People will once again say I’m unfair to the young but it’s becoming clear it was a waste of time to give a chance to younger nannies. There is no planet on which a 23-year-old nanny should make 25% more than a tenured professor gets for a clearly much more qualified job. Fifty-year-old nannies with 30 years of experience and tons of references don’t expect anything in the vicinity of these insane salaries, of course.
Get Off My Lawn!
Clarissa's Blog 
You haven’t learned by now that people don’t get paid what they DESERVE? They get paid whatever the local market value is for their service. That’s how capitalism works.
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I think older, more experienced workers are better aware of what the real value of this work is.
I just feel such a disconnect with these young people. And it bothers me because I’m not that old. Plus, I need to be able to understand them in order to work with them.
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“more experienced workers are better aware of what the real value of this work is.”
Agreed as long as “the real value” = “what people can be persuaded to pay”.
“I just feel such a disconnect with these young people. And it bothers me because I’m not that old.”
The gig economy = Get every red cent you can because who knows when the next chance will be. Yay liquidity?
Also, maybe this is something they’re being taught. If the salary is something to be negotiated and they ‘know’ to make the first offer as high as possible (without having a clear idea of what a realistic first offer should be).
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Two cents:
What if in your part of the country only the rich and eccentric ever need the nanny services, while all the “normal” women just do not work? When we came to the US our daughter was 6… And most of the American-born mothers of her classmates did not work even when their children were 6…
Years later, when we were moving to Montreal, the university assigned me a person to help in finding and renting something… He started from driving me to the Westmount. When I asked him why would he do such a strange thing to a new assistant professor he responded by pointing out that maybe I am independently wealthy… I guess this still happens a lot…
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Since the strange young woman, I talked to several older nannies and they all charge very reasonable amounts. I’m afraid it’s a generational thing.
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Or maybe she took a couple of courses in feminist studies, and took the idea that “traditional female work” is very much underpaid very much to heart…
What if she is collecting material for her dissertation?
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The number of spelling errors in her message make me doubt she will ever write a dissertation. She confuses “then” and “than.”
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Off topic, but I just had to share this.
I’m sure the Bill Gates foundation will plonk down millions of dollars to implement this grand vision of education.
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God. Some people definitely have too much money and time than what they know what to do with. Imagine the poor teachers who will be subjected to endless presentations about this idiotic scheme. 😦
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The original source. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.468.6726&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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God, who comes up with this crap?
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There is no planet on which a 23-year-old nanny should make 25% more than a tenured professor gets for a clearly much more qualified job
How did the dewy nanny justify her rate to you? I’m curious.
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I didn’t continue the discussion after she quoted the price. I’ll get my share of conversations with 20-year-olds who think they should be celebrated for showing up when school starts.
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I thought she might have said something like “I have a degree in early childhood education and psychology and I’m the oldest of five children so I babysat all of them and my mother ran a daycare and made me work as an aide,” or “I’m actually Mary Poppins — at a discount.”
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This is when you find out that you may not be able to find someone to do things for you for any price that you do have to do for free. Tip: find an artsy woman in her 30s who is looking for a low pressure job. Or find a qualified caregiver who runs a day care center out of her house. Keep in mind that you are in a sellers’ market. And good luck.
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We’ll be paying $300 per week for our two kids to have childcare. That’s pretty much the going rate here. But they are older and not so hard to care for. Infants are usually more expensive for childcare. I might try to minimize my costs by just working in the evenings. But we’ll have to wait and see how that goes.
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