The nanny doctor is in
LINDSAY HELLER helps families and caretakers learn to adjust to each other
It wasn’t that Kimberly Van Der Beek’s new nanny was unqualified. She had come with sparkling references and a goldstar recommendation from her agency. She knew three languages and had philosophies about child development. She was nice and prompt and had an excellent driving record.
Still, Van Der Beek, the wife of the actor James Van Der Beek and a parenting blogger, noticed that when she entered the room, the nanny was often just getting off the phone. And though the nanny was doing a good job with the Van Der Beeks’ 7-month-old son, Joshua, there was some tension with their 2-year-old daughter, Olivia, Kimberly Van Der Beek thought.
And so it came to pass that on a rainy morning not long ago, a black Volkswagen Beetle with the license plate NANNY DR drove up to the Van Der Beeks’ Hollywood Hills home. Van Der Beek ushered its occupant, a woman named Lindsay Heller, up the back stairs of the house, sat across from her on a couch and began a list of concerns and questions.
“She’s very emotionally invested in my kids,” she told Heller. “I just don’t know if she has passion about Olivia.”
She went on. “She lets Joshua just lie on the floor while she’s drinking her tea. Put some pep in that step. Put the tea down.” She leaned back and sighed. “I just find that if I’m around, I’m the one taking care of the kids. I like to be preventive about things. If Olivia wakes up from her nap at 4, I’d like to know that there’s a snack ready. There never is.”
Heller listened. “I wonder how much she knows about what your approach is and what you like,” she said.
Van Der Beek considered this. “I haven’t been very clear in my approach, I guess,” she said. “We’ve had conversations about philosophies, but not really about what I expect her to do.”
“Very often, a new nanny feels meek and doesn’t want to ask too many questions,” Heller said. “She might not want to bother you.”
And Van Der Beek’s feeling that she must take charge of her own children when the nanny is around?
“You need your own process, to learn how to separate,” Heller said. “There’s something really powerful to a clean goodbye. You have to get used to saying, ‘In five minutes, Mommy’s going to work.’ When you shut the door, shut the door. It’s good for both of you.”
After an hour, a plan was in place. Van Der Beek was to draw up a document detailing her priorities for her children; her preferences for their activities; protocols for waking, sleeping, and eating; and tasks that aren’t child-related that she’d like the nanny to do.
“I’ve never really managed people,” Van Der Beek said. “This is all new to me. I need to get better at this.”
Heller, or the Nanny Doctor, as she calls herself (she has a PhD in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology), is a consultant for an age of anxious parenting, acting as a mediator of sorts for parent and caretaker, at a rate of $200 an hour. She draws from her experiences both as a mother to two daughters under 3 (she is married to Matt Donnelly, a TV writer) and as a former nanny to clients like the director Stephen Gaghan and his wife, Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer and socialite.
“I remember her solving a conflict with the kids, who were 5 and 6,” Mortimer said. “She had them calm down and use their ‘I’ statements. Our little girl said, ‘I don’t feel safe when you throw a Lego at my head.’ Our boy said, ‘I feel that throwing a Lego at your head is the only way to get your attention.’ She treated them with such respect and dignity.”
Heller, 35, is also a therapist in private practice with offices in Beverly Hills, but she said she devotes half her time to tasks that include hiring, firing or training a nanny and intervening in a troubled relationship.
One high-profile client, she said, thought that the nanny had become too enamoured with the perks of the parents’ lifestyle, demanding weekly massages and a personal trainer. Another client, an actress, hired Heller to watch her new nanny for several days to see whether the child, who was considered difficult, was responding. A producer once hired her, she said, to intervene with an actress on set who was distracted by her nanny’s behaviour.
Most of Heller’s fixes focus on reorganization and communication. “It’s a complicated relationship, but it doesn’t have to be,” she said of the bond between nanny and child. She believes each family should have what she calls a house book, a document like the kind she had Van Der Beek draw up.
That was her suggestion for Desiree Gruber, an executive producer of Project Runway who is married to actor Kyle MacLachlan, with whom she has a 4-yearold son, Callum. They live on two coasts and employ four nannies.
“We made a mission statement for how we wanted to raise our child,” said Gruber, who also calls the house book a “family manifesto.”
“I make mission statements for companies. It made sense for my child, too. There’s a certain way we want him raised, and I need that to still go on when I’m not in the house.”
“Maybe I took it to an extreme,” Gruber said of the document, which she updates regularly. “But people are in my house, I like to say clearly: If this happens, handle it like this.”
About one-quarter of Heller’s consultancy work — the most rewarding, she said — is helping nannies like Cathy Bergman, the former live-in head nanny of a household with other, problematic employees.
“Lindsay taught me I had to let it go,” said Bergman, who spent two sessions with Heller. “It was none of my business what went on when I wasn’t on. I would overhear all that sassiness and realize I had to leave the house and separate. She told me, ‘When you’re off, be off.’ She was right.”
On a Sunday in January, four nannies gathered at Heller’s office for her weekly support group, for which each had paid $12. One attendee had asked her employer for a raise two months before and still hadn’t gotten a response. She was afraid of following up, so Heller helped her write an email asking for more money and perhaps a stipend for health insurance.
Another nanny had been unceremoniously let go just the day before, after having watched two children since their infancies. She was told she could put them down for their naps, and that was that. She wept while she spoke.
“Parents don’t always realize how important the nanny relationship is to the child,” said Heller, offering the nanny a tissue. “They don’t realize that the child needs a transition.”
As do parents, it seems. At one point Heller spoke about her own woes with a nanny who left to work for a neighbour and now refuses to speak to her former employer, even when they cross paths, which is often.
“It hurts,” Heller told the group. “We cared about her and valued her. I’m not sure what I did. She won’t tell me, no matter how many times I’ve asked.”
She shrugged. “She is part of our family story,” Heller said.
“It’s sad. I’m not immune from nanny problems.”