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:

• We don’t even know if this is a true story, and you shouldn’t post images of people online without consent, no matter what you saw them do.

• How does anyone know that woman isn’t the toddler’s mom? How do you know he isn’t just adopted?

• Even if that woman was his mom, slapping him is unacceptable and he should be taken away by CPS.

• Nobody would post this if the nanny was white.

• The parents should file a police report, the nanny should be in jail.

• Moms slap children all the time and nobody cares, but suddenly it’s a problem because a nanny did it? Why do you hate nannies?

You get the deal. Shit got crazy. It’s the Internet, after all.

The insanity of that thread got me interested in mom/nanny dynamics in general. On the subreddit r/nanny, you can feel a clear undertone of resentment between the nannies and moms—and to a lesser degree, dads. I saw a post where a nanny described an incident in which she and the mother were both at home, and the toddler had fallen and continued to cry after the mother picked him up. The nanny had confidently declared, “He wants me,” and the mother had been offended. Generally, most of the posts in this subreddit are complaints about employers or the children the nannies care for.

Of course, Reddit is the perfect place for complainers and that might skew the results. Subreddits that center around dating are not full of people raving about great dates; they’re far more likely to be full of people complaining about not being able to find a partner in San Francisco who has his own bedroom and doesn’t already have a 7-person polycule. So of course, I have to take r/nanny with a grain of salt.

However, Facebook groups for moms and nannies to connect on job opportunities carry a similar dynamic. Sometimes, nannies are posting their resumes and moms (never dads!) are posting job offers, and everything goes well. Frequently, however, nannies post anonymously to complain about their employers—one example I saw was a nanny who felt “violated” that her employer had an AirTag on her child’s stroller. Multiple nannies, in the midst of complaining about their employers, make comments about how the kids prefer them to the parents, or how the parents (but really, mothers) are selfish for working and hiring them at all. I saw a nanny in an Instagram video say that her employers were “corrupted by worldly things” and that if only they had the right values, the mother wouldn’t be working. The moms aren’t complaining about the nannies on these groups, but that’s because they’re complaining about them on mom groups. On mom groups, moms frequently complain that the nannies aren’t good at cooking or cleaning, or that they’re on their phones too often. A common source of conflict is whether or not nannies should be expected to do any kind of house management or cleaning work, especially while the children are napping. Moms frequently complain about how expensive a nanny is, seemingly forgetting that the expense is another person’s salary.

A lot of these complaints might have a nugget of truth to them, from either side, but much like the notorious mom and mother-in-law dynamic, these complaints seem to come from a place of wanting to complain—the relationship itself, no matter who is in it, feels innately awkward from the start.

Perhaps some nannies have had bad employers in the past and go into their job expecting mistreatment (I’ve never been a nanny, but as a former disgruntled employee who was forced to wear a “sexy kimono” to a tech trade show, I understand the innate distrust of your employer.) For example, I once saw a nanny post her resume on a mom/nanny connection group asserting that “I don’t work like other nannies. I check YOUR references. I need the contact info of three other nannies you’ve employed and I won’t be moving forward until I talk to them.” (She did not get any replies.) On the other hand, working moms who employ nannies may feel threatened or resentful on some level, even if the nanny did nothing wrong. It’s easy to feel that you’ve committed a mom-sin by hiring a nanny—if you spend even five minutes on Twitter you’ll see that by hiring a nanny you’ve admitted you “can’t care for your own children.”

For the both the nannies and moms, I think most of the resentment (if there is resentment) comes from the fact that the employee/employer relationship can be extra awkward when it’s inextricably tied to the personal (and not only the personal, but the most important part of the personal: your offspring.) It’s one thing to hire a contractor to build you a new fireplace, and a totally different thing to hire someone to care for your children for years—and presumably, to develop an attachment to them and have some degree of love for them—but at the end of the day, to be an employee who could be terminated at any time. Many of the nannies I’ve met do seem to love the children for whom they care. But also, they could be fired. They could have a dispute about a Christmas bonus. They aren’t the child’s grandmothers. They’re employees. It’s a very fraught dynamic!

Of course, there are many moms and nannies who get along, like most of the nannies I met during my stint as a SAHM. I’m convinced these people are actually more common than the ones who secretly kind of hate each other. But there’s a reason this particular cover image garnered so much outrage from all sides of the political spectrum. Everyone knows these relationships can be super awkward.

But for the rest of you who are neither a mom, nor a nanny, and have no personal stake in this: you’re being weird! According to many people who felt that the cover was rightfully skewering working moms, there is no “right” choice for these mothers. People will frequently assume that working moms are using their entire salary to pay for childcare, and that the choice to stay home is a simple one, forgetting that working moms can also be surgeons and lawyers, and the main breadwinners. People will complain about daycare employees being stretched too thin, so working moms are also neglectful if they use daycare. But if a mom chooses to hire a nanny instead, she’s an unfit mother who prioritizes her work (or, if she’s a SAHM who needs a little extra help with multiple kids, replace “work” with “her Pilates classes and her beefcake personal trainer named Declan”) and that by hiring a woman of color, she is oppressing her.

There’s also the fact that some (albeit not all) of the negative reactions to this cover seems inexplicably aimed at women, when last I checked, fathers are also employers of nannies:

Why are these women not holding men’s marriages together? Are all the privileged women in this example lesbians?

If the cover specifically depicted nannies in unsafe or unfair working conditions, then that would be a different story completely—we could have a discussion about how modern-day human trafficking is often for unpaid domestic labor, or about how even legal domestic labor can be underpaid and unfair, or about the nature of work in general. But the cover didn’t depict any of that. It just depicted nannies happily chatting at the park, one of whom has a son graduating from either high school or college. Anything that we read into that—including my admittedly personal feelings about how mothers are the convenient punching bag for every Internet weirdo’s mommy issues—is more about us than the source material.