Dear Prudence: Nanny Share Language Battle

[minoanmiss]

: My best friend’s child care arrangements fell through a few months ago. We live in an area where it can be very hard to get child care, even if you can afford to pay a lot. My oldest child has now entered school and is only with our nanny for two hours before I get home. My friend has been dropping off her daughter at my house, and we have been doing a nanny-share until she finds other arrangements. My friend pays a small premium to my nanny, but she does not defray any costs my husband or I are paying for our live-in help. Our nanny has been instructed to only speak her native Spanish language to our children. My first language was Spanish, and it is very important to me that my children be fluent in the language. My friend, despite her best efforts, has not found suitable arrangements for her daughter yet after three months. She also just found out that her daughter is slightly behind where she should be verbally. She thinks this might be because she is being spoken to in a foreign language during the day and has asked if we could allow our nanny to speak English until she has found alternate arrangements. I said no, and she is really angry. Part of it seems pointless anyway because my husband says our nanny’s English is poor to begin with (I always speak to her in Spanish so I don’t know). I understand my friend is struggling, but I am not sure I want to compromise. I pay my nanny well above minimum wage in addition to providing free accommodation and meals. I want the service I am paying for and that is the language immersion for my children. I also don’t want to burden my nanny with a language that is unfamiliar to her—she does such a great job helping our family and raising my children. My friend says I am being heartless to her child’s needs. Am I?

A: I don’t think you are being heartless, and I don’t think there are any children who are suffering or not getting their needs met in this arrangement. Many young children are “slightly behind” in their verbal development; it’s no reason to panic, and it’s certainly not the result of hearing Spanish a few hours a day. This little girl presumably hears English at home and from most of the other people in her life. I think your friend is experiencing a great deal of stress and ambiguity due to her inability to secure child care and is overreacting to a very slight developmental bump in the road. There’s very little she feels like she can control at present, so she wants to dictate what language your nanny speaks, which is unreasonable. If it were just a matter of “getting the service [you are] paying for,” however, I might advise you to compromise in the short-term; however, since this nanny is fluent in Spanish, the language she was hired to speak to your children, and struggles with English, I think it would be unfair of you to suddenly change the terms of her employment. Your friend’s daughter is not in any danger. Hearing Spanish on a daily basis is not causing her developmental delay, and you were clear about the nature of your child care arrangements when you offered to share them with your friend three months ago; you should not ask your nanny to start speaking English now.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I'm trying to decide if Best Friend 'merely' needs to chill and to remember the benefits of being bilingual, or if she's being racist and/or ethnocentric.

[rmc28]

Both is always an option!

[staranise]

Yeah exactly. Bilingual and ambidextrous kids may be "behind" monolingual/kids with strong handedness, but that doesn't mean they don't end up having a net benefit.

[ashbet]

LW is doing her friend a major favor -- she should not have to compromise the specific arrangements she made to have her kids cared for by a Spanish-language childcare provider.

Friend can look elsewhere for childcare, if she wants an English-only carer for her kids.

[cereta]

Just as an addition to what everyone else has said, kids who are raised multilingual from infancy often take a little longer to display language skills (not necessarily to develop them, but to display that development), but that is not really a "problem," and even if it were, it tends to even out very quickly. Unfortunately, in the past, this has led some parents (see: my MiL) to speak only the primary language so their kids won't be "behind." In the end, the benefits of multilingualism far outweigh any slight perceived benefit in meeting milestones at the "right" time.

Beyond that, WOW, is friend being an entitled wanker.

[lavendertook]

Entitled wanker is exactly how I'd classify this one. On top of seeing nothing of making an entitled demand on her friend's "gift," and of the effort for the woman working for them, I think the friend not seeing the cultural importance this language plan has for the LW, as well as her thinking it should be no big deal to require a Spanish as first language speaker to speak in English falls under the heading of aversive racism. Maybe LW should encourage her nanny to ask for more than a "small premium" of her friend who she has allowed to DOUBLE the nanny's work load for longer than was initially anticipated because her labor is really not the LW's "gift" to give, ya know? The friend is an entitled wanker, but both she and the LW are treating an employee like an exchangeable commodity here. Pay her the fuck more.

[lavendertook]

Yup. I can only imagine what the "well above minimum wage" is that the LW is paying. She relates the room and board as a wonderful gift she's throwing in for free, not because it's part of the package that better serves her own needs for help at any time something comes up. Despite her wanting to maintain connection to her culture through language, she probably still thinks she's dong the woman a favor because she doesn't speak English fluently and is not of her class standing. But no, no problems with class in the US!

[cimorene]

100% all of this. Not to mention if she was genuinely concerned about her child's verbal development, she probably would have looked for some real information on it and would have quickly discovered everything said by cereta above, ie that multiple languages are only beneficial in the long term even if they occasionally result in a slight delay in children displaying their language skills early on.

[jadelennox]

Yeah. As much as I side with LW over Friend, I got to "any costs my husband or I are paying for our live-in help" and my sympathies immediately went to Nanny, mostly because I am exceedingly in an Eat The Rich mood these days. Anyone who can afford to have a child and live-in help (and doesn't describe it as "my cousin Rico who's in grad school and offered to be a discount au pair for a place to live near the university") is not someone who needs too much sympathy from me.

Eat the Rich. And pay your nanny more for the higher workload (of nannying a non-Spanish-speaking kid, no less).

[cynthia1960]

Definitely a case of pay the nanny more at the absolute minimum. I'll pass on eating the rich, I saw somebody elseweb saying that meal would taste like Botox. I'd also say it would have dollops of spite and unearned privilege.

[conuly]

An extra child doesn't really double the workload. The math is a bit funny, but it averages out because the kids keep each other occupied.

Still, Nanny probably deserves a raise for dealing with an extra parent, particularly one who doesn't want her to speak Spanish to the child.

[lavendertook]

No funny math allowed--nope. Two kids, double the pay. Period. If the fringe benefit is they occupy each other more, and it makes up for double the feeding and cleaning up after, thinking about how to manage, and breaking up fights, consider it a well-earned bonus--lord knows there will be no other bonus.

[conuly]

It's really not double the feeding or cleaning up either. You'd think it would be, but it just doesn't work out that way.

But, as I said, dealing with an extra parent definitely is an increase in workload.

[cereta]

Seriously. It wouldn't even have to be double; childcare usually doesn't work quite that way. But it should be more than a "small premium." And the absence of anything about what the nanny wants/thinks is pretty telling.

[movingfinger]

LW, it's obvious what you should do. You hired the nanny, she lives with you, you all get along well. The arrangement with your "friend" isn't working out. You can say, "I'm sorry, that isn't possible. Let me know whether you wish to continue having Precious come here."

I don't know how little the extra work is paying the nanny, but it should probably be doubled just for this BS.