The Silent Tension Between Moms and Nannies

A Many Such Takes deep dive of the New Yorker cover discourse

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I’ve often said that discourse usually stems from an ink blot test of sorts—something happens (say, jazzy sorority recruitment dance videos) and discourse blooms from people reading into this content behind the lens of their own insecurities and resentments (These women are sluts! These women would have made fun of me for being gay! These women are super cool and I want to be like them when I grow up except I’m already twenty-eight!)

Well, this week is no exception. The New Yorker’s cover art depicted two nannies (both women of color) taking care of white children in an urban setting, with one of the nannies showing the other a photo of her son’s graduation. Nothing in the image was inherently negative; if anything it looked kind of upbeat and happy. A “slice of life,” if you will:

One kind of funny thing is that quite a few Twitter users didn’t notice that these women were the nannies. That’s not a joke on them; if you aren’t in an area with a lot of nannies it might not be obvious. Lots of people saw the women as adoptive lesbian parents, or members of a multi-racial family.

The cover paints a scene with which I’m familiar. The parks in our neighborhood during the day are mostly full of toddlers and their nannies, occasionally their moms. When I was a SAHM after a layoff several years ago (very on-brand for me, the person who is always getting fired), I became friendly with many of these nannies. They told me they enjoyed their jobs, and seemed to genuinely like the children for whom they cared. They were also friends with each other, and formed a social group with scheduled playdates. One nanny, an older immigrant woman, often told me how disappointingly delayed her client’s child was in terms of development and how much more advanced other children at the park were, frequently prompting the 18-month-old to learn from more capable toddlers. I thought it was kind of sweet and funny that she was being as neurotic and competitive about this as the child’s own mother likely was.

I also had a nanny growing up—a British nanny (this helped me tremendously with my dramatic Victorian England play-pretend games) who remained with the family for our entire childhoods before becoming a teacher, and is now an honorary grandmother to my kids. She was present at my baby shower and my son’s first birthday party. While I’m sure she and my mom used to have a clear employer/employee relationship, they’re now close friends and get margaritas together every week.

Because my personal experience with the mom/nanny dynamic has never been negative, I didn’t see the cover as critical or negative. But one thing I’m learning, per the Internet, is that often these relationships carry all sorts of awkward undertones, sometimes but not always because of race and class.

And even for people who are not nannies, or who do not employ nannies, the New Yorker cover brought out a very evergreen sentiment: I just don’t like women.

Far be it for me—the dreaded “liberal white millennial woman”—to have any opinions on race or to write on this topic at all, but I never saw it as problematic that some nannies were women of color, unless they were being compensated poorly, or worse, compensated poorly because of their race or immigration status. To take issue with this comes dangerously close to the logical conclusion of the progressive, feminist, Robin DiAngelo-reading mom deciding it’s an act of “radical social justice” to only hire a white nanny, or to give up her own career lest she inadvertently force a woman of color to have a job instead.

As far as the ink blot phenomenon goes, I’m not immune. This discourse activated my own rage, summed up neatly in this tweet:

The Twitter discourse says working moms “can’t raise our own kids” because we work the same hours as our husbands, that the parents employing the nannies are xenophobic Trump supporters who want to deport them, (Have they ever been to Brooklyn playgrounds?) and that these kids are being “raised” by nannies instead of their parents, as if the nannies are present 24/7, and as if children historically haven’t been raised by a variety of people other than their parents. I’m not even including the variety of racist right-wing comments on the cover (figured it was best not to platform them at all) who didn’t like that any white child was exposed to people of color, or who believed the cover was an example of anti-white propaganda.

Maybe these commenters can’t relate to the image because it involves a park, and parks are outside, and none of these people have been outside in a very long time.

Although this all feels really terminally Twitter-brained to me, other parts of the Internet show that the relationship between a nanny and the parents who employ her, especially the mother, is a source of silent tension in real life too.

The closest I’ve come to experiencing this drama first hand was on a local Facebook group for parents (almost always moms) and nannies, where someone anonymously posted a photo of a nanny (at least we’re assuming she was the nanny) from far away at a park. The nanny was facing the toddler, who was crying. Although we had no proof that this woman was the nanny, she was a different race from the child, who was not only white, but very pale and blonde. The caption read that they had seen this nanny scream at and slap the child because he was whining.

The reactions were varied, and looked something like this: