When I go to the playground with my toddler, the other children are usually minded by older women who speak Spanish to each other. I’ve been watching them idly, wondering whether to hire childcare – either as a temporary measure to cover medical appointments, or a longterm one to give us more breathing room. (Can we afford it? Am I not falling down on my job if I hire someone to do my work without doing labor to replenish our accounts? It’s so strange to take commissions these days – I don’t find it worth it to hire childcare for $35/hr to cover me so I could do work for $50/hr.)
Leaving all of that aside, there’s the question of whether hired child minders are good at their jobs. I find myself split on this.
When my preverbal toddler gets into micro-conflicts over toys with other toddlers at the park, the nannies tend to swoop in and say, “Share, share” – which often just means “cede”, even if the other child was there first. The nannies seem more interested in preemptively appeasing me, the parent of the other child, than in guiding their charge through a fair navigation of a resource conflict.
I think race is salient to them. Asian nannies are very rare around here. I’m clearly the biological mother, and my irrationality is not worth risking. (Or maybe it’s my fault – they can smell my neuroticism in the way I peer at interleaved hands on the toy bike’s handlebars, and choose to deescalate before I do.) And who cares about fairness between preverbal toddlers, anyway?
Despite this, my observations of them have inclined me more towards hiring someone. If some sort of apocalypse situation arose and I saw a child unattended, I would instinctively expend a lot of slack on taking care of that child as well. I now feel, bizarrely, that the same child soul looks out through all child eyes, and having fallen in love with one instance I have some duty to the others.
I basically see the same love of all children – the same omnifiliophilia – in most of the nannies I see at the park. Since I’ve just been so fussy about fairness over a toy bike, you might think I don’t appreciate this basic instinct. But I see it as nigh miraculous. For $35 an hour and some of vetting, a mammal with the same miraculous omnifiliophiliac programming will keep my child safe and comfortable. Our parental instincts are remarkably catholic, encompassing puppies and baby squirrels. I will get someone who instinctively runs over when my child cries, clucks with concern when she gets a rash, and feels joy when my child is happy.
Yet, if I wanted someone who sees my child as a peer-mind and would teach her in turn to relate to the world as a place of other peer-minds, I’d have to pay significantly more. It’s funny that one of these things is cheap and the other expensive.