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Quality, reliable child care is the great unlock.
Want to go to the gym? Go for a run? Go out with friends in the evening? Show up on time for a call and be prepared for it? Do deep work that’s uninterrupted?
You need an extra set of reliable, trusted hands. For all of the above and, frankly, for the sanity of your spouse. A nanny, if you don’t have family around.
But this person is in your home, around your children and spouse on a daily basis. It’s an intimate role. There are a lot of ways it can go wrong.
Personality mismatches. Values clashes. Absentminded. Unreliable. Poor judgment.
We’ve now hired nannies in five countries. After interviewing dozens and letting more than a few go, we’ve gotten clearer about what we want and what we expect.
How we introduce ourselves
Here’s the actual description we send out:
My wife (Dutch) and I (American) are both entrepreneurs. We are looking for someone special who can make our family’s collective life easier and smoother, thus we are looking for an excellent nanny whom we can rely upon.
The most important task is of course taking care of our sweet children. You need to enjoy taking care of babies and toddlers!
In addition, you will take on tasks in the household, such as cooking for us, keeping our home tidy, and doing laundry.
We think it is important that you take initiative, think for yourself and take action, enjoy playing with a little one(s) and that you are looking for a long-term collaboration.
Our filters
Then we have our filters. If a candidate doesn’t pass all of these, it’s a deal-breaker. Some of these started in the nice-to-have pile. They’ve all slowly migrated to the need-to-have pile after trial and error.
Mother herself
This is first for a reason. Someone who’s raising or has raised her own children has an intuition that can’t be taught. She’s seen the fevers, the tantrums, the moments where a toddler goes quiet and that silence means trouble. She doesn’t panic. She doesn’t need to be told what to do when the baby won’t stop crying at 6 PM.
She’s been there.
(We learned this one the hard way. Younger nannies without kids of their own were often wonderful people who simply hadn’t developed the instinct yet.)
Comfortable in the kitchen cooking
Not “willing to heat something up.” Actually cooking.
A nanny who can put a meal together while the kids nap means we come home Breitling replica to a functioning household, not a second shift. This one compounds. A nanny who cooks saves you from the daily decision fatigue of figuring out dinner, which sounds trivial until you realize you’ve been making that decision 365 times a year.
Thinks alongside us
This is the one that separates good from great. A good nanny does what you ask. A great nanny sees the thing you haven’t asked about yet and handles it.
The diaper bag is already packed for tomorrow. The laundry got folded because there was a quiet window. She notices the milk is running low and mentions it before you discover it at 7 AM.
The rest of the list
These are shorter to explain but no less important:
- Good communicator. Tells us what happened during the day without being asked. Flags concerns early. Doesn’t let small issues become big ones through silence.
- Attentive to detail. Did she remember the allergy? The nap schedule? Which park we said to avoid because the gate doesn’t latch?
- Timely. Shows up when she says she’ll show up. This one seems obvious until you’ve had a nanny who is chronically ten minutes late and your 9 AM call starts at 9:12 every time.
- English fluency. We run a bilingual household. Instructions, schedules, and communication happen in English. If there’s a gap here, things get lost. And things getting lost when it involves your child is not acceptable.
- Proactively cleans and tidies. Not asked. Not reminded. She sees it, she does it. The kitchen counter gets wiped after lunch. The toys get picked up before we walk in the door. This is about mindset more than cleanliness — someone who proactively tidies is someone who takes ownership of the space.
- Loyal. Doesn’t gossip about us to other nannies or the neighbors. Treats the relationship with the same discretion we offer her.
- Privacy-friendly. Related to loyalty, but distinct. We don’t want someone posting our children on their Instagram story. We don’t want our home life as content. Non-negotiable.
- Curious. Asks questions. Wants to learn. Reads to them. Teaches them things. A curious nanny raises curious children.
Where to find them
We’ve sourced nannies from:
- Playgrounds. Go where the nannies already are. Watch them work. You learn more in twenty minutes of observation than you do in an hour-long interview. Is she on her phone? Is she hovering? Is the kid having fun?
- Local Facebook groups. Every expat community, every neighborhood has one. Post what you’re looking for. The referrals come fast.
- Local WhatsApp groups. Same idea, more intimate networks. Especially useful outside the US and Europe where WhatsApp is the default communication layer.
- Marketplaces like Sitly or Care.com. Wider funnel, more filtering required. But that’s where volume is.
The best hires have come from referrals and playground observation. The worst have come from marketplaces. Correlation is not causation, but five countries in, the pattern holds.
Interview filters
We do video interviews first now. No need to constantly introduce new people to our home and our daughter. This alone has saved us enormous time and energy.
We used to invite everyone over. You’d spend an hour with someone you knew within three minutes wasn’t going to work out.
A fifteen-minute video call solves this.
Beyond the checklist, here’s what we watch for:
- Does she hover, or does she let the child play and explore? Hovering is a red flag. It signals anxiety, not attentiveness. The best nannies create a safe perimeter and then let the child be a child within it.
- Does she clean up? Is she teaching the child to clean up after themselves? This tells you everything about whether she’s raising the child or just supervising the child.
- Can she get other things done while watching your child? A nanny who can only single-task is someone you’re going to outgrow fast. The best ones fold laundry while the baby plays on the floor. They prep lunch while the toddler colors. They’re running the household, not just monitoring one member of it.
- Does she wash her hands when she first comes in? Small detail. Tells you a lot.
- Is she keen on hygiene and instilling good habits? Teeth brushing, potty training, hand washing after the park.
Is she on her phone?
We are not on our phones in front of our girls. I won’t say never, but it’s a conscious choice. We expect the same from our nanny.
A phone out in front of a child is implicitly saying this device is more important than you. Kids pick up on this immediately.
Sophia, our oldest, already mimics phone calls — she picks up a hairbrush or a tube of toothpaste, holds it to her ear, and calls Oma and Opa. They are watching everything you do, all the time. A nanny scrolling Instagram while your toddler plays on the floor is teaching a lesson whether she realizes it or not.
Values match, not skills match
We’ve used Elimination Communication and are now going without a diaper. A nanny who gets this and supports it vs. one who thinks it’s weird — that’s a values match, not a skills question.
We also ask directly: “Why should we trust you with our child and let you into our home?”
It’s a blunt question. That’s the point. The answer tells you more about the person than any reference check.
The trial day
Once someone passes the video interview, we do a one-day trial. We’re there the whole time. This is not a test of whether she can keep the child alive for eight hours — it’s a test of fit.
You learn things in a trial day that no interview will reveal. How does she move through the house? Does she ask where things are, or does she figure it out? Does the child take to her? Does she default to her phone when there’s a lull, or does she find something to do?
One day. That’s all it takes to know.
Time off and schedule flexibility
Your schedule will change. Their schedule will change. Their kid gets sick. Your trip gets extended. Someone’s mother is visiting.
Have the conversation early about how you handle these situations. Get clear on paid vs. unpaid days off, notice periods, and what happens during school holidays.
The ambiguity is where resentment builds.
Vocation, not gap job
(This will get me in trouble, I know.)
The nannies who have worked best for us are either older women with their own grown children, or younger women from cultures where household management is a respected, taken-for-granted skill. What they have in common is that they treat the work as a vocation — not a gig, not a bridge between other things, not something they’re doing while they figure out what’s next.
The ones who didn’t work out tended to be younger, from Western countries, treating the job as temporary. Between things. Not quite committed. You can feel it. The kids can feel it.
There are exceptions to everything. But when you’re trusting someone with your child, you optimize for the pattern, not the exception.
No nanny cams
We treat our nannies like responsible adults. No cameras. No location sharing. No checking up. If we trusted you enough to hand you our child, we trust you enough to not surveil you.
This is a conscious choice and not everyone will agree with it. Our view is that surveillance erodes the relationship faster than anything it catches.
If you need a camera to trust your nanny, you hired the wrong nanny.
What we’ve paid
What’s interesting is how the cost of a full-time nanny seems to be a reliable indicator of cost of living in a given place. Here are the hourly rates we’ve paid:
- South Africa: $5
- Dominican Republic: $9
- Portugal: €10
- Amsterdam, NL: €17
- Austin, TX: $25
That’s a 5x spread from cheapest to most expensive, and it maps almost perfectly to the general cost of living in each place. (Childcare is one of those expenses that can’t be offshored or automated. It’s fully local. It’s priced by the local labor market, and the local labor market is priced by the cost of living. It’s a clean signal.)
The unlock
Here’s what actually changes when you get this right.
You stop operating in survival mode. You stop counting the minutes until bedtime. You stop being the person who can never make plans, never commit to anything, never be anywhere on time because childcare is always the bottleneck.
Your spouse gets breathing room.
(This matters more than anything else on this list. A burnt-out partner is not a problem a nanny directly solves, but the space a nanny creates is where recovery happens.)
Your work gets better because your work gets real focus for the first time since the baby arrived.
And the kids? They’re fine. Better than fine. They have another adult who loves them, teaches them things you wouldn’t think to teach, speaks to them differently than you do, expands their world.
The great unlock isn’t really about childcare. It’s about bandwidth.
And bandwidth is the scarcest resource in any household with young children.
Get this hire right and everything else gets easier. Get it wrong and you’ll spend more time managing the nanny than you saved by hiring one.
Five countries. Dozens of interviews. More than a few hard conversations. This is what we’ve learned.
BDC