This one is IMPORTANT. You need to know EXACTLY what you are doing when maternity and paternity are done. You need a backup to your plan, and a backup to the backup.
Harsh truths:
Nannys are very expensive - you need time to find the right one. It’s a learning experience: how do you interview, what do you want, how do you make sure your not making a mistake?
It takes time for you, your child and your nanny to get used to each other. Give it at least 1 week of dedicated transition time.
Daycares are cheaper but child to teacher ratios of 4:1 make it very tough on infants. They also have horrifically long wait times.
Grandparents are great - but may be out of touch with modern day childcare and cause family friction.
Kids are at the peak of their separation anxiety at around 6-7 months. In California, this most likely coincides with when the combination of maternity and paternity leaves would be done (if you stagger them). It makes it the hardest time to transition a baby to a new caregiver.
My Advice
If possible, do your homework before you even start trying. Get on daycare wait lists as soon as you possibly can.
Get on multiple daycare waitlists - you might think you found the perfect daycare, but during your first week you see red flags that you missed before. The long wait times mean daycares can change a lot from the time you put your name down and the time your kid is actually admitted.
I believe that children fundamentally need love and attention - unless they are able to entertain themselves and interact with other kids (i.e. crawling, sitting and standing by themselves) daycares’ poor teacher to child ratios create an emotional void.
Make sure you spend at least one week transitioning your child into daycare or a nanny. Where you are monitoring from a distance. Observe how your child is cared for when the teachers/nanny are not aware of your presence. If financially possible, have a month to transition. This allows you to support your child as they get used to a new norm in their day to day life.
Try to transition prior to 6 months, at least part time. This can help ease the separation anxiety they experience.
The Backstory
When we found out we were expecting, one of the first things we did was get on a few waitlists for daycares. We didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl, but here in the bay area getting into a daycare, especially a good one, is much more difficult than it should be. (I’ll post more on our experience evaluating a daycare later).
We interviewed and toured a few, joined their waitlists and had one on the top of our list: Stock Farm, affiliated with Stanford, where my wife works and close to my work as well. Fast forward 14 months later when we got to the top of that list. We were ecstatic! It was near the end of my paternity, and our favourite daycare became available right when we needed it to. We scheduled a transition week to get our little girl used to the environment and for us to get used to having her away from us, and being taking care of by someone else (it’s a very scary thought).
During the first day transitioning her, I was with her almost the entire time. Helping her ease into the new environment, the new people and the new kids. The teachers would feed, change, and put her to sleep, but I’d be there. Second day I stepped out of the classroom a few times I noticed her crying but the teachers got to her in time. The third day I stepped out for longer periods, and would hide from both the teachers and her sight. This is when I noticed the ‘normal’ flow of things. At any given time there are 4 kids (4-10 month olds), 1 teacher. If a baby is crying, often times the teacher is occupied, changing, feeding or putting another baby to sleep and it takes some time for them to get to that crying baby who needs something. Our daughter’s cry escalated to a completely new level that I had never heard before. She was not used to this type of 4:1 care (her care had been 1:1 for the last 6 months). I asked my wife to come in and get a second opinion on the situation. At the same time we noticed none of the teachers that we interviewed with 14 months ago were still there. There was also a change in management. We ran into another parent who mentioned that she is taking her kids out of the daycare and into another one due to poor management, processes, and a few other issues that her son came across. This was a clear signal that we too cannot leave our daughter here.
The overall experience lead us to believe that this is not the right age for our daughter to join the daycare. The type of care that she would receive did not mesh well with her personality; she would be unhappy until she is numb. The babies there felt numb.
Nanny care seemed the right way to go as she’d get 1:1 care, and we were fortunate enough to be able to afford a nanny if we had a tight budget and watched our spending.
The problem was, we were 3 weeks away from my paternity ending and no leads. I reached out to friends in Apple, Facebook, Google to post in their internal parent groups for nanny recommendations. We also searched on care.com, Town & Country and urbansitter. We frantically started interviewing nannies, prioritizing those that came in through referrals. We had never interviewed a nanny before. Lots to learn over a very short period of time. It’s important to realize that this is a two way interview. Not only are you evaluating the nanny, but the nanny is evaluating whether you are the right family for him/her. A dozen interviews later, we had a shortlist of 4 nannies we wanted to trial with. We scheduled 3-4hr trials with each nanny. Some invited us to their home (this was new and interesting experience), most was done at our home. We were happy with two of the trails and decided to extend an offer. We were lucky that she accepted.
The real fun starts when the transition week with the nanny started. More on that at a later time.
Sorry for the long post, but I felt like this real life experience was important to share.