[From Unsplash]

It was a regular school day. I was discussing an economics extended essay with a 17-year-old boy in a post lunch session. He had missed school lunch because of a house meeting. The teachers were being served tea so I asked if he would like a cup. “Yes miss and a biscuit. I’ve not had anything all day,” he said. I was shocked. Lunch was understandable, but what about breakfast? “Someone has to be awake to make breakfast,” he said. He was a bright kid and an avid footballer but demonstrated poor self-management skills. Despite being a prefect, he struggled to make it on time for morning assemblies and usually had a poor turnout. I observed how at every parent teacher meeting, he would brush aside his mother’s genuine concerns about his performance. I never saw the boy’s father in the two years that I taught him.

As someone who has taught in some of Mumbai’s elite schools, I have witnessed family dynamics play out at parent teacher meetings. Despite the teenage angst that very often gets directed at parents, you can tell the hands-on parents from the ones who tend to not be present and involved, which more often than not exacerbates this teenage angst. Take discussion over marks. There are kids who  get annoyed and even embarrassed by their parents’ constant inquest about an odd mark lost in some assessment. And there are others who are in a perfect symphony with their parents. They discuss overall assessments, not one mark, help each other recall a competition, assessment, movie they watched together and so on. 

You can usually trace the journey of a troubled teenager to childhood where parents’ absence in some important aspects of growing up could lead to unfulfilled emotional, physical and social needs that in turn could stunt their cognitive development too.

Parenting in the Indian context has traditionally been based on a collectivist approach — that of putting the whole before the individual self. Joint families were perfect conduits for this. Uncles, aunts, and cousins contributed to parenting without even being aware of it. But now with income levels rising and nuclear families proliferating (nuclear families make up to half of India’s population, up from 34% in 2008) parenting has become hugely isolating and stressful. This can be worse in expensive cities like Mumbai where both parents may have to work in order to provide the best for their children. Sadly, good creches are very few and far between in the city, which limits options. Some couples ask their parents to oversee the child who is in care of a nanny or just have a nanny take care of the child by herself. This pattern often continues as the child gets older, except, now instead of a nanny, the teen spends more time with gadgets and tutors instead of family.

Can nannies substitute for parents?

I have a daughter — she is almost two now. I didn’t notice nannies much when my daughter was still in the pram because I didn’t take her much to the play area then. As she started walking, my interactions with them grew. I would see most of them talking into a smartphone tucked between their shoulder and ear. They were either pushing the swing the child was on or just giving instructions. At first I thought I was judging too soon and being too harsh. But then I started seeing a pattern form — the same nannies would be on their phones and some would routinely open the child’s bag to take out their phone as soon as they got down the building. I also noticed that there was constant noise — just instructing kids to not do anything. This one time, I was walking with my daughter and she was touching flowers and leaves planted along the walking track; it was important she felt the texture but I also had to be attentive lest she plucked. Another kid, roughly her age, also decided to follow her but was reprimanded immediately by his nanny. “Put your hands in your pocket and walk straight,” she said while being on the phone. Many would find this innocuous, but punishment as a way to prevent an action that may not have necessarily happened seemed unfair. More so because when I saw his mother a few days later, she seemed more relaxed. 

[Child-directed free play is important for their cognitive development. Image from Unsplash]

It was not just one isolated incident. I have observed free play get disrupted on many occasions. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his book The Anxious Generation, that depriving a child of free play could lead to social, cognitive and emotional impairment. A child’s brain is 90% of its full size by the age of five and free play contributes hugely to this.

Nannies bridge the gap between a parent’s absence and a child’s needs but rather than solving the problem of parents unable to give enough attention, they can make it worse for the child. Given the nature of the responsibility they are entrusted with, I found many nannies lacking basic qualities needed for childcare — attention, compassion, and sensitivity. Spending time with a child looked like performing a chore. This became more obvious to me at the playschool I take my daughter to. The school allows nannies to come once in three days for the parent toddler programme. On one such day in a music class the teacher played a song which we were supposed to enact through actions. Kids were meant to observe and perform in their own time. To ensure that the child gets the hand gestures correct, one nanny started making her do so rather fastidiously and then another followed suit. The teacher then explained that we need to let kids be and decide for themselves when they are ready. As a society we tend to be more result-oriented than let the internal dynamics of a child take over. 

As my daughter got busy with free play, I got chatting with another teacher. She mentioned how children had the best gadgets and toys these days but little attention from adults, especially parents. And that’s why parents were strongly encouraged to be there all three days of the week for the parent toddler programme. Grandparents could substitute too, but the school had decided that nannies could come in only for one of the three turns. Affluent neglect is what she saw in children — those who experience emotional vacuum despite all the material possessions. We spoke about heightened stress levels both working parents had these days. It leaves them with little choice but to rely on nannies and even when they are back home, some downtime seems reasonable. “Me time is in the office. When you are back, it is not OK to hand an ipad to the child so you can relax. It’s the same with grandparents; ours used to read us books, now they are on their phones,” she said. 

Schools offering early year programmes witness early signs of affluent neglect and one intervention that can help a lot is schools enabling open forums to educate parents. Early intervention is important because these dynamics cannot be traced back once a child is in higher classes. It is then that schools start making hasty generalisations. 

Schools often assume that children of working parents experience greater emotional vacuum. At least I have seen many schools make that hasty generalisation and sadly it’s the already harried working mother who gets the short end of the stick. 

A friend was narrating how at an admissions meeting in one of Mumbai’s elite schools, her colleague was asked if she will join back work. “They seemed to suggest that with both parents working, a child gets neglected so she lied and said she will continue to stay at home,” she said. Another mum told me about how a teacher would only give her lectures on being attentive to her child. “After a point in time I just started sending my husband to school — and he didn’t get such lectures,” she said. I feel sad hearing these stories, especially because our earliest impressions on gender roles form in schools and if this is what schools stand for in reality, something seems amiss.

However, schools are not completely wrong either. My aunt, who consults with a south Mumbai school, mentioned how one four-year-old kept looking at his parents’ photograph and not at them during the admission interview. Once classes started, they found he had behavioural issues. They soon realised that the child needed a lot of attention to calm him down. He found comfort in the headmistress and would love to sit next to her in the office. They then got to know that both parents would leave home early in the morning and return late in the evening, and the child was in the nanny’s care all day. He would act in disruptive ways to vie for their attention. I have heard similar things from my cousin who is a pre-primary coordinator at an international school in Mumbai. She mentioned how it is easy to identify kids who are with parents at home compared to the ones who are with nannies. It's in the way they speak at times. She also said that one can tell the kids who get daily practice in sounds and numbers compared to those who only get that over weekends when the parents are home. She narrated this incident when a tobacco packet was found in a child’s bag. The parents were clueless, of course, but then realised that the nanny chewed tobacco. They’d asked her on several occasions to quit, and they thought she had done so. 

Some parents strike a good balance

Coming back to the issue of time-strapped parents and the hasty generalisations schools make, I have also seen some parents strike a good balance between their busyness and the attention their children need. 

We have a friend with quadruplets (yes, you read it right) in the same housing complex as ours. My daughter loves playing with them. This one time, one of them was observing an insect. “Didi, caterpillar!” one remarked, to which the nanny replied, “No it’s a slug.” I was shocked and couldn’t resist asking how she knew that. “During Covid bhaiya would come down every day, sometimes twice a day with the kids and we’d walk around the society and observe plants and birds,” she said. The kids are now seven and even though there is no work from home now, you’ll find the father playing with his four kids on weekends. 

I was discussing with his wife, who is a working mum, how I always saw other nannies on the phone. She said that often the live-in domestic help are asked or expected to double up as nanny, so they rightfully catch a break swiping on their phones while asking children to be careful. It made sense. She also said that since both their nannies were keen to learn, they would include them in games, activities and the general well-being of their children. In this case it would be highly unfair and dare I say negligent on a school’s behalf to assume that with both working parents, the kids would be neglected.  

Involuntary absenteeism, like in the example above, may not be the devil it’s made out to be. It is the voluntary absenteeism that is the problem. I spoke about this with another friend, also a mother with a young child, and she made a pertinent point. How are we, a generation of obsessed parents, voluntarily absent? Let’s face it — we are obsessed that our child sleeps sharp at 8 pm, eats protein, avocadoes, no sweets, gets the best of education and so on. We plan holidays around the child, treat organising a birthday party with the same fervour as a high-stakes presentation and give it our all for the kid. Then why are we not present when we can? I honestly don’t have an answer. But maybe because of the same reasons that we hire nannies. It is convenient to hire help, skip the tiredness and inevitable boredom of talking with very small children and maybe scroll through our phone.

On their part, if nannies treat children like chores, it is because we as families may have entrusted that responsibility as a chore. The dynamics would change immensely if a parent showed up at the play area to spend time with the kids rather than only check on the nanny. Most nannies have little or no education, might not possess the subtleties we would like given the lack of exposure. On top of that you have an unregulated labour market, so to expect professionalism from them is a tall order. 

I realised this when I met a nanny who had accompanied her employer from the US for a few days. She would come down with the toddler every evening sharp at 5 pm with a playmat, toys nicely  stacked in a picnic basket, along with a pram and bottle of milk. The child looked as happy as did she. I never saw a smartphone on her; she seldom darted for the swing to just push the baby (it’s the most convenient thing) and rather let the baby crawl around, feel the texture of the mat, point towards the swing he wanted to sit on. The play was child directed, not adult dictated. When I didn’t see her one evening, the mother told me that she had requested the nanny to cover for her the next day and was therefore compensating for the extra hours with an off. I don’t think this kind of work ethic or professional boundaries exist in most households in India. 

While I might not have a dedicated nanny, I have a staff of two — a cook and a live-in help who help me with my daughter too since we have no family to help. My cook has taken it upon herself to feed her dinner. My daughter loves to spend time with the live-in help. She often follows her, balancing a folded towel to stack it in the cupboard. In the absence of family support, we prioritised fluidity over structure so that our daughter gets to spend time with everyone and not one designated person. We set a few rules — clipped nails, no use of smartphone in front of her — but things got challenging when more nuanced behaviours were concerned. For instance, we had to tell our cook to stop feeding when the child said no. At first she looked aghast but when we explained — like our paediatrician had — that all senses must be engaged in eating, she understood. I observed early on that the live-in help would sometimes make faces and tease my daughter. Though it was out of sheer playfulness, I asked her to stop as that made my daughter cranky. Despite doing all this, it is very tough. So, imagine the kind of effort that must be required to train caregivers on what to do when parents are absent. And training that is more than just “she must finish her food”, “he must go down to play for one hour” or “she must sleep by 8.”

What is the solution?

When we speak of trained nannies, what we are talking about are those with experience with children and not those who have studied to become nannies. I was surprised to find that some institutions like the National Council of Training Academy, Emax India, and Aroma group of institutions offer diploma and certificate programmes in nanny training. But given that the nannies market is an unorganised one and a nanny sticking with a family for over two-three years is a big deal, how many of us will even think of investing in training our help? The trained nannies would also come at a premium and charge appropriately, which to be honest, is not something a majority of us can afford. A friend of mine was paying close to a lakh a month to her nanny when her child was small but she was a paediatric nurse.

I brought this topic up with someone I know — what can parents who have no choice but to rely on nannies do? She suggested a more formal setup for training  nannies. A place that not just educates in a child’s physiological development but also looks into his or her emotional well-being and on the way one must engage with children. It is difficult given India’s cultural diversity that gets reflected in a microcosm like the housing society I live in. 

To my mind, an easy and sustainable solution is for parents to come together and organise training sessions for nannies. The diversity of human capital and expertise in a housing complex like the one I live in, is priceless. Doctors, psychologists, home makers, teachers could be consulted to develop training sessions for nannies. After all, it takes a village to raise a child!

Sadly, the bar for childcare by nannies is so low, especially concerning freeplay, that it quickly becomes a norm. “They know no better,” is what this person who suggested setting up institutes said.  

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Raising Healthy, Happy Children

Research throws light on the role of adults on the growth of children 

[From Unsplash]

• When parents, teachers and coaches get involved in free play, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

• Children’s brains grow to 90% of full size by 5 years of age.

• Depriving a child of free play could lead to social, cognitive and emotional impairment.

• A study in China of over 2,000 infants showed that compared with infants raised by grandparents and parents, 12-month-old infants under the care of babysitters had partially suppressed lengths and weights and lagged cognitively.

• Across many countries, shifts in the sociocultural landscape of parenting have led to many fathers adopting a more active role in infant care compared to previous generations.

• A study by the British Red Cross found that 90% of new mothers felt lonely after giving birth.

• National Council of Training Academy, Emax India, Aroma group of institutions are some institutions that offer diploma and certificate programmes in nanny training.

• Parents within gated communities can come together to organise training sessions on childcare for nannies. 

• The 2017 Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act mandates that companies with 50 or more employees provide a creche facility, with costs borne by the employer, and encourages companies to allow women to work from home.