Posted on June 1st, 2011 in category Share Care |
My husband and I shared a Nanny with our in-laws for more than a year. We entered the Share Care with great enthusiasm. Together, our families would certainly be able to find a great Nanny, and having all the cousins together was the icing on the cake. We approached the Share Care like a small business. Before we started to look for a Nanny, we held meetings to talk about the logistics, what we were looking for in a Nanny, what our needed schedules would be, how we’d handle payroll issues, whose house would be used, etc. We wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page about how we envisioned the partnership. While we tried to get everything nailed down in our initial meetings, we found that there were still many smaller issues that arose over time that required us to adjust and modify our arrangement – that is, flexibility over time was at least as important as preparation up front. Here are some of the things we identified and agreed on in our initial meetings, followed by what came up and surprised us once we started working with our Nanny. • Illness policy. We borrowed …
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Posted on December 1st, 2010 in category Share Care |
Initially, a share care seems like it should be a very straight-forward and attractive alternative to hiring a nanny just for your own family. In general, if two families split one nanny, then for each family all the costs should get split in half too. Sounds simple, right? Share care arrangements can work well, but potential problems can often arise among families with different schedules or different parenting requirements, styles or needs. Here in our second ‘share care’ blog post, we’d like to highlight some of the important issues that we see arise in a share care situations and should be considered at the outset. One way to look at it is this: At one end of the spectrum, if your family hires its own nanny, you will have all the complete control and get to make all the decisions. At the other end of the spectrum, if you were to try to combine enough families into one share care group, then you would essentially be a part of a private day care arrangement, and you would need to have maximum flexibility to get the benefits. So, if you’re going to do a share care, somewhere in between those two …
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Posted on November 1st, 2010 in category Share Care |
In general, a “share care” is any arrangement where two or more families cooperate to hire one nanny to care for the children of all the families. Typically, a nanny will require only a slightly higher hourly wage for more children. However, the cooperating families are able to split all the costs among the entire group, so all things being equal, if two families hire a single nanny, the on-going costs to each family can be cut just about in half. In these uncertain economic times, that makes a lot of sense. The best child care providers are seasoned, experienced professionals with an established earning history, and a share care holds some potential to allow caring families to stretch their child care budgets. But these arrangements also present a number of unique issues that the participating families are wise to consider up front. Over the next several blog entries, we will talk about some of the issues inherent in share care arrangements. For those who decide the arrangement is right for them, we will try to provide some tips and resources to help you make the arrangement work. If there is one theme that will come through loud and clear, …
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