Nanny Employer Blog

I recently had the opportunity to visit our new Vail office.  We are thrilled to be able to offer services to existing and new clients who may vacation or own a second home in the Vail/Beaver Creek/Bachelor Gulch/Arrowhead/Eagle part of Colorado.

My family loves to vacation there and we experienced our first Thanksgiving with all 4 of our kids in ski school!  Our youngest, 3 year old twins, were finally potty trained and anxious to hit the slopes!  They got as far as the “Magic Carpet” where they rode up a motorized flat escalator of sorts and were able to “ski” a few feet down with the help of a wonderful (and very patient) ski instructor, making “pizzas” (wedges) and avoiding the alligator alleys (translate “trees”).  We are all anxious to head back up again on Christmas Day for some more practice.  Even though I have a wonderful nanny who lives with us and will be travelling with us to Colorado, I’m sure that I will avail myself of our services there so that I can give my much-loved and hard-working nanny a chance to ski herself!
 
We are so thrilled to have partnered with Jill Smirl, our franchisee in Vail,  to open a much-needed office in that area.  Jill is a mother of 3, knows everyone in the Vail Valley, and is an awesome realtionship builder with a passion for quality and customer service, so she is a great fit for MBF!  She also purchased a local operation, Vail Sitters, and has incorporated their client base into Mom’s Best Friend Vail/Beaver Creek.  We offer a wide range of services in this market, some of which differ from other markets, including ski companions, property managers, and more.  If you are a current member in any of our cities, keep in mind that your membership is good in Vail as well.  A membership is so versatile, since it can be used in any city for a wide range of services, and makes a great Christmas gift so keep this in mind for a stocking stuffer.  If you’re planning a white Christmas in Vail, don’t forget to make MBF part of your plans!

Last week, I attended the Alliance of Premier Nanny Agencies conference in Las Vegas, along with 100 of my colleagues who own and work for professional nanny agencies all over the country. We enjoyed a great time of collaboration and idea generation. On Friday, Lisa Vines (VP of Sales Operations) and I spoke to the group about how to enhance your on-call (sitter) services. We shared ideas about how to exceed client expectations, reward your nannies, and provide corporate backup child care (as we do for many Texas businesses). I am also proud to say that we were recognized as a top 3 nominee for Nanny Agency of the Year at an award dinner on Saturday evening.

Attendance at events like this conference help us to stay on top of the latest background checks, providing top notch customer service, and general ways to improve our offerings to our valued, loyal client families. Belonging to one or both industry associations (the other being the International Nanny Association) signifies an adherence to stringent industry standards, ethics and expectations in the running of your business. Mom’s Best Friend has been a member of both associations for many years and helped with planning conferences, speaking at conferences as an industry expert, and working on various committees to help make improvements.

You may be aware that the CBS program, The Early Show, is running a week long series on nannies. The broadcast has made the common mistake of implying that online-only job sites provide the same level of service as professional agencies.

The Alliance for Professional Nanny Agencies has provided some of the following information to help parents understand and differentiate between an online nanny database and a full-service nanny placement firm (like Mom’s Best Friend).

A Sittercity spokesperson was interviewed in one segment. Sittercity connects families and nannies online and rarely screens either. Job listing services such as Sittercity should not be confused with full-service nanny agencies.

Online job listing services can give the client a false sense of security. Many online services steer parents to low-cost, computer background checks that offer minimal screening compared to what a top-notch nanny agency would consider adequate. Sittercity connects parents to the LexisNexis background check that costs $9.99. Sittercity’s own web site has a disclaimer that the LexisNexis check covers just 38 states (http://www.sittercity.com/help_detail.html?tag=bgcin). Some online job listing services call the LexisNexis check “nationwide” which can be misleading.

Top notch household staffing agencies require a computer background check, and much more, on each job candidate. Most quality agencies hire a seasoned professional to conduct background checks. You can read in detail about what a thorough background check entails on our web site at: http://theapna.org/blog. We, at Mom’s Best Friend, use a company that provides the most comprehensive background check available at this time, as well as ongoing monthly monitoring for the lifetime of the placement.

Quality nanny agencies also meet each nanny candidate in person and check the candidate’s references and resume. Online job listing services most often do not check qualifications or references. They simply advise parents to perform those tasks.

Careful, experienced household staffing agencies are the best way to protect children, but they also help ensure a job seeker’s safety. Katherine Olson of Minnesota was found dead last October, one day after she responded to an online ad for a nanny job. The 19-year-old man police suspect placed the ad, where he posed as a parent seeking a nanny, is charged with her murder and awaiting trial.

A responsible staffing agency knows when one of its job candidates is being interviewed, and the candidate is expected to report in afterward. The personal contact that a qualified agency provides is an added security measure for both candidates and the hiring families. That service also increases the chances a family will find a nanny that is right for them and decreases the chances of high turnover of nannies in their employment.

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By now, you have hopefully survived the first week of school and have begun to get into a good fall routine. After numerous trips for school supplies, uniforms, and books, and meetings with new teachers, you and your kids can now relax a bit and settle into your new schedule.

For our family, it is always the chance for a new start, a blank slate and we spend a lot of time talking to our eldest 2 daughters about what to expect in this new school grade, how to make the most of their education, how to make friends (and keep them!), first impressions with new teachers, and outlining our expectations of them so that we can all have a great year! It’s of even greater significance for our family to go through this exercise since mom and dad are the teachers too (we home school two of our children 2 days a week as part of the University Model School model school they attend).

One of the biggest challenges we personally face is in getting our 6th grader to take ownership of her school work. We want her to take pride in completing her assignments to the best of her ability and turning them in on time. Our school has a low tolerance for work turned in past the deadline and really wants to help teach kids early on the importance of meeting deadlines so that later on into adulthood, when it’s an important presentation for work, the sense of responsibility and self management has already been long established. For some great homework tips for parents, check out: http://www.newsforparents.org/expert_motivate_kids_homework.html.

Our live-in nanny/home educator, Katie, is a tremendous asset in assisting with our childrens’ learning and development. She made a trip to Teacher Heaven to update our home classroom with colorful bulletin boards and teaching tools, ordered all of our new books and uniforms, and helped get our dedicated space and “students” ready for a new school year! We recently decided that we would set aside time each week for a “book club” where she and I will read relevant books on raising children and discuss ways that we can implement some of the things we are both learning when working with the kids together so we are always on the same page and present a united front! Our first choice is “The Magic of Love & Logic” and I am already very excited about some of the great takeaways from this first read.

At Mom’s Best Friend, we want to support you during this sometimes stressful transition with all the tools and resources you and your family need! Let us know if we can help in any way.

You might have seen one of the two news segments this last week featuring Mom’s Best Friend and our background checks partner, CSIdentity. View Fox segment | View CBS segment

We are very excited to roll out this new program for our clients which will incorporate the most comprehensive checks now available. We believe that we are the first in our industry to introduce this type of check into the screening process, thus guaranteeing our client families tremendous peace of mind.

This new firm we have partnered with, CSIdentity, searches more than 350 million unique identity records for criminal histories, which accounts for 70 million criminal identities in its database versus the FBI which has 55 million. New to our screening are two added features now possible through CSIentity:

• Identity Authentication: validating the identity of each candidate through a series of questions that only that candidate would be able to accurately answer
• Ongoing Monitoring: monthly monitoring that continues to ensure the candidate maintains a clear criminal background.

This last feature is at no additional cost to our clients and continues for the entire duration of employment between the client and caregiver. We are so pleased to be able to offer this unique and exhaustive background checks package to our valued clients.

Mom’s Best Friend has been active in helping to create standards for our industry through the International Nanny Association (www.nanny.org) and The Alliance for Premier Nanny Agencies (www.theapna.com) in the realm of background checks so that there is consistency across the country in this arena, thereby protecting families and children from substandard screening. Let us know what you think about our new offerings!

I just hosted an event at my home for more than 20 of Austin’s best nannies who all came to hear Claire Flynn from For Kids’ Sake speak about terrible twos and terrific toddlers. Although our family has just barely past this stage with our youngest (3-year-old twins), there was still much knowledge to glean that carried over.

I was pleased to see two employers attend with their nannies hoping to take in the great message together and more easily reference what they learned in future conversations. It is heartening to see caregivers so invested in their charges and making their lives better that they are willing to come on their time off, after a long day of working, and take in anything new they can learn. Many shared stories (temper tantrums in the checkout lines), anecdotes (a spoon of honey before bed to control bladder accidents), and sought advice for dilemmas they were encountering from the former Stanford specialist.

The main theme we took in was casting a vision of who you want your child/charge to be when 18 or 19 and leaving the home and working backward from there to teach these core competencies and life skills beginning as early as possible. Claire focused on “democratic parenting,” teaching children they are not the center of the universe, giving them the freedom to fail, equipping them with independence, self reliance and problem solving abilities and spelling out the consequences of any action ahead of time to secure the child’s “buy in.” Role playing and encouragement verses praise. And then, repetition, repetition, repetition!

Our caregivers were coached on how to remain neutral (at least in appearance!) when a child acts out in order to keep from giving them what they want…a reaction! They were empowered and extolled for their professionalism and daily commitment to an often challenging but very rewarding vocation. After more than 2 hours of coaching and Q&A, our session came to and end and it was another half hour before Claire could sneak out and head home.

The only feedback I received was “I wish it was longer! I have so many more questions!” Be encouraged…we will bring her back again next quarter to impart more pearls of wisdom!