WWYD: nanny looking for a new position?

DallasHorn

I'm struggling with how to handle this situation and wonder what others think.

As context, we've had our current nanny for a little over 2 years. My kids are DD1 - almost 9, DS - just turned 6 and DD2 - almost 3. Back in the beginning of the calendar year, our nanny (who's in her early 60's) mentioned that next year begging in 2015, she wants to stop working full time and reduce her hours.  This was a good thing for us as we decided to put DD2 into preschool this fall. As the youngest of 3, she is more advanced on what she does since she's always trying to keep up with the older 2. With our nanny we agreed to an arrangement where during the school year, she would work a reduced schedule on T & Th (so 2 - 5, vs 8 - 5). We've had 8+ years of childcare, so this is a welcome budget thing to start to reduce childcare!  Our nanny had at first said she might try to find a part time job during those hours and then she decided not to and just make her financials work.

Fast forward...we are just 2 weeks into the reduced schedule and I have no idea what prompted me to check, but I got on care.com to see if she was looking. Since Care.com is how I originally found her, I still have our initial emails sitting in my account online. When I pull up her profile, I'm able to see when she has logged in and her current profile description says "I'm looking for either full time or part time". 

On the first day of preschool, I casually asked her if she was still looking and she said it was really hard to find something part time and indicated she would just use the time to do other things (like yoga -- she's pretty active).

Since then, I've been regularlly checking care.com and it's clearly stating she is logging in every day - - which I don't have a problem with - - after all if I was looking for a new job, it's not like I'd tell my current boss. BUT, I'm wondering if I should address the conversation again . My concern is do I need to start looking for a replacement b/c she is leaning toward taking another full time position? I just don't want to be left hanging and having gone through the nanny search a couple of times, I know it can take several weeks to find the right person. I don't necessary want to say...hey I can see you've been regularlly checking care.com, but wondering if there is a right way to address the situation if at all.

As far as do I want to lose her....no. She is the best nanny we've had thus far. However, she did just get a 3% raise and we are not in a position to pay even more simply to keep her. My hope was to get through this school year and then we could reassess childcare for summer 2015 and the 15-16 school year.

smoochmoosemom

I agree that you shouldn't bring up the care.com thing but that you should check in with her to see how your part time arrangement is working. It's what she said she wanted, but maybe now that it's reality she sees that her budget isn't working and it's hard to find part time work that fits the hours she has available.

MickeyM04

We had a very similar thing happen this past winter.  Except our nanny was FT and never gave any indication that she was looking for anything else (unlike yours who explicitly stated she was possibly going to look for something PT since you didn't need her FT anymore.  Our nanny had started to become unreliable and missed several days of work in a very short time period and it was getting to be a real problem.  So we started looking on care.com for possible back-up care and found her profile which had been created recently (we were able to date it because she had recently had a baby and she included the age of her baby in the profile) and had logged in recently, stating that she was looking for a new FT position wherein she could watch kids out of her home (she had never mentioned this to us or asked if we would bring DS to her).  Well we started looking for alternate FT care right away, because we realized that if she was looking and she found something, she would obviously take it, and we couldn't be left in the lurch.

I opted out of talking to her about it, because I figured nothing good could come of it.  Either she would lie about it to cover her tracks (she was just curious what was out there, she did it on a bad day but had since changed her mind, etc.); or she would tell us the truth but then start REALLY looking, knowing that we would likely be doing the same thing and it would be a race to see who could line up an alternate arrangement first (e.g. I'm not going to sit and wait for her to give notice, and she's going to assume that since we know she's looking that we will try to find someone else and then amp up her search); or she would tell me that she really didn't mean it/was just curious/etc. and that would be truthful, but I would never be able to believe it. 

As it turned out, she ended up quitting very last minute and we were sort of in the lurch anyway.  That being said, regardless of how much you like her, don't want to have to deal with finding new care (which I totally would get), etc., your top concern should be yourself and your kids.  And if she's looking, which she obviously is (why else would she be logging in to care.com daily?  does she need a nanny?  I don't think so), there's a chance she will find something else and you will end up screwed.

I personally don't see the point in asking how the arrangement is working out.  She's obviously not being honest with you, so I'm sure she isn't going to start now.  We had several state of the union conversations with our nanny after she had her baby--is this still working out OK?  Do you feel stressed?  Can we do anything to make things go more smoothly (pre-prepare DS's lunches, for example), etc.?  And we were told everything was great, no problems, very happy, blah blah, and then we find the care.com profile.  I mean think about it, if you were job searching and your boss was like, are you happy here, is everything working out OK, would you say, "No, I'm not happy, this sucks?"  Of course not.

I'm a little bitter though on your behalf since this happened to us, so my opinion is very black and white on this subject.  GL to you, I hope it works out one way or the other!

bumpuser10331514

Best case scenario is that she's looking for PT, but leaving the door open for a better FT position. I like what PP said about asking her how the new schedule is going for her. I think that would open the door to her mentioning if she's seriously looking. If she doesn't mention looking for anything, I would guess she's not seriously looking, but I would probably still casually revisit your expectations if she ever decided to leave (i.e., notice).