I dropped my daughter off at a friend’s house. Her parents are out tonight until 10ish, so the nanny will be watching them until then. Nanny’s boyfriend was there eating dinner, they both introduced themselves and seemed normal. My wife is a little freaked out by this guy. Is she justified?
How old is your daughter? What in particular freaked your wife out? Was it just the fact that the boyfriend was there or did she find something disconcerting about him?
As long as the nanny has permission from the friend’s parents for the boyfriend to be there, it really makes no difference what your wife thinks, or you for that matter.
If it’s a big deal to you as a parents, take her home.
So you guys are freeloading on someone else’s nanny and your wife has the nerve to think it’s not kosher that her bf is hanging out? Here’s some simple advice:hire your own damn nanny.
Sorry that’s the only way I could think to turn this onto the OP.
He was eating dinner you say? Hmm Suspicious.
She’s 7. My wife didn’t meet him, I dropped her off solo.
I’m having trouble squaring your first sentence with the second. The “difference” is whether we take her home or not, and I’m asking if that’s a justifiable position. We’re not judging their parenting or anything.
You know who else ate dinner, right?
Well we heard back from the parents, they apologized for not telling us in advance that he’d be there. He’s “like family” and so my wife feels better now. But if anyone else wants to toss their 2 cents in, feel free.
Mostly (3/4): offensive overreaction. He’s a male that your wife didn’t even meet, and yet she’s worried. Oooh, a big scary male! Is fearing someone because their sex is all you know about them better than fearing someone because all you know about them is their race? I don’t see how, but I’d expect a few people to argue the opposite. Either way, I’m a little tired of the attitude that men should all be treated as rapists-just-waiting-to-happen. As an aside: do you trust this friend’s parents, or not? How would you feel if they called you to express concern about visitors you chose to have and really don’t need to justify? Would you not be rather offended if they took their daughter home because of your trusted guest whose only crime was belonging to a group assumed to be desperate to rape, and possibly eat, small children?
The rest (1/4): understandable. It’s hard to blame you when that’s just what society considers normal and acceptable.
Or that we’re all pedophiles.
You are not giving us any information about him upon which we could form a judgement.
If it is merely based on the fact that he is male, and she hasn’t met him before, then no, she isn’t justified. After all, the nanny herself is there too. But perhaps your wife has some further reason you are not telling us (and perhaps are not aware of).
Or is the nanny a stranger too? Were you not expecting the parents not to be there? That is not clear, but I guess it would be more understandable if your wife were leery of leaving your kid with two complete strangers.
Yes, certainly men get a bum rap for being men and doing the bulk of the molesting in the world. As a man myself, and a former babysitter to boot, I’m sensitive to these concerns. But Bozuit, you’re missing a key point that **njtt **caught and I failed to emphasize: yes, he’s a male, but he was also a stranger. We trust the parents because we know them, they trust the nanny because they hired her and we knew she’d be there. We didn’t know the boyfriend was going to be there, and we didn’t know if our friends new. He was an un-vetted entity, vouched for (at the time) only by the nanny.
So I can flip it around on you – if you hired a babysitter for the night, and she showed up with her boyfriend, a guy you didn’t know, would you let him stick around in your house with your kids? I absolutely would not.
This was essentially that same situation, except we had no idea if he was there with permission of the parents.
If the babysitter is someone I know and trust, I wouldn’t care. But in fairness, I’ve been lucky in the fact that I’ve never had to hire a babysitter that I didn’t know. Hiring a stranger to take care of my kid would be very difficult for me. Be it man or woman.
I wasn’t missing that point. In fact it was part of my point, even if I didn’t make it clear. You don’t know him, so you have no reason to think he’s a problem, except presumably because he’s male. Presumably, if the nanny was there with a female friend studying French, it would not be the same kind of issue. Of course, I might be wrong in my presumptions.
No, I probably wouldn’t, but that’s mostly because he would be my guest and not someone else’s, so I would expect to know who he is before he comes into my house when I’m not there. I would also think it’s a little unprofessional of a babysitter to show up with a boyfriend/friend/anyone else without checking with the person who hired them first.
As I said before, I’m not without sympathy. I certainly don’t mean to say you or your wife are bad. It’s the way people tend to see things, and how can we expect parents to not fear for their children’s safety more than an outsider would think is strictly necessary? I couldn’t honestly say I know that, if I were a parent, I wouldn’t have exactly the same concerns. My rational side would not be happy if I did, though.
I think it should be fine if a babysitter and her boyfriend wants to have sex while watching the kids. That is what your wife is afraid of, right?
What you’re forgetting in this context is that the Nanny MUST have some sort of permission to have her BF over from the other parents. No female babysitter I’ve ever heard of would let her BF into a clients house without permission. Your assumption that they might not know he’s hanging out is highly questionable bordering on absurd. They feel it’s fine for the pair to watch over their kid. If you don’t want to be part of that arrangement you can choose not to leave your daughter there, but it’s not directly analogous to a babysitter for you showing up an unannounced boyfriend. You have to decide whether to trust the other parents decision re this setup.
I think you need not to enable your wife’s drama on this issue. The way you are presenting this scenario with all this “What if they don’t know he’s there!” OMG!!" is kind of silly.
I wonder if this old trope has ever played out anywhere besides cliche teen horror flicks?
Are nannies infallible or something? Is it beyond comprehension that a nanny might exhibit poor judgement and do something not allowed?
I am glad it worked out, but I think your wife did have reason to question the situation. If it had been an illicit visit, that would be a sign that the nanny had very poor judgement and could not be trusted, and that’s an issue. Furthermore, people in love-- especially young people-- are stupid and even great and stable people sometimes date crazy and dangerous. I am less likely to trust “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” than just about any other category. These relationships can easily short circuit even a usually stable mind.
It’s not about male bashing. I’d be concerned if she had her lesbian lover over, too.
The worry doesn’t have to be sex between the nanny and the boyfriend, or that he would molest the children. I would be concerned that herattention would be divided and not on watching the kids. I know it’s not an every-minute type of job but if I showed up and there was someone I didn’t expect I might question their dedication to keeping an eye on my kid. No drama – just concern.
I’m not a parent, but were I one I think I would hesitate to leave a child in the care/company of someone I had not met ever.
This isn’t necessarily completely analogous, but I remember when I was a small child and the babysitter brought over her boyfriend and a couple other dudes. I don’t know whether she had my parents’ permission to do that, but I was very disconcerted being surrounded by so many strangers.
Yet another problem would be violence. I had a former student beat his girlfriend’s toddler to death just a few months after he left my classroom. I thought he was somewhat cold, and somewhat angry, but not the kind of person that could do that. And of course, a woman could do that as well, but the fact is that if the babysitter’s female friend hit my kid, the dynamics of her defending my kid, reporting it to me, dealing with the situation are all very different. You could absolutely, 100% have a perfectly competent, perfectly nice, perfectly sweet nanny who was also in a complicated physically abusive relationship and you wouldn’t know it. And it’s just true that that sort of abusive relationship is a lot more likely within the context of a romantic relationship than within a friendship.
Trust is not subject to the transitive property. I can trust a nanny well enough to sit with my kids, but not trust her well enough to have 100% faith in her judgement about the men in her life. I can trust my neighbor well enough to trust her judgement in a nanny, but that trust doesn’t magically pass through my neighbor and into the nanny and then into the nanny’s boyfriend. I mean, by that logic, if the nanny’s boyfriend then wanted to bring his band over to play xbox, I should also think that was fine, because if I trust my neighbors, I trust their nannny, and if I trust her I trust her boyfriend and if I trust her boyfriend, then surely I trust his friends? He trusts them!
So yeah, I would have called to make sure they knew the boyfriend was there and that they had met them. Provided they knew and knew him, I’d probably be fine with it. But if the boyfriend had friends with him, or if they didn’t know about him or that he would be there, I would have gone back to get my kid.