A while back, the Internet was treated to a clip posted on social media by a Bengaluru-based mother who admitted to spending a whopping 46,000 rupees every month on two nannies. They looked after her two toddlers while she worked or vacationed. Heated debates promptly ensued.
Some sang praises for the woman’s thoughtful delegation of childcare while prioritising self-care and goals, while others (possibly exhausted to their wits) wished it were them with two nannies. But mostly, commentators (parents or not) chastised the woman for seemingly not wanting to spend time with her own children, or, dishing out what they believed was an unjustifiable amount on salaries for childcare, and selfishly alienating her tender-aged children to fulfil unjustified career whims. Why have children when you can’t be bothered to spend time with them, one comment rebuked.
Such sentiments are not typical to Internet comment sections alone. Parenting gurus and public personas like ‘momfluencers’ and ‘tradwives’ proudly brandish the “we don’t believe in nannies” or “I have never had a nanny” rhetoric to indicate that there is more value in the kind of parenting when substituted or paid childcare is not relied on by the mother. The latter is touted as a cheat code and short-cut unbecoming of a ‘real’ parent.
This sentiment finds currency in Indian family courts, too. Custody battles witness a familiar rhetoric where estranged parents competitively scramble to demonstrate which of the two parents could provide better quality of custody for the child. Resultantly, court pleadings and attorney arguments frequently centre around submissions echoing similar assumptions about mothers with nannies. Submissions such as, “the child is habitually left with servants while she works and absents herself from home and the life of the child”, are typical and meant to cast doubt on the mother’s true capacity to care and rear. Notably, couples prior to separating typically begin their parenting journeys on the mutual acknowledgement that nannies are a requisite in daily arduous childcare, who facilitate remarkable convenience and ease in children’s upbringing, particularly in metro cities and nuclear family set-ups. However, on acrimonious separation and in their custody claims before courts, the same reliance on paid childcare is weaponised to demonize the parent doing so. Quite fascinatingly, family courts, while granting visitation access to fathers at their residences, accord plenty of positive weightage to the presence of grandmothers and other female relatives in that home as a reliable indicator of the safety, suitability and stability of that home for the visiting child.
Value judgement against mothers who rely on paid childcare exposes simmering anxieties and skewed assumptions about parenting roles from the standpoint of ‘the good mother’ on one hand and on the other, ‘the father’. It assumes that the delegating mother, who, far from being a good mother, does not truly parent or nurture her child, and falsely equates her choice to partake in non-parenting time for her hobbies, work or rest as ‘child neglect’. The Bengaluru-based mother on the social media clip is not touted as the provider for her children and family that she actually is, but is rather viewed arbitrarily from the lens where she is a mother who by choice is not fused with her children at all hours in a day. What is worse – she pays for the substitute caregivers from her own income. This is a role we are evidently not comfortable with her playing. This approach fails to acknowledge a longstanding human tradition of rearing children through several hands in a community.
There has always existed the norm to tap into other human resources for childcare whether one paid for it or not. Recall the commonly referenced proverbial “village” required to raise children? Yes, that one. The advent of the norm where nannies are frequently hired by families to help with child rearing has nothing to do with ‘modern parenting’. Rather, the ‘nanny economy’ is an inadvertent and obvious transition in the customs of child-rearing that communities have historically indulged in. Generations of children from Indian middle class and upper-middle class families will recall the ubiquitous presence of childhood ‘didis’, ‘didas’ or ‘ayaas’ flanking their parents or playing the role of the omnipresent caregiver adult at home. There is nothing novel about delegating care of children. And yet, we seem to be in denial and latch unwarranted judgments on mothers who use approaches that are rather ordinary and customary.
A mother owes no explanation as to how she decides to gather her personal tribe to raise her children.
Part of the public reactions to the video is the complaint that the mother should be the one babysitting her children. We are not comfortable with the idea that she is at work, let alone that she prefers to work. She is barely lauded for earning her own income and enjoying the financial prowess and discretion to pay for not one, but two domestic workers to look after her children. No, we don’t like that because we want her to be economically dependent on her husband. We root for her economic self-abandonment and unquestioned acceptance of a belief that motherhood entails around-the-clock babysitting and a commitment to domesticity, not to the workforce, or perhaps a job of her dreams. There appears to be collective discomfort in a woman assuredly earning a financial corpus of her own. She is much rather preferred stationed in domestic life.
Nobody accounts for the grim reality that an economically dependent wife and mother’s life is mercilessly torpedoed in the event of the earning spouse’ death or his illness and inability to work, or if he chooses to leave her. The father’s role is not part of the discussion in the aftermath of the video because in that particular family set-up, he already seems to be doing what we prefer as his default – working for his earnings. We do not ask why he is away from his children. We are glad he upholds the male provider standard. We do not ask further questions about whether he undertakes childcare or domestic responsibilities.
A woman is entitled to delegation of childcare whether or not she is a working parent. She may choose whatever mode for this that works best for her: whether she prefers to appoint her relatives to stand in as her substitutes while she works or rests, or opt for trained nannies who she perhaps considers a better fit for implementing her parenting goals. We ought to stop our judgment of mothers and how they choose to spend their time and resources. Fathers in child custody battles are often considered better custodians of their minor children when their older mothers and sisters are in the same home. And yet, mothers are belittled for the same approach to substituted caregiving and their capacity to mother inspires no confidence. This judgment says more about the judge than its unwilling subject. Why do we feel irked and fascinated by a woman taking charge and organising her domestic life with her own money?
The mother on the video felt the need to justify her expenses doled out monthly for childcare. She also explains that her children’s nannies are not merely fulfilling a transactional role but are an extension of her family. It’s almost as if she foresaw the impression her choices would leave and prefixed what she believed would be a palatable explanation to her audience.
But no mother needs to explain her decision to employ nannies any less than she has to explain why she employs two instead of one, or that the nannies route this income to educate their own children in their native hometowns. A mother owes no explanation as to how she decides to gather her personal tribe to raise her children. It is time we left women alone to their parenting choices and took a good look at what part in us mothers with nannies seem to unsettle.
