Nanny wars
The politics of stealing a childminder
Perhaps alarm bells should have rung when Agnes, my nanny, said she was in hospital, having her tonsils out. She’d only recently arrived from Hungary, and had seemed fine the week before.
Three days later, she resigned. She had been offered a job at a fashionable celebrity crèche, she said, having mysteriously managed to navigate the interview process from her hospital bed. Furious, I had no option but to stop working myself and act as her emergency cover. I had no idea, when I started searching for childcare for my daughter, Rosie, now nine, and son, Felix, seven, that finding a decent nanny could prove harder than persuading fussy preschoolers to finish a floret of broccoli.
So if you do source someone decent, you don’t take kindly to them being swiped – as Stella Mccartney reportedly recently discovered. The fashion designer is said to have fallen out with her friend Victoria Beckham – the pair’s daughters, Reiley and Harper, both nine, attend the same London prep school – after the former Spice Girl poached her nanny.
I’m not surprised Mccartney is seething. Short of stealing her husband, Beckham could scarcely have swiped a more valuable commodity. “The right nanny can be the difference between domestic harmony and chaos, so it’s no wonder that a nanny with a good reputation is hotter than this season’s
Hermès bag,” explains Zarja Cibej, founder of nanny agency mytamarin (mytamarin.com). “Poaching can risk the tightest friendships. You’re not just hiring an employee but creating upheaval for another family – one that you might still see at the school gate.”
And yet the practice goes on, with some working mums’ morals going missing in action when the potent combination of kids and careers are at stake. Take Olivia Hall*, 42, who tells me how a fellow mum from her children’s school in London tried to steal Sarah, her loyal nanny of seven years. “She was reliable, committed and fun – everyone in our neighbourhood commented how we’d lucked out,” recalls Hall, an accountant and mum to Georgia, nine, and Peter, six. But one morning a couple of years ago, Sarah emailed shortly before starting her shift to tell her that she would be looking after one of Olivia’s friend’s daughters, as well as her own two children, after school from now on.
“I read the email on the train to work, and went ballistic,” says Hall. “I found the mum in question’s email, and told her there had been some confusion – our nanny was not available to look after another child. She didn’t reply. I later found out that Sarah thought I’d okayed the arrangement. She’d been duplicitous.”
A week later, the two women bumped into each other outside school. “She didn’t say sorry but she wouldn’t meet my eye. I think she felt embarrassed,” says Hall. “It was cringeworthy between us for months until I decided it wasn’t worth falling out over. Some might say it was flattering she wanted our nanny – but I felt she’d broken an unspoken mums code of conduct.” According to a survey by the Family and Childcare Trusts, only 50 per cent of areas in the UK offer enough nursery places. For parents who don’t work regular office hours, that figure goes down to one in eight. Little wonder that demand for nannies – often a more economical option for parents with more than one child – continues to rise, with demand exceeding supply.
According to mytamarin, 31 per cent of parents are looking for live-in nannies, but only 19 per cent of nannies are after live-in positions.
Post-brexit, and with fewer potential nannies flocking from Europe, that discrepancy could increase. “I say to parents that nannies get to choose who they work for as much as a parent chooses a nanny,” says Cibej. “This is something some parents don’t appreciate – they think they’re picking a doll from a shelf.”
And if a nanny is unhappy with their working conditions, they are ripe for poaching, as Lizzie Kerr, 39, a management consultant, found, when she set her sights on a workmate’s employee. “Katerina was working part-time for my colleague and looking for extra hours,” recalls Kerr, mother to two boys aged five and three, who, on her colleague’s recommendation, employed her for occasional shifts. On returning to work after maternity leave, Kerr needed a full-time nanny and asked Katerina if she’d be interested: “She said no, out of loyalty to my colleague, which made me like her even more.”
After an unsuccessful three-month search for a nanny, however, Katerina told Kerr she would like to come and work for her after all. “She said the other family kept changing her hours so her schedule was unpredictable. They’d take holidays and want her to make up the extra hours when they got back. She felt taken for granted.”
Kerr admits she “absolutely” felt guilty for poaching Katerina: “It didn’t feel right, but at the end of the day I played it fair. I heard my colleague had told people Katerina had left for a posh family – her way of justifying it was that she left for a better salary. But I was paying Katerina exactly the same.” Her crucial advantage, she says, was that she was a “nicer employer”.
Yet Leanne Williams, owner of nanny agency Nurturing Nannies (nurturingnannies.co.uk), says: “Poaching nannies is not good etiquette. If the nanny has applied to an advert that’s fine, but approaching them behind their employer’s back is not acceptable. Agencies don’t do that – we’d never approach a nanny employed in another job.”
After all, being deserted by a nanny isn’t just a colossal inconvenience – it feels as much a hurtful rejection of your family as your financial offer. “It’s such an intimate job that finding a nanny is more like finding a romantic partner than a corporate appointment, and it’s devastating when it doesn’t work out,” says Cibej.
Don’t I know it. After joining childcare.co.uk – a sort of Gumtree for the childcare industry, which allows parents and carers to advertise and contact each other direct, when my children were five and three, I
‘A nanny with a good reputation is hotter than this season’s Hermes bag’
interviewed a wonderful nanny whom my children instantly adored.
Two days later, I offered her the job. Too late. She’d accepted a position elsewhere. I almost cried. What was wrong with us? Dozens of other less impressive interviewees came and went until I settled for Agnes, who wanted a (paid) week off, three weeks after she started, announced her impending tonsillectomy a fortnight later, and was out of the door, three days after that. I felt wounded for weeks, before finally stumping up the price of a second-hand car to join a nanny agency that found me Anna, who became part of the family. She only left after two years when she became pregnant. “If you pay your nanny well and make sure she’s looked after, she won’t be stolen,” says Williams. “If she’s poached, it’s probably because she’s not happy.” *Some names have been changed