[0:00] Music.
[0:12] Okay i'm really excited for today's episode i'm bringing you my first ever guest on the podcast, and it also happens to be one of my favorite people ever say hello nate favorite people ever this is nate my husband and i don't share her very much on instagram and he's not he hasn't been on the podcast yet but you're gonna find out why i like him so much here in just a minute it. So this episode is for those of you who have wanted to hire child care and have not yet for whatever reason.
[0:43] Hopefully we can help you break through some of the reasons or the fears of hiring child care. We're going to tell you our stories from both of our perspectives. I'll tell you my perspective. Nate will tell you his because obviously if you're going to hire someone to watch your kids, it requires the buy-in from both partners in the partnership. And so that's why I wanted Nate to be on the episode with me tonight.
[1:05] But first, why don't you give us an intro of yourself, Nate? I'm Nate. Hi, Nate. Hi. What do you do?
[1:15] I've been in banking for the last almost nine years, 10 years, pretty close to that. About almost eight years of consumer lending experience in finance, car loans, auto loans, that's the same thing, credit cards, personal loans, I'm equity lines of credit small mortgages all that good stuff and then COVID happened and I started doing HR instead because I hated the work-life balance and HR is a lot more cush and able to actually spend time with your family before the kids go to bed so and then I'm number one cheerleader.
[1:54] And uh father of three and goofball the extraordinaire true ridded dip ado okay so i want to start by well i'll start telling my side of the story first i'm going to try to tell the 30 second version because this story could turn into a 30 minute version so here's the quick download i'm taking you back to we would have hired our very first babysitter slash nanny Side note, I never know if I should call them a babysitter or a nanny. So in my mind, those two words are, I use them interchangeably. I don't know if everyone does that, but just know babysitter, nanny are synonymous in my vocabulary. I feel like nanny is more professional, but when some people, there's this awkward stigma around, you have people watch your kids. So then it's babysitter is a lot more of a nice word to use. Whereas nanny, it feels like. Like it's not like we have a full-time live-in nanny. This is like 15 hours a week. So it's like a medium between, you know, a girl that comes over and watches your kids for a couple hours while you go on a date versus a full-time nanny. Yeah. So I never know what to call her. But out of all the nannies we've had, nanny babysitters, they don't either, none of them have had a preference of like, I prefer that my title is a nanny or I prefer babysitter. Yeah, totally.
[3:11] So taking you back to almost five years ago when we hired our very first nanny for the first time. Nora would have been just a few months old. But there was a moment where I was almost like there was a straw that broke the camel's back because I'd wanted to hire child care for a really long time.
[3:29] My oldest brother and his wife, my sister-in-law is a nurse practitioner. And so they had hired a part-time nanny, which I didn't even know was a thing really. And I'm super grateful that they sort of like blazed the trail doing that. I think I would have been too scared to take that leap without someone sort of walking me through the process and giving me their tips and hacks. And so thankfully, my brother and sister-in-law had hired a part-time nanny. So that gave me the courage to do it for our family. but you know in the moment when we finally made that decision to get serious about hiring someone this is the 32nd version so I was 38 weeks pregnant with Nora Grant broke his leg playing on my parents patio one afternoon I went into labor with Nora that night then we had our transition to two kids also look like the two-year-old being in a leg cast then we survived six weeks of a leg cast. We survived six weeks without a leg cast, and then he broke his other leg. And then we survived six more weeks of a full leg cast on the other leg. So after that experience, that for me was kind of like my breaking point where I finally had to get super honest with myself and say, I need help. I need more support. Also during this season, Nate was not working from home and was working in a branch, which required him to be there early in the the morning to late at night.
[4:49] And we also moved farther away from family. So I didn't see Nate very much. We didn't see each other as often as we would have liked, which also meant that I didn't have as much support.
[5:01] And so I think that was the thing that pushed me over the edge a little bit to get serious about my needs and wishes and desires too. So that's when we started looking for our very first nanny. But also some additional backstory, we needed the help one for extra child support, right? Because I was gone for 12 hours a day and then I get home and we'd have dinner and then put the kids to bed. But the business, the baby toy business has gotten to a point where she needed more time and that wasn't enough time for her. So I feel like the combination of like, holy moly, we just had two broken legs, a newborn. We moved into this new house that's far away from family and friends. The business is growing. we need we need extra time we need the help we got to do something different because this is not working okay so what was that moment like for you as the spouse of me being like hey so i really want to do this thing will you support me it's kind of vulnerable to bring a you know potential stranger into your house and for me i didn't have really an office at the time so i just They'd kind of hang out downstairs and I'd go work out of our bedroom, which worked. But it's like, are we cool with bringing a person into our home to watch our kids? What was that like for you?
[6:19] Yeah. So when we first hired her, Nora would have been. She was like four months. Yeah. But then I started HR right when COVID happened. Pretty shortly after that. Yeah. Yeah. So I think from my perspective, it wasn't so much the issue of inviting someone into to the home to help. I feel like maybe my background in finance had, had my caution was the financial aspect. This is going to be an extra cost. We're paying for someone to come and watch the kids while both of us are technically at home. Like both parents are here, but both parents are also working. Um, and so for me, it wasn't the issue of, Hey, come over or hang out with our kids or play with the kids. Or there, I didn't worry about the stigma of what other people would think. I was worried about. Can we afford this? Can we afford this? Is this, does this make financial sense? Yeah.
[7:13] And to go back to that moment in time too, honestly, for the first couple of months, it was break even. And I have this very distinct memory. This is what I want to really share because I think a lot of women are also being held back because of the cost. And it feels so expensive and childcare is so expensive and daycare and all the things. But I have this distinct memory of the first time we hired our awesome nanny. She was coming three days a week for three hours. So nine hours per week. At that time, we were paying her $15 an hour for our two kiddos. So I was sending her this Venmo once a week. And I had this distinct memory of realizing that I was paying her more than I was paying myself, which was very confronting. parenting. But also, I think when I realized that, I also realized I would still have her help. Even if I don't make any money from this, even if I literally break even, it's still worth it to me because these things that I'm working on are so important to me. And when I, for lack of a better word, get it out of my system, when I have space and time to do my creative thing, then I step back into my mom role and I'm such a better mom. I feel so much better. I'm so much happier. I'm not trying to squeeze work in from my laptop while I'm with my kids.
[8:32] I caught the vision of how amazing it is to have support so that you can, instead of being split between the two roles all the time, be able to move from one role to the next. So I would step out of my mom role for three hours, step into my CEO role, wrap that up, and then step back into my mom role. And I was also so amazed how much work I was able to get done in three hours because I didn't realize how much time and energy my the brain change task change thing that I was doing like I'm just gonna sit here while my kids watch a movie oh but someone needs a diaper change oh Nora needs to be fed oh someone needs a snack it's like you can get stuff done and I like I think women are, exceptionally good at getting stuff done but I was amazed at how how much I got done when I had three hours to sit down and focus.
[9:22] So even though the first, it was probably like two or three, no, probably two months before my income increased such that I could start paying myself more, which is a pretty quick return on investment. But it was stressful for me personally for two months of like, we're losing money on this. Like that's how it felt. But it was comforting knowing, okay, well, we're just, Kaylin is laying the groundwork for something much bigger than this, and we can afford this right now. Okay, so here's a vulnerable moment. As the parent, the spouse that was working a 40, 50-hour work week, it was hard to then come home to.
[10:06] My wife has been way overburdened with this newborn and a two-year-old with two broken legs, right? And seeing the stress, seeing the postpartum, seeing the, I want to work on this, but I'm so exhausted from just keeping these kiddos alive. Then when I actually do get my moment, I feel like I'm still trying to process the day. I'm still trying to make sure that they're taken care of. And so it was just putting strain.
[10:35] Um, and so for me hiring the help, it was like, oh my goodness, I have, I have my wonderful wife back.
[10:43] She's, she's able to put on this mom hat and then she's able to set that aside and put on CEO hat and go to work and then put that aside and put mom hat back on. And then I would come home from work and, okay, here's, here's my wife hat. And that was such a breath of fresh air. It was like, we needed this. Holy moly, we needed this. yeah so so now looking back right like it was stressful for the financially it was stressful for those few months i feel like it was immediately an immediate relief though of a lifeline like if you want to talk about the return on investment we could talk about how poppy c plate grew like exponentially that year totally and was that because of covid was that because i was able to focus it would be impossible to know for sure the emotional return on investment emotional return on investment though is priceless.
[11:33] So obviously we're huge fans and advocates for getting the support that you need. Let's talk a little bit about the process of how we find our people. How do we get them trained? What is it like bringing a new nanny into our home? So we've had a handful, I think probably five. All of them we have found through care.com except for one, which was a girl that lived in our neighborhood. So I like to use care.com. That's that's my secret. That's my hack. If you pay for the upgraded subscription, I think it's $40 per month, but it makes it so that you can send people direct messages, unlimited direct messages. So basically what I do, this is what I started doing now. Anytime I need to find a new babysitter, a new nanny, I hop on there. I make a job description.
[12:19] This is a little side hack too, but I found that the more specific I am, the easier it is to find people. So the first couple of times I made a listing, it was like, nanny needed for some hours per week on any day. And it was like, that's really hard for people to like figure out if they can fit that in their schedule. But when I started to be like, okay, what do I want? You know what I would love? I would love to work three hours on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from this time to this time, put that in a job description and just do that. It's so much easier for people to understand if if they're a good fit for your listing or not. And then I would basically DM any person that I thought that I liked their profile and be like, hey, I saw your profile. It looks great. I have this job listing. You should look at it. And leave it up for a week or two. Every single time I've done that, I've found care within that month. So paying for a little bit of a premium price to find someone has been crucial. I tried one time finding someone through like a Facebook group. If you do like a Facebook group search, you'll probably be able to find like a group that's local to you that's in your area. I found that the quality of the candidates on care were better than the ones on Facebook. They seemed a little bit more serious. Most of them are like college students. It was important to me that this was a girl who's like doing something with her life. She has goals and dreams and plans. She's reliable. She's responsible. She's committed. She comes on time.
[13:46] And I found more success finding care through care.com than on Facebook. Why don't you talk about the process of interviewing and bringing them into our home. What's that like from your perspective?
[13:59] Yeah, so we get the initial interview set up, and we kind of just let them come in and hang out with the kids for the first five or ten minutes, because right off the bat, you're able to see if the kids are going to jive well with everything. The nanny it's not so much are you going to jive well with the nanny right because you're you've got other things going on in the day so you need to make sure that the child slash children are going to be able to to jive with them and we've had interviews where, the the nanny will walk in and you kind of feel a little funny about it and then within the first few minutes the kids are feeling a little bit funny about it and it's like well you can tell so quickly okay thanks or not appreciate appreciate you coming have a good day yeah and then there's There's other times where the nanny walks in and it's like, we just found the nanny. Yeah, totally. In our experience, they've all been female, but we keep saying she, that's just because of our experience. But most recent interaction, she came in, kids loved her.
[14:58] Drew is very much, Drew's our almost two-year-old. He's very much in the attachment phase when there's like stranger danger and
[15:05] he totally just melted for her and just warmed right up. And that's key because when she comes and it's the morning handoff, right, between parent and nanny, there's no crying, there's no fussing. It's, hey, I'm here to play and let's have fun. And that takes a huge load off of our plates because there's been in the past a nanny where it was kind of like we need to have a game or an activity right there ready to go the moment she gets in. And that'll distract the handoff and then they're fine from there yeah that's like but i think that's a really good hack because and i think every kid's different and they're different at different ages and different stages so some kids like nora has basically always been like totally happy to have whoever come over she just loves the attention wants the attention and wants a friend yeah some of them have struggled a little bit more so some hacks would be like having a little activity planned or prepped that they can get started on as soon as you leave to go do your thing or walks or go on a walk there's been a couple times I will like have her come over with the kids in the stroller and they leave on a walk immediately that helps kind of bridge the gap.
[16:16] We started for a little bit to when, you know, if the kids are having a particularly hard day, I'll just turn on a YouTube video for a little bit. Let them watch this for five, 10 minutes. Warm up. Warm up, adjust. Eat breakfast. Through this transition moment.
[16:29] And I think that helps a lot because I've noticed in myself, I get a little uptight if the handoff doesn't go very well. And so as much as I can mitigate that as possible helps me feel comfortable. Yeah. As far as, as training, I guess our, our situation is a little bit unique in that both of us work from home. I work in the basement, Kaylin works upstairs, but we are very upfront with the nanny that we want this to be your thing, right? We are not going to micromanage you. We want you to have fun with the kids. We want you to be comfortable. We want you to, right. And then if there's a moment that we can hear out of our office that maybe a kid's fighting or maybe they're, you know, crying something, something's going on, we can hear that and then we can step in and correct the behavior or take the child, whatever's going on. That way the nanny feels comfortable of, hey, both parents are here all the time.
[17:24] Which could be kind of weird. It could be weird, right? Like as an outsider's perspective, it's like, I don't know, now their kid's crying. Are they judging how my performance is because their kid is crying? We're very hands-off. If we need to be hands-on, we're liberty to take it and make it their own, make this their own experience. And so I feel like training, it's very hands-off almost, right? Like, how do you want to play with the kids? How do you want to do that? Going back to what Kaylin said about the job posting, one of the things that she and I both hate is folding laundry. I don't know why we hate it. And so we ask, hey, are you comfortable folding our laundry, right? We go through and we take out what items we don't want them to fold or whatever. Most of the time it's them just hanging t-shirts. But that's something like, hey, are you comfortable hanging t-shirts? Are you comfortable changing diapers? Drew is still in diapers. What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? Asking about experiences.
[18:24] We try to keep the lines of communication super open. Very open, very clear, very comfortable. If there is something that we didn't communicate very well, like just today, because we've had our new sitter starting for us
[18:33] just in the last couple of weeks, we were getting the day started. Drew was having a hard time. I was like, hey, let's turn on YouTube. And she was like, I actually don't know how to turn on your TV. It was like, oh, I'm so glad you asked. Thanks for letting me know. So I feel like one, having a sitter who feels, who is bold enough and confident enough in herself to ask questions helps a lot, but also. Or like, hey, what's Drew's nap time routine? Right. Does he like the bottle warm or cold or, and just having that open communication because they don't, they're coming to your home. They don't know. They don't know all the little things that your kids like or don't like. So no question is a dumb question is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, totally. We try to help it. We want her to feel like,
[19:15] Even though we're in the house, when she's in charge of the kids, she's in charge. And we're not going to come in and, like you said, if we need to mitigate an issue, we will.
[19:26] Like today, Nora was just a little bit sassy and bossy on how she said something. So I said, Nora, that's not how we talk. And then that put it of, we correct the issue. And it didn't put the nanny in a weird position of like, well, this kid just is being rude to me. I can't be rude back, right? And if we weren't in the house, we'd probably just give more direction to her about like, here's how we would handle this situation with her. Here's some principles that we would use to help guide her. Something that I also found really helpful, if you, you know, our home is unique in the way that it's set up where I have my workspace and Nate has workspace. It's like literally the reason why we chose this floor plan to build because of those accommodations. But if you don't feel like you have that space in your home, something that I did for a little bit was leave the kids at home with the nanny and I would go work at the library or something, go to Starbucks, go somewhere to get out of the house. I also felt like that helped with the transition, but also I hope, I hope helped her feel a little bit like I'm in charge. The kids are adjusting to me. We can kind of get to know each other's rhythms and cues and things.
[20:31] Okay. So I have a couple of questions from the audience and I want to answer, but for the last thing that I want to hear from Nate, what advice would you give to either wives who are obviously, Obviously, it's probably the wife who's listening to this episode who's been thinking, I would love to hire child care. I don't know how. It's super overwhelming. I'm terrified. What advice would you give to her? And also, what advice would you give to the spouse of her who probably also has fears and concerns as well?
[21:01] First, I'm going to jump order. I want to talk to the husbands first real quick. I get it. There's maybe some doubt or fear or concern or whatever. Ever trust your spouse just full send i feel like when we started this whole experience this whole journey i i tell kaylin this that when we started the baby toy company she was super pregnant with grant and we went home to you go and bought the first wood and everything and she said nate i need you to build this and i'm going to sell it that's the one time that i doubted her in this whole process and look at where i haven't doubted her again and i know that it'll work out so So husbands, put your pride away, listen to your spouse and just trust them. Cause like how kick ass are they? I said ass. Hopefully that's okay. Ass. How kick ass are our women just doing it? Right. Uh, women, uh, Have faith in yourself, have trust in yourself. I get it. There's, there's a lot of like, oh man, what if, what if we hire this person and maybe I'm losing money or maybe, maybe it's not a right fit. Maybe we hire someone and you know, the first day or the second day, it doesn't go the way that we were thinking it. And now we've got to fire them.
[22:12] We've been there. And now we've got to find new childcare, right? Is my spouse going to judge that this first nanny didn't work out? And now we're, we shot our shot and now we're done. done, um, I would, I would say, don't do that. Don't, don't worry about that because we have gone through the nannies and we know how that goes and, and just believe in yourself. Right. And, and it's okay.
[22:34] There's this weird stigma of needing help. It's totally okay to have to ask for help, to, to need help, uh, because we all need it in our own little ways, whether it's through the business or man, we even use our nannies so that we can have a date night. How cool is that? That we're still able to go on date nights. I feel like having three kids, the date nights get sucked away if you don't have a nanny. So we were definitely feeling it for about a month while we were in between nannies. And I'm grateful that we can have a nanny again so we can go on. We've got a date night scheduled tomorrow. We've got a date night scheduled next Thursday, too. So go do that because you guys need time, too. That's awesome. That's all I got. I concur. Thanks for letting me join the podcast. That was awesome. Love you. Love. Okay, so I wanted to answer a handful of questions that I got just from a question box that I put up on Instagram. First question, how do you introduce your nanny to your kids? We like to, like Nate said before, sort of give them a quick little intro at the interview stage.
[23:29] I don't know if I explained this process before very well, but on care.com, you can have a chat thread where you can basically DM each other back and forth. And some things I look for when I'm DMing a nanny back and forth. Actually, the first thing that I look for is how quickly do they respond? Am I having to wait a day or two in between their responses? If yes, they're probably not going to be my favorite candidate. I usually love the ones who are super quick to respond. They provide a lot of detail. They're very honest and vulnerable and share lots of details. That's a huge green flag for me. So usually our kids are introduced briefly to our nannies when they come over the first time for the interview. And Grant and Nora are old enough now that they can, they started to remember some of our past nannies. So they kind of know the drill and they know like, Hey, we're having a babysitter come over tomorrow for us to meet for the first time. You know, so they don't like plan on her being the one they, they've kind of figured out, like, it takes a little bit for us to find the ones we might meet two or three before we pick one.
[24:30] So I like having the kids introduced at that phase. One of the questions that I got was, do we do a trial run with them? We haven't before, but I don't know if that's just because Nate and I can usually sniff out the energy pretty quickly. Almost every single one of the interviews that we've had where we ended up hiring
[24:47] our favorite nannies, we just kind of hired them on the spot. Like when they came over for the interview it was like hey you have great communication skills you seem very confident and able to carry out your duties I really like the way that you've answered these questions and carried yourself and we basically offer them the job on the spot we're super informal we try to make it not the super like big deal but I feel like we are able to get enough of a vibe of how they're going to do with the kids just from that interaction.
[25:17] The next question was, do we pay per child or by hour? And the answer is yes to both. So I think I said at the beginning, our very first sitter was $15 an hour. We had two kids at that point. We're currently paying $20 per hour. We're in Utah, basically because all three of our kids are going to be home over the summer. And so there's the range, if that's helpful, based on our location. Obviously, your location might be different. But I like to be super transparent about that because it's always a little bit awkward to know, like, what? How much are people paying child care these days? And that is definitely a premium rate. But like Nate said, we also have her folding our laundry. We have expectations that we communicate that if there are toys or activities that are brought out during the day, that those are put back away at the end of the day, right? Right. So we want it to be like a really cool job for these girls because we want them to stay for as long as possible. And so it's worth it to us to pay a couple extra dollars per hour. If one, we know they're going to be here reliably. Two, we know they're going to stay for hopefully a good amount of time. And three, that they're going to love on our kids because that's really important to us. The next question was, what do you do if you're staying home while you have a nanny? Hopefully we answered that question a little bit, but a couple other thoughts.
[26:34] If you like, hopefully in your home, you at least have one space you can retreat to and close the door. That for me would be like a non-negotiable. I don't want to be working at the kitchen table while the nanny's here, right? And that would make the nanny's job really hard too. So if you can remove yourself to a room that's enclosed where you are not accessible, that's what I would recommend. Obviously you may or may not have a space that's an office and it doesn't have to be be an office space. You heard me say at the beginning, I worked out of our bedroom. So for four years, I was working out of our bedroom and I just had a little desk space and that worked. That was sufficient. So you don't need to have a fancy office, but if you like to leave the house and go somewhere else, that's a great option too. The last question was, do we use online resources or people we already know? We have hired one girl from our personal network who we knew who's availability matched ours, but the rest of them we found through care.com. You could totally put up a Facebook post or an Instagram post to your private followers and be like, hey, I'm looking for childcare and see if you can find someone that way. That was how we found the one girl who happened to live in our neighborhood whose availability fit ours. But like I said, Facebook groups are another resource, but my personal favorite is care.com. Upgrade to the premium subscriptions for a month. You will find someone, hopefully you'll find someone amazing who you love. Of the five nannies that we've had, we found four of them that way. And that is what I will continue to keep doing in the future too.
[28:03] I hope this episode was helpful and inspiring. I hope it helped you feel comfortable and empowered and confident in making the decision to do the thing that you've been wanting to do. If you're listening to this episode, I'm going to guess you've probably thought about hiring child care before. And hopefully after this episode, you're thinking about it a little bit more seriously, maybe even making a plan of when you want to hire someone. I will say right now where it's like the beginning of the summer, I think is a great time to find childcare, especially if you work around the university schedule.
[28:37] This just happened to work out this time, but we were looking for a nanny the week that school ended for most college students. And I had so many applications on my care job description. I usually don't get like a ton, but this time I had dozens and dozens. So it was kind of nice to be able to like be really picky about who we hired. We're always really picky. But if you are able to work around university schedules, I would totally hire that either like the end of a semester or going into a new semester when college
[29:10] students' schedules are changing anyway. That's a really helpful hack. But I think the overall takeaway from this episode is that you are worth the investment. No matter how much you're making right now, your sanity, your mental health, your joy, your fulfillment are worth far more than $20 an hour. And that would be at the maximum rate too, right? If you wanted to hire a younger girl or a teenager, obviously the rate's going to be less than that, which is awesome. And not only is your work and effort and service and impact that you provide
[29:41] to the world worth far more than that, you have a much greater earning potential than $20 per hour. But beyond that, you're worth it just for your own joy and fulfillment too.
[29:54] I know there's drama, there's doubts, there's fear, there's probably guilt coming up about making this transition. I think guilt was a huge one for me and I don't even really process it anymore because I don't feel very much guilt anymore because I have so much of my own evidence of how much better I am as a mom when I have time to do my business thing and that I'm a better business owner when I have time to do my mom thing. And I have dedicated time to do both. I have so much evidence that I'm a better human that way. And so this for me, having childcare is not something that I'm going to discontinue anytime soon. And I would love to help inspire other women to take the leap and do that for themselves too. So always feel free if you have questions, I'm an open book and I love to have conversations about this. So send me a DM on Instagram or send this episode to a friend if you're thinking of someone who needs to hear a positive, uplifting review of taking the leap and getting the child care. I am team get the support that you need. I hope this episode was insightful and inspiring, and I will see you next Wednesday.
[31:04] Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, the greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing fruitful life while you build an amazing fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at kaylenpriest.com slash greenhouse, and I'll see you there.
[31:44] Music.
