Last week new mothers were told by Barbara Judge, the first female chairman of the Institute of Directors, not to take long maternity leave, but to work on and hire a nanny. “My mother used to say when a baby is born it needs to be fed, bathed and diapered,” she said. “An 18-year-old girl can do that. Your job is to get the money to pay the 18-year-old girl. When you have to be there is when the child gets smarter than the nanny.”
Lady Judge said the system in the US – where mothers are entitled to only 12 weeks’ unpaid leave, compared to 12 months off and 39 weeks’ paid leave in the UK – helped safeguard women’s jobs. She herself took just 12 days off work when her son was born.
The financial drain of employing a nanny is one thing, but we shouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Share and Care is an organisation which began by matching young people needing somewhere to live with older people who need company. Now it also matches families with young children or young adults with special needs with people living alone and who want company. Between them there might be a big difference in age or not.
These arrangements resemble, obviously, the family: people of different ages and characters sharing their needs and capabilities in dozens of different ways that may even work better than it would with their real kinfolk. Looked at this way, would an 18-year-old nanny really be such a bad addition to childraising? I’m reminded of the old saying : “God gave us our relations; thank God we can choose our own friends.”
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