The last time Rhonda Salins, a full-time stockbroker, ran a newspaper ad looking for someone to take care of her three children, she tried to be very careful.
”I advertised for a `mature, loving, reliable person to live in our home and care for three small children; fluent in English, and driver`s license required.` I got calls from people who thought their English was good enough, but they couldn`t even respond to my questions. If they came in person for an interview, they would bring along a friend who would translate for them.”
Salins, who lives in Highland Park, ended up hiring a young woman from a small Illinois town who had taken a break from college-but only after what she considered a stringent screening process. ”I called the Baptist minister where she went to school and talked to him,” Salins says. ”I called her college to verify she`d gone there. I called her babysitting references. I talked to her parents. I interviewed her at length.
”She seemed to be all the things I was looking for. She was sweet with the kids. She was willing to spend a long day working with them and driving them to activities. But I don`t think you can know somebody until they live in your home.
”After the first week, she told me that a friend had played a practical joke on her and put our phone number in the newspaper for a dating service,” Salins says. ”So I got calls morning, noon and night-sometimes from people who were drunk-to the point where we almost had to change our phone number.
”My husband and I questioned her. `What kind of friend would do something like that?` I asked her. Then I noticed that the classified ads were missing from my newspaper, and I found them in the recycling bin. I saw that she had circled the dating services. She had done it herself-there was no friend playing a joke. When confronted, she denied it.
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”After the second week, she went away for the weekend to visit somebody she called her boyfriend, and she never came back. She left everything-her keys, her jewelry, her makeup. She also left a $40 phone bill for 900 numbers. And there I was on Monday morning, ready to go to work, and I didn`t have anybody to take care of the children.
”I came to the conclusion that this was one disturbed girl. The crazy thing was, a few months after that, I got a call from a woman in another suburb who said this girl had applied for a job and mentioned my name. She didn`t really give it out as a reference but mentioned that she had worked in my home, and this woman tracked me down. I told her, `I think she`s possibly dangerous.` ”
With no extended family to turn to for support, middle-class families in which both parents work (nearly 70 percent of women with children under 18 are employed) are increasingly dependent on virtual strangers to mind their children. The demand for in-home child-care workers-nannies, babysitters, au pairs or housekeepers-far exceeds the supply, and finding child care can be a constant, energy-draining struggle.
Consequently, desperate parents often hire anyone who seems ”nice,”
hoping their gut instincts are right. Sometimes they settle for caretakers who don`t speak English, even taking the risk of hiring illegal immigrants or foreigners on tourist visas. Most are untrained in child care and may or may not be reliable, leaving both parents and children in a vulnerable position.
Little surprise then that the recent movie ”The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” did so well at the box office. The story about a pyschopathic nanny who takes over a household obviously struck a nerve.
”Parents often think their children are safer with in-home care because they`re in their own home, but they aren`t, necessarily,” says Barbara Reisman, executive director of the Child Care Action Campaign, a New York-based advocacy group. ”The care-giver is isolated, which may be a problem for her as well as the child. You don`t have a lot of adult interaction or supervision. That puts an even greater burden on the parents to make sure they hire the right person and that they monitor the care.”
Problems with child care or anxiety about it cuts into productivity on the job. ”In studies we do, usually around 20 to 30 percent of parents report missing work because of child-care problems,” says Dana Friedman, co-president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute. ”That`s absences. If you throw in coming in late or leaving early, the number jumps to 40 percent.
”The more secure parents feel about the kind of child care they have, the less likely they are to be distracted at work. Slightly more than half of the parents in one study we did indicated that if they had had another option as to where to put the child, they would have taken it-meaning they didn`t have their children in situations they preferred. That`s pretty alarming.”
To cope with this situation, many large companies have created programs to help employees find both child care and care for elderly parents, or have implemented flexible work schedules. ”My company created a work and family-program position and staffed it to provide information, resources and referrals,” says Kathryn McKee, senior vice president for human resources at First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles and past president of the Society for Human Resource Managers.
”We`re not in a position to build a child-care center, but we have a flexible scheduling program that managers can implement where possible to meet employees` needs-different hours, time off at midday to be made up later.”
Such programs help, but parents still are alone with the problem.
”Anything else that goes wrong in your life doesn`t pack quite the same punch as when you have babysitter problems,” one mother says. ”I can`t describe the panic when my phone rings before 7:30 in the morning. It may mean she`s not coming for the day, and that`s a horrible emergency.”
Even after parents find an acceptable nanny, they`re often never quite comfortable because the power in the family seems to shift. Not only do they worry that she`ll call in sick, they may be reluctant to criticize her work for fear that she`ll quit.
Parents often use the terms ”nanny” and ”babysitter” interchangeably. However, strictly speaking, a nanny is someone who has formal training or considerable actual experience with children, either lives in or lives out and takes care of almost all child-related tasks. Babysitters, the way parents seem to define it, mainly take care of the child`s physical needs. The better ones provide some intellectual stimulation through games and activities, but many parents have given up expecting much of that.
”Au pairs,” who are popular on the North Shore, are generally teenaged girls, often from foreign countries, who live in and assist with child care and housekeeping tasks, usually for a one-year period. ”Housekeepers” do work around the house with a little child-care included.
Unlike day-care centers, the in-home child-care industry is essentially unregulated. Many states, including Illinois, require employment agencies to be licensed, but the nannies themselves are not subject to any official scrutiny.
And, of course, the thousands of child-care providers who aren`t placed by agencies are free agents and not subject to licensing.
They`re also part of a substantial underground economy involving ”under- the-table” cash payments. The illegal but widespread practice means the child-care provider doesn`t have to declare the income, and the family can get away with paying less and avoiding the paperwork hassles of withholding income and Social Security taxes.
Many families are so strapped that they forfeit the child-care credits allowed on their federal income tax returns, to avoid putting their babysitters on the books. In 1989, when the Internal Revenue Service began requiring taxpayers claiming a child-care credit to include the provider`s name and Social Security number, the number of taxpayers claiming a child-care credit declined from 8.7 million to 6.1 million.
Without either regulation or national standards, the child-care workforce tends to be largely transient-women from various walks of life with no real commitment to the child-care field.
If parents find someone acceptable who stays with them for a year, they consider themselves fortunate. It`s not uncommon for arrangements to collapse after only a few months.
Pay scales vary, based on what the parents are willing to pay and what the nannies are willing to accept. Competition for someone reliable can be so fierce that parents have been known to lure away another family`s child-care worker by offering her more pay. Parents have come to fear the thought of nannies getting together at playgrounds or parks and comparing notes about their wages and duties.
”I get very paranoid about pay,” says a Chicago mother. ”I don`t want my sitter talking to anyone else and knowing what they make. I`m not poor, but I`m not rich. The going rate when I had my first child was about $150 to $200 a week-that was 10 years ago. For $150, you got somebody who babysat certain hours and did no housekeeping. For $200, which we thought was a fortune at the time, you got a lot. The going rate then was $40 a day-top of the line.
”Now the basic bottom line is $250 a week-$50 a day. I pay $275, and I also have somebody come every other week to do heavy-duty housecleaning. That puts me up to $300 a week. I have somebody else on Saturday and two nights a week because my husband is often away and my kids have classes in various places. So I`m spending $400 a week. It`s a tremendous financial drain.
”I don`t want my name attached to cash figures because it`s very wrong for me to let people know what I`m paying. There are parents out there who are really screwing things up, driving up the salaries by paying $350 to $400 a week for a very simple light-hours job-8 to 5 or 5:30 caring for one child.” Laura Pastorelli, who has a small business called Personalized Child Care, which matches up families and child-care workers, says she`s concerned about the number of calls she gets from parents who ”have the money to pay for child care but just want to save a buck. They`re talking about an 11- or 12-hour workday.
”I was working with a lawyer who found somebody to come in to take care of the baby for what amounted to $35 a day. I told her, `I hope I don`t run into your child-care worker on the ”L,” because if I do, I`ll educate her as to what the going rate is.` It`s a crime for someone to work for $35 for a 10- hour day. And she was doing everything, housework, too, for less than the minimum wage.”
Parents usually find child-care workers through word of mouth, advertising or with the help of one of the several dozen employment agencies in the metropolitan area. There is also another avenue: tapping into an ethnic underground network. Each area of the country has dominant immigrant groups whose members seek out child-care jobs and often are willing to accept low pay. In Chicago, Mexican, South American and Caribbean immigrants and a few Irish women are working in child care, and Polish women are popular and plentiful, placed through some employment agencies or through want ads placed by parents in the Polish Daily Zgoda.
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A Mexican-Central American underground dominates the border states. On the Eastern seaboard, it`s a Caribbean and Irish network, and in Florida, it`s Cuban. ”There are probably some qualified people working illegally, but the scary thing is, there are a lot of people who don`t speak English taking care of children,” says Janet Shannon, executive director of the International Nanny Association, a non-profit group of nannies, parents, agencies and recruiters headquartered in Austin, Tex.
”That`s difficult for the kids, but the real problem is what happens in an emergency? I lived next door to a woman who had someone from El Salvador taking care of her little boy-just as nice as she could be but who did not speak a word of English. Every day when the mother would leave for work, she`d look at the woman and say, `Nueve-uno-uno.` She never said goodbye, she said 9-1-1.”
There`s another risk as well. ”Tuberculosis is on a rapid increase, as is hepatitis-B,” says Christine Thornton Weiner, founder of Nannies Midwest Ltd., a respected employment agency based in Rolling Meadows. ”And you`ve got a whole illegal market of people out there working with babies. Parents will ask, `Are you healthy?` and they`ll say, `Yes.` But those diseases are silent killers. Some people can be carriers and not know it.”
Unfortunately for parents, there`s no outside, objective authority passing judgment on who passes muster and who doesn`t.
”Day-care centers or family day-care homes are licensed,” says Mary Ellen Gornick, president of Corporate Parenting Associates, in Skokie, who conducts child-care seminars at Prentice Women`s Hospital of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. ”Whatever we want to say about the licensing standards-that they`re not tough enough, that they`re not monitored enough-at least someone has to jump through some hoops to get licensed. There are certain standards one has to meet. You have a beginning.
”When parents are hiring someone to care for their child in the home, the biggest question mark is, `Am I going to be able to identify the right person?` ”
For many parents, it always seems like a roll of the dice. ”It was scary to leave my child for the first time with a babysitter,” says a Chicago nurse who went back to work when her daughter was 3 months old. ”Emotionally, it was the hardest thing I`ve ever had to do. It was really bad at the beginning. I didn`t fear that she wasn`t taking good care of my daughter, but I worried because she was asking for her pay on Tuesday when Friday was usually pay day. She was just there to do her job and get out.
”She had good references, but you can`t always trust the references. My gut feeling was that she would be a good babysitter, but I wasn`t all that crazy about her personally. But I didn`t have a whole lot of choices at the time.”
”The whole issue of who is minding the children is one we haven`t paid proper attention to, and it`s really important,” says Weiner of Nannies Midwest Ltd.
”What`s frightening to me is the parents it doesn`t scare-the people who call here on Monday morning and say their nanny walked out over the weekend.
(They call her a nanny, and, of course, she was a housekeeper.) They don`t ask about my credentials, they don`t ask anything about the agency. They say, `When can you send someone over for an interview?`
”We get calls from all over the country like that on Monday morning, particularly from the East and West Coasts. For all they know, they could be calling a child pornography ring. They`re calling a number in another city, and they don`t ask anything. They don`t ask for our tax number or whether we`re licensed. They`re basically saying, `Send us a warm body so we can walk out the door tomorrow and leave our children with that person.”`