Before I had kids, I underestimated how big a job it is to find good childcare. This post aims to give a picture of what it’s like for people who haven’t yet done it, and be useful to those who are in the midst of it.
There’s a whole other question about whether to have a full-time parent or use paid childcare (or some of both). This post won’t get into that.
I also won’t get into the effects of these different kinds of care on children, which is another hard question. This post lays out a bunch of the research there.
Instead, I’m going to lay out practical aspects of finding paid care. This is focused on ages 0-5 because that’s when care is hardest to arrange. I understand that cobbling together enough camps to cover the summer is a whole thing in the later years, but I haven’t yet had to figure that one out. I’ve either worked in or had my kids in large daycare centers, small home daycares, with au pairs, and with nannies.
Location and hours of care
Unless a daycare center is close to your workplace or along your commute, it likely means some extra commuting. It’s a long day if you get ready, bring the child to daycare, get to work, have a full workday, pick the child up, and get home. It helps if one parent can do dropoff and the other can do pickup. Or you could consider having a nanny do the pickup and thaw some dinner.
Larger daycare centers probably offer longer hours, like 8 – 6, than smaller daycares or in-home caregivers.
In-home care like nannies or au pairs mean that there is no extra commute for you, and the child can still be in pajamas finishing breakfast (or still asleep) when you leave for work. I find this a lot easier than needing to get kids dressed, fed, and out the door at a specific time. If you work from home, you can also see the kids during the day, and breastfeeding is easier if that’s relevant.
Sick time
A downside of daycares is that kids get sick more. The kid can’t be in daycare once they are sick, so parents can miss a lot of work this way.
An au pair or nanny who’s willing to care for a sick (or only kind of sick, but recently sick enough they can’t return to daycare) child is a real blessing.
Finding childcare
It’s strangely hard to search for the local childcare options by location. Google maps has some but not all the options, because operators of small home daycares are often not very web-savvy.
In the US, https://childcare.gov/ has a listing of licensed providers: And this site might be helpful for finding small home daycares (though I’m not sure how much better it is than just looking at the government list above.)
In the UK, https://www.gov.uk/get-childcare has some kind of directory and information about subsidies.
Larger daycare centers will be more organized about having a waitlist. Sometimes the waitlist will be long – you might call a few places during pregnancy to find out how long the waitlist is and decide when to get on one. Smaller places may or may not do this.
If you’re affiliated with a university, they might help with finding local options.
Many nanny and daycare arrangements seem to happen by word of mouth. You can join a local Facebook group or other discussion group for parents in your areas. (Search for city name + “parents” or “moms” or “mums”). This is a good way to find openings – someone’s children are starting school and their nanny will be available, a daycare slot is opening up, etc.
People who aren’t working with their nanny anymore may have an incentive to find a new job for the nanny so the nanny doesn’t file for unemployment, so I take recommendations with a grain of salt.
Costs
There’s no simple comparison, because daycare and nanny costs vary a lot by type and city. If you have an extra bedroom in your house and multiple children, an au pair is probably the cheapest option. Once the kids are in school, any kind of aftercare program at the school is probably the cheapest option.
For us in Boston (before Massachusetts au pair rates changed), for one infant, the annual cost for us looked roughly like
| Au pair | Small daycare | Nanny |
| $21,800 (plus room) | $24,180 | $52,000 |
Unless it’s a temporary arrangement, you will pay for childcare every week of the year, even if you don’t use it. Daycares, nannies, and au pairs still get their usual pay if you’re out of town or out sick, if the center is closed, and during holidays.
There will be some days when your usual care falls through and either a parent needs to take the day off work, or you hire additional care for those days.
Places to search for rates and other questions about childcare in your area:
Berkeley Parents Network for Bay Area
Layering childcare
Sometimes only one arrangement (daycare, nanny, school) is not enough.
- When the child is sick
- When the provider is sick or on vacation
- Snow days when school or daycare is closed
- Planned school holidays / vacation
- For single parents
- For couples where both want to work longer hours than one arrangement allows
Podcast on layered childcare
Thread on backup care
Types of care
Daycares
There might be a center affiliated with your workplace or university.
There are larger centers (run either by a corporation or a community center or similar) and small daycares run by the provider in their own home (“family daycare” or “in-home daycare” in the US, I think this is called “child-minders” in the UK).
All the types of daycare vary in quality. There are a number of guides on things to look for. Some items seem over-the-top to me — for example I don’t think a written discipline policy is needed, but I would ask about how they handle discipline.
US:
- Winnie shows maps of daycares and which of them have open slots, but this seems to be nearly all larger center daycares and missing smaller ones.
- https://childcare.gov/ has a listing of licensed providers.
- NeighborSchools is a service to match you with small home daycares (though I’m not sure how much better it is than just looking at the government list above.)
UK:
Flavors of daycare
It took me a while to realize that some of my gut feeling about a place was how about much it matched my class background. A place with Scandi style wooden furniture felt better to me than a place with bright walls decorated with cartoon characters. But especially for babies, I think that has little to do with how good the care is. As another writer says, “If, like me, you judge people on their spelling and grammar . . . you will not enjoy reading many of their advertisements, even though none of it matters as long as they’re nice to your kid.”
In another direction, there’s a type of middle-class academics-flavored center that I’m suspicious of. My mother worked at a couple of such centers, and didn’t like the “drill and kill” emphasis on worksheets.
I almost didn’t look at a daycare near us because it was housed in a church, and we weren’t looking for a religious setting. But when I did, I was impressed with the director and the setup (nooks and crannies for kids to play and hide in, lots of interesting materials to play with). I’d sooner go with this Christian daycare than some of the more sterile centers I’ve seen.
Grandparents
This might work for a while, but my impression is that it rarely works out long-term as well as people hope it will.
Advice threads
Au pairs
This is about the US au pair program; the UK and other countries have a pretty different system.
Structure
The au pair program is regulated through the state department, and you must match through one of the 14 approved agencies. The agencies charge around $9k/year to help you match with an au pair and provide some support if the match isn’t working out. They have a bunch of candidates somewhat vetted, and you look through profiles and then try to set up calls with candidates. You can make profiles with several agencies and not pay anything until you actually match with an au pair.
Because it’s legally a cultural exchange program rather than a form of employment, there are different rules than with normal employment – for example au pairs can’t legally work more than 10 hours a day or 45 hours a week even if you both want that. They usually stay for 1 year, but some stay for 2. More about the rules.
Massachusetts is the only state that’s decided employment rules also apply on top of the state department rules, so au pairs here are paid more, and there are more rules.
Other au pair thoughts
Aupairmom.com is the best resource on how to match with an au pair, setting fair policies, etc etc.
The au pair matching process feels like a gamble, matching online with someone who you can’t meet in person, and who’s going to watch your child and also be your housemate. Once they arrive there’s more hand-holding with an au pair, orienting them to a new country and job, and often helping them through homesickness because many have never lived away from their family before.
I found the matching process pretty stressful. You fill out long profiles on agency websites and sort through a lot of au pair profiles, but it’s not always easy to learn the things that each of you most want to know. I saw advice to make a website and link to that (though you still have to fill out the agency profiles). After a lot of frustration I finally spent an afternoon on Wix and made a website for us highlighting all the stuff I thought was most important for a candidate to know about us. I don’t know how much difference it made, but we matched with the next person we talked to. Once you realize what makes you different from other families, highlight that. E.g. we didn’t own a car and didn’t expect an au pair to drive — this is great for au pairs without strong driving skills and a dealbreaker for those who want car access. So we wanted them to know it up front.
Sometimes it’s a great match and the au pair will be a family friend long after their year is done. Other times it’s not so great, but it’s a big deal to rematch.
Having live-in care can be really convenient for everyone. The au pair has no commute and won’t be kept away by traffic or bad weather. But I found it somewhat stressful to feel responsible for someone else’s experience in the household, and to have no space away from each other if something wasn’t going well.
Some au pairs are genuinely great with kids, but some want to spend a year in the US and are willing to put up with kids to make that possible. And if you have someone great, you can’t keep them long-term.
Consider how much you want another adult around your house. Some people like having more adult company. We already had dinner with housemates most nights, and our au pairs were a lot less nerdy than the rest of us or nerdy in different directions, so it often felt hard to find much to talk about that everyone was interested in.
Nannies
This is usually the most expensive option, especially per child if you have only one child. In many ways, it’s also the most convenient.
On the higher end, you can get someone with a lot of experience. If you have more hippie / non-authoritarian methods of childrearing, you might be more likely to find a nanny who’s on board with that than with other options.
Live-in nannies typically make about the same hourly rate as those who live on their own, plus they are provided with a room and food. It’s not standard to charge for these, and some states like Massachusetts limit the amount you can legally charge an employee for housing. (I saw references to such a law existing in California but I can’t find the actual law.) A lot of people have the hope of offering a free room in exchange for part-time childcare, but I don’t know anyone who’s had this work out, and there are lots of stories of disappointment.
A nanny share (nanny cares for children from two families) it can reduce costs, though not by half since the nanny is dealing with two families’ schedules, rules, etc.
If you expect them to do laundry, cooking, or cleaning, be specific about this. It is not the default, and it’s common to pay extra for these extra services.
If you’re getting a temporary arrangement like a student on their summer vacation or someone between regular jobs, there’s less expectation of covering their taxes, vacation time, etc. But if it’s someone’s long-term job, they likely expect normal employment stuff like paid vacation and periodic raises.
Be clear about whether the arrangement will be over the table or under the table. Many nannies prefer under the table because they don’t report their income or pay taxes on it. That’s illegal for both them and you, and if they change their mind later (for example because they want unemployment) you could be in trouble. If you pay legally / over the table, many nannies will expect a higher pay rate because the going rate assumes no taxes. This calculator helps you figure out what the pre-tax pay should be to come out to a given post-tax level. If an arrangement is short-term or occasional you may not need to pay tax – it kicks in at a certain level of quarterly or annual pay, currently $2400/year.
In many locations, employer requirements that apply to other jobs apply to nannies too. You probably need to pay overtime for hours beyond 40/week, and probably need to provide worker’s compensation insurance in case they get injured on the job. There may be specific rules for domestic workers (including nannies) about break times, overtime, etc. This site lists rules by state.
It’s not usual to provide health insurance to nannies in the US – this site says 17% of nannies get some kind of health insurance provided by their employer. It’s more common for higher-end nannies.
Places to look for nannies, in addition to word of mouth and social media groups:
US:
UK:
Nannies while traveling
You might want to hire a nanny or babysitter while traveling (because you’ll be at a conference or work event, or a wedding or similar.) In many cases the nanny and child(ren) can hang out in your hotel room or at the venue, and you can check in with them during the day.
On the very low end, you can try looking for a nanny on a free service like Craigslist, Gumtree, or the local equivalent. I’ve never found that worthwhile.
On the next level, you can pay for a subscription to ac matchmaking service like Care.com to find a local nanny. These are mostly people who are between jobs, so they aren’t always the greatest. I’ve never had anyone who seemed incompetent with the children, but several people who flaked out after anywhere from one day to one week (this was at the low end of pay and without checking references – in retrospect I probably should have checked at least one reference even for a one-day thing). I’ve also had a few really good people from these services.
On the high end, you can use a temporary nanny service in the city you’re going to. One example is NannyPoppinz, and there are local agencies in lots of cities. They do background checks and interviews, which makes the matching process less work for you.
If you already have a nanny at home, you can see if they’re willing to travel with you. Expect to pay for their flight and their own hotel room.
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