simple flower or try to count the number of petals on a daisy – are they all the same? Get children used to the idea of estimating by guessing a number before you count the petals. Use mathematical language like the first swing and the second swing. Make collections and count them out, and use the shells or stones or sticks you’ve collected to sort them later.

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Students for summer childcare

Every year university students use their long summer break to earn a bit of extra cash to support them through their studies. Often young women, although some young men too, who like children see spending a summer as a nanny as the perfect solution. Students can be a great alaternative if you’re considering a summer au pair, but there pros and cons to weigh up.

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