Cross posted on sharidelic.

The saying “It takes a village to raise a child” meant little to us when we thought of having a kid. Our concerns mostly revolved around finding the right school when the time came. I'm sure that will consume our lives in due time especially because we live in an area with some of the most expensive schools or school districts in the country. But for now I’ll only focus on our experiences with childcare and the lack of a "village" to raise our son!

The first time the issue arose, when we started looking for daycares to send him at 5 months, hoping to return to work at the end of my maternity leave. After a lot of research and visits to several daycares, we were able to find one we liked but Virj couldn’t adjust to the change and developed some health issues. Subsequently, I had to quit my job and take care of him full time for the next few months.

Nanny/Babysitter

We started looking for a nanny when Virj was 9 months old as we realized that he needed individualized attention. I went through several referral channels including the Oracle employee newsgroup and our friendly neighborhood priest at the Hindu temple but none of them worked. I placed ads at various places, exchanged emails with potential candidates, interviewed at least a dozen people and made numerous phone calls to check references. We found candidates of all kinds including a lady who started pitching for her home daycare after coming in for an interview as a babysitter and refused to accept our offer on health grounds! We hired a person found through Craigslist who lasted a week.

To cut a long story short, we managed to find a mother’s helper (instead of a nanny) eventually, who worked for a year. Though it was just part-time help, it improved our lives considerably. During this time I went back to work and luckily was able to work from home most of the time. That helped because our helper/babysitter kept changing her schedule constantly. Even this relatively blissful period came to an end quickly when the sitter decided to quit during our long trip to India, in spite of an advance retention bonus.

Daycare

Being utterly fed-up with nanny/babysitters, we started looking into daycares again! Most of the big commercial daycares in our area had long wait lists and so we shopped around for home daycares. I looked up my referrals from a year ago and picked two --- one of them got filled even before I could go in for my scheduled appointment and the other owner hiked her prices the moment she heard about us having a babysitter in the past! The later apparently had a sliding scale of prices (that wasn't published anywhere) and charged her clients according to their perceived "affordability". Needless to say that the hourly rate she quoted would be the same for a well-qualified nanny in the Bay Area!

So, we had no choice but to fall back on the daycare Virj first went to. So far Virj has been there few times and seems to like it. We are still worried about how he adjusts as he continues to be a very fussy eater. The ideal situation would be to divide up his time between a daycare and a babysitter at home --- that way he would be able to socialize with other kids and get the one-n-one attention at home. So we are continuing our search for a part-time helper.

Babysitter

This time I'm focusing exclusively on Craigslist. I placed several ads and received emails mostly from college grads who are clearly interested in the job due to lack of opportunities elsewhere. Even some parents are willing to take advantage of this, like this ad posted by a couple on Craigslist:

Temporary” Babysitting/Nanny Position for Upwardly Mobile Young Professional
My husband and I are looking for an energetic, recent college graduate who is looking for a professional job in the real world but finding the job search challenging due to the economy.

We have a place for you to ride out the economy while earning a paycheck. We would like for you to be our nanny, helping with our two year daughter as well with cooking and light cleaning. We are both well educated professionals and well connected in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities. We are more than happy to mentor you with job search and career strategies as well as make introductions to people we think may be able to help. (So far we have placed two babysitters in great jobs.) We are a “fun” family. We love to go sailing on the San Francisco Bay, travel to the Napa Valley and generally enjoy life. Travel is a big part of our life and we would love for you to travel with us. ….

I’ve done several phone interviews and few face-to-face interviews so far. The candidates have ranged from a yoga enthusiast, who "gets a headache from machine noises" to an ex-Singapore Airlines staff/babysitter, who gave me a long lecture about the state of the business during a phone interview. Being desperate, we even tried out a 22-year old sitter with a very flexible schedule. Within the first few hours we realized it was a bad match --- she definitely fell in the category of caregivers using this as temporary work alternative.

This clip from ThirtySomething, an 80’s TV show summarizes my babysitter search nicely!



At times, we wish we lived close to our families and could use their help! All the local resources I used haven't been very useful.

Our experience partly reflects on the current economic condition and the wage differential between certain service sectors. I bet school teachers in the Bay Area get paid far less than full time nannies! Did you know that pilots for major American airlines can earn as little as $17000 per year? See Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A love Story to understand what I mean! I think some of the wages in the childcare industry are not justified especially because there’s no definite standard by which the skills can be judged. Some of the background checks available online are not even accurate. Apparently, not all counties disclose full background information to online agencies. So, we have to cross our fingers and hope it works out with the next babysitter and she ultimately turns out to be trustworthy!

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