Anyone ever hire a nanny?

[miche]

Well because of everything, we have decided to scrap the whole daycare idea and hire a nanny. We'll enroll difficult child in 1/2 day preschool (no naptime!) to keep her busy and the nanny will be responsible for putting her on the bus/driving her to the school.

So has anyone ever hired a nanny? Where did you start? I've called a few agencies and they all want $200 just to fill out an application and then another $1500-$2000 to place a nanny in your home. It seems pretty steep to me...

My wonderful 21 year old neice (difficult child's godmother)has agreed to do it for us when she finishes school for May-June while I'm still at work. But we are going to need a permanent nanny in the fall.

 

[Andrea Danielle]

Hi there, it is challenging to find the right nanny for a difficult child. Most nannies really want or hope for an easy child to deal with and what you don't want to happen is for them to be easily frustrated and then have to go through a couple different ones trying to find out who can handle your child.
What we ended up doing was advertising online through Universities/Colleges and saying right in the ad that our son had BiPolar (BP). This way, we were sure that who ever applied had an interest in working with children like this.
We ended up finding a student who was just graduating from a program called Child and Youth Worker. She was thrilled to get some hands on experience. She chose a career in working with challenging children so she welcomes the behaviours that he has as she can learn from it.
It has turned out to be the best arrangement for us because she wants to learn and we work together on finding solutions. She loves The Explosive Child techniques and tries hard to implement it. When starting with our son, she quickly realized that a lot of those behaviour modification techniques she had just learned in school were not working with our guy :smile:
So, that's my advice, find someone who WANTS to work with a challenging child - not someone who really wants to have a compliant one.

Andrea

 

[miche]

That's a good idea. I'll look at the college...

 

[SRL]

Also check with the education department December grads in early childhood and special education.

 

[miche]

I'll do that.

I also registered at eNannies, and put up a profile. I described difficult child as 'strong willed' and 'highly energetic'. A special education college student added me to her favorites list. She wants experience with all types of kids....

 

[totoro]

Also check out http://www.greataupair.com we hired ours a couple of years ago through there in Indiana. She was a education major... although we didn't know our difficult child was a "difficult child" at the time our aupair was awesome and so patient. If we could find one here we would consider it... We still keep in touch with her.
They also did our taxes etc, through the company. You pay a small fee but it was smaller than some of the private non-online ones.

You set up your profile and you can state that you need someone who can deal with special needs etc.
husband was looking a couple weeks ago and there was a girl who had exp. with special needs but she was just outside of our area. Some are live in or out.