Your co-workers with kids are not OK

Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.

While much of the rest of the country is trying to figure out some sort of “new normal,” working parents of small children feel utterly abandoned, and many of them are at their breaking point.

With children under 5 still not able to be vaccinated—although that’s coming, but who knows how soon—and day cares frequently closing for COVID cases or exposures, parents of young kids are struggling. Without reliable child care, they’re regularly forced to take time off work—often unpaid if they’ve already used up all their PTO—or to try to work from home while simultaneously caring for kids so young they require constant supervision.

This letter I received is typical of what I’m hearing from parents of young children:

I have two small children, one who is just barely two and a four-year-old. Since Covid started when I was on a leave of absence with my youngest, born January 2020, I’ve just never felt settled or on top of my job. I’m consistently two months behind on my work and my daycare keeps closing for either positive cases or exposures. Every time this happens I’m left to work from home or take unpaid leave. I’m out of PTO, which I get a generous amount of but it’s all been used on staying home with my children while daycare closes. My husband is now recently out of PTO as well and since he earns the higher wage, it just makes sense for me to be the one watching the kids while he works.

… Working from home is pure hell. I have to wake up at 4 am and work until my kids are up, work while they nap and then work once they go to sleep. … So this means I’m usually busy with work or children from 4 am to 11 or 12 at night. I have no time for myself. I barely recognize myself. … I’m doing a bad job at work, I hate the feeling of being behind, I hate being so busy all day every day and then on top of it my work is so broken up I’m not able to put in a 40-hour week or get a full paycheck … ever. I’m working harder than ever and getting nothing out of it.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by DragonImages/Getty Images Plus.

People with no kids or older kids might hear this and suggest, “Get a nanny!” But there’s a huge shortage of child care right now, and even people who could theoretically afford a nanny (which is definitely not everyone) or split the costs with another family (still definitely not everyone) have found there’s no one available to hire. So working parents are left juggling an unrealistically large amount of responsibilities for which there is literally not enough time in the day.

Here’s some of what I’ve been hearing in my inbox:

• “Us parents of kids under 5 are breaking. My mental health is abysmal, as is my partner’s. We are exhausted, burnt out, fight all the time, and I, at least, am constantly on the edge of a true mental health crisis that would have most people scrambling to send me to the hospital. And we’ve been lucky—we only have one kid and our preschool has great COVID protocols so has had fewer closures over the last 3 months than many in our community.”

• “I’ve used up all my PTO and my check gets docked with every day I take off now. I’m a high school teacher on top of it all, but I have no one else to watch my children. My husband and I switch off, since he’s also a teacher and makes the same amount as I do, but we’re both out of time. I feel like I’m terrible at my job—I can’t even work from home, because all classes are in person. I’ve had 3 separate 10 day quarantines with my kids since October and it’s a significant burden on my co-workers, too, especially the ones who don’t understand that I can’t just take them out of daycare and put them somewhere else. ALL daycares follow these rules.”

• “We’re on our third quarantine and haven’t had daycare since before Christmas. I feel like a failure as a mom and employee most days. Some days are ok, but then some days I’m working on my spreadsheets through tears at doing every job not to my high standards. It feels like this year is even worse than last year or 2020, because now most people have decided to move on, despite the pandemic clearly raging on. I’m so anxious because my youngest still cannot be vaccinated. Doesn’t help that leadership tends to be in an age group where childcare is a distant memory.”

• “I’m crying at my temporary kitchen table office while I’m writing this, at home with my quarantined toddler and desperately trying to stay on top of my work while feeling like I’m about to be fired because this is the 4th time this has happened in as many months. I dragged myself into the office with strep and an abscessed tonsil (because it wasn’t Covid!) the last two weeks so I could save my PTO for situations like this. … I feel like a shell of myself after the last two years.”

• “Just last week, I was let go from my job after having to take 2 weeks off in the last 5 weeks due to daycare closures. I did what I could from home, but it wasn’t enough and I was working in a completely un-empathetic work environment where I was the only parent, let alone single parent. … While I’m extremely stressed about money and healthcare and paying for daycare, there’s a small amount of relief mixed in with my anxiety because I haven’t had a moment to myself in a long time and it’s so hard.”

What’s more, the supports that the government put in place near the start of the pandemic, which were a lifeline for working parents, have now expired. Paid family leave for COVID exposures expired in December 2020. Monthly child tax payments stopped last month. And many employers that were sympathetic to working parents during the first year of COVID have become tired of accommodating parents and expect employees to just somehow make it work now—even though they’re still in essentially the same situation as March of 2020. As one person wrote to me, “It feels like the world has forgotten about us and moved on.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s women who are bearing the brunt of this—both to their mental health and to their careers. Many of them are concluding they have no choice but to quit working:

• “I have 3 kiddos—5, 2, and 1. The quarantines are never ending. I quit my job earlier this month, even though I was poised for much higher leadership positions and salary. I have no family support and the almost daily anxiety attacks and deep, deep depression born purely out of this awful situation became too much. I feel so much relief. And I’m still processing my grief because I know I’ve probably torpedoed my career that I’ve worked SO HARD for. It’s unfair.”

• “I like my job. I like being a working mom. But I have decided to quit my job in a month. I don’t think it’s fair for my 2.5 year old to be plopped in front of the TV all day while my husband works from home. I’m in healthcare and expected to be in the office. I don’t think it’s fair to expose my child to long COVID or unknown future health problems because I want, but don’t financially need, to work (my husband makes twice what I do, them’s the breaks).”

• “It’s so insidious how it ‘just works out’ that the mother’s job is the one to take the hit. I make more than my husband, our health insurance is through my job, and yet somehow it still ‘just worked out’ that I’ve been the one home with the kids for the last 2 years. We do have our reasons and they make sense to us, but lots and lots of individual family decisions that make sense in microcosm add up to a disproportionate effect on mothers’ work, quality of life, and emotional wellbeing.”

The only good solutions for working parents are structural ones. This won’t be solved by finding that one magical day care provider that doesn’t close frequently, and it’s not even about employers instituting more family-friendly policies (although that would help!). Those changes only work for the limited number of people affected by them. The true solution for working parents right now would be broad institutional action: stronger labor protections, subsidized child care, and health care that’s not tied to full-time employment. Instead, though, parents of young kids have been left to find individual answers to systemic problems, and that’s an impossible task.

(Source: Slate)

First mothers

 I have been fascinated by Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons for years. In fact, I have been trying to write about her since I graduated from college. The Maroons were communities of fugitive slaves and free Black people, some who, after the British took the island from the Spanish in 1655, fled to the mountains, and others who later escaped British plantations to join them. They resisted for eighty-four years. The Leeward Maroons, led by Cudjoe, and the Windward Maroons, led by Nanny, waged the first Maroon War from 1728 to 1739. Despite their small numbers and lack of military equipment, they raided plantations for supplies, liberated enslaved people to reinforce their ranks, and killed more white people than were able to kill them. The Maroons successfully prevented the British from expanding into Jamaica’s interior until they negotiated a peace treaty and land allotments to each of the different factions on the island. The free towns they established at the end of the First Maroon War still exist today.

Nanny was declared a national hero in 1976. Her face was put on the Jamaican $500 bill. I had a rudimentary understanding of her story growing up, but the first time I saw her depicted in fiction was in Michelle Cliff’s novel, Abeng, which I read as an undergrad. Nanny’s story is part of a buried history of Jamaica that the heroine, Clare Savage, a light-skinned and middle-class Jamaican, isn’t taught. As a consequence of that ignorance, Clare is raised to uphold a system of colorism and white supremacy. Cliff takes the beginning of Nanny’s story directly from Maroon legend: “In the beginning there had been two sisters, Nanny and Sekesu. Sekesu remained a slave. Some say this was the difference between sisters. It was believed that all the island’s children descended from one or the other.” Unlike Sekesu, Nanny “carried the secrets of magic into slavery,” which she used to free herself and others. Cliff confers a moral purity on Nanny that she denies Sekesu.

QUEEN NANNY AS SHE APPEARS ON JAMAICA’S $500 BILL

Cliff describes Nanny preparing for war, cowrie shells in her hair. Later, when Nanny meets with the leader of the Leeward Maroons, the “only decoration was a necklace fashioned from the teeth of white men.” Nanny was known for being a military strategist and though in legend she emerged from the kingdom of the Ashanti, in Cliff’s telling Nanny draws her knowledge of battle from the “Dahomey Amazons,” the Mino of Benin, an all-female army in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Nanny was known for being a powerful spiritual leader, an “obeah woman,” and Cliff describes her as a master of disguise who stuns soldiers with her spells. She even recounts a popular legend where Nanny is known to have stopped bullets with her ass.

But Cliff’s Nanny never speaks. She never becomes a fully realized character. So I thought, I could do that. And then later I thought, Who am I to think I can write this? Still, I’ve tried over the years, picking up the project and abandoning it. Nanny is a historical figure of huge proportions, but the written record about her is minimal. In Cliff’s version, after being betrayed by Cudjoe, who refuses to join forces, she is killed by William Cuffee, a “Black shot,” hired by the British to fight in Black militias against the Maroons. It is documented that Cuffee tried to claim a reward for her murder in 1733, but there is no other mention of her death in written texts. In fact, there are three more written references to Nanny in the seven years that follow and they demonstrate that she was still alive.

Though I haven’t lived in Jamaica since I was five, the allure of Nanny feels personal. Her story provides a reprieve from the nearly constant theater of Black pain and suffering that is the history of the Americas we’re taught. At a time when Black women on the island were seen as easy prey for white men (such as, for example, Thomas Thistlewood, a plantation manager and owner who recorded every slave woman he raped over a thirty-seven-year period in his diaries), Nanny was a woman who became famous for terrorizing white people.

Like Clare Savage in the novel, I’d been taught to react to acts of injustice with politeness. My mother would scold me if I spoke badly of my father, even behind his back, even though my anger was because I’d seen him beat her. What did it even look like for a woman to rebel with violence? Part of my interest in that question and in Nanny was stirred when I took a trip to Jamaica in college. I went to their rural town in the mountains to meet my paternal grandparents for the first time. Like the Maroons, they still lived as subsistence farmers. Their part of town had no streetlights. I had never experienced such suffocating darkness, but my grandparents could move around without even a flashlight. During the day, I saw my grandmother, who was rail thin and diabetic, disappear into areas of dense vegetation holding a cutlass and emerge with something for me, bananas or a piece of sugarcane. I had a vision, then, for Nanny. The drawings of Nanny I’d seen looked more like my grandmother, with her hair always tied with a plain white headwrap, than like Cliff’s Dahomey Amazon warriors.

On that same trip, I met a cousin whom I hadn’t seen since I was a child, but who had since been disfigured by a vat of acid thrown on him by his wife. He later forgave her; they’re still together to this day. I listened to adults talk about him as if he were mad and about her as if she were evil.  Later, when I saw her in person, I noticed some relatives were polite to her face but whispered about her when she was out of earshot; others shunned her outright. I never found out what my cousin did to stir her anger, but I had witnessed men do unspeakable things. And I had been expected by the women around me to be quiet and forgive them for it. In Jamaica, I kept seeing glimpses of the matrilineal society in which Nanny lived, quickly obscured by misogyny. Sekesu was the victim; I knew her well. Nanny was the hero who I wanted to be. But I didn’t know how, so I started imaging her.

After college I worked at a public defender’s office doing fund-raising, but also paralegal tasks like answering letters from prisoners seeking a lawyer to handle their appeals. The letters were desperate and described a level of brutality that haunted me. One of the first letters was from a woman who said she was being raped by prison guards and punished for speaking out by being locked in a solitary housing unit. I started writing about Nanny as a way to counteract feelings of complete helplessness. I didn’t save any of my early drafts. I learned later that for me to connect to characters that I’m writing, I need to put a real piece of myself into each of them. But back then, I was writing about Nanny because she was everything that I wasn’t.

On my trip to Jamaica, the year before, I had read excerpts from Karla Gottlieb’s biography of Nanny, The Mother of Us All, in a bookstore in Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston while waiting for my flight home. I skimmed through and landed on the description of Nanny that Philip Thicknesse, a British captain who fought in campaigns against the Maroons, had written in his memoir. He called her the “Old Hagg,” and described her as wearing “a girdle around her waist … with nine or ten different knives hanging in sheaths.”

In my version I had her carry a cutlass for protection and foraging, but I didn’t believe the version of her that Thicknesse described. Gottlieb had deemed it an exemplary piece of “exotica,” a style of writing typically used by white men at the time to write about nonwhite people. Still, even the version I wrote of Nanny didn’t feel quite human. What I had learned about obeah growing up centered around fear, never liberation. My most superstitious aunt taught me to track the hair I shed, my nail clippings, even to count my underwear because all of it could be stolen and used by your enemies to work spells against you. But obeah was instrumental in resistance to slavery and its practice was outlawed on plantations. I didn’t understand Nanny’s version of obeah, but in my writing, it became Nanny’s tool for violence. I didn’t employ the kind of magical realism I would later use in my first novel. Nanny was just magical. Bullets were shot at her, as in legend, but they didn’t pierce her flesh. She could make trees shift and move, use magic to generate a kind of piercing noise that made only white men’s ears bleed. In reality, her power came from her knowledge of guerrilla warfare, tactics like forest camouflage. Her incantations were more likely blessings that fortified her people’s courage as they went into battle. In historical accounts, the Maroons reportedly used noise to disorient and intimidate British troops while attacking them—yelling, banging on drums, blowing horns like the abeng (made from a cow horn). But my version drew from legends about Nanny’s exceptional ability rather than from corroborated historical accounts and oral histories. My Nanny was flat, a representation of all the violent things I wanted to do in this world because I felt weak.

*

When the pandemic began, I found it hard to focus on the novel I’d been writing, set in a present day that no longer exists, so instead I tried to write about Nanny again. I ordered Karla Gottlieb’s The Mother of Us All and read it in its entirety. According to Gottlieb’s research, in 1740, the British granted Nanny and her people land. William Cuffee couldn’t have killed her in 1733. Cudjoe did sign a peace treaty on behalf of the Leeward Maroons, but so did Quao, a leader of the Windward Maroons who in some oral histories is Nanny’s brother and was described in Thicknesse’s memoir as having deferred to Nanny’s orders. Both treaties specify that the Maroons have to hunt down and return escaped slaves, as well as fight alongside the British in the case of a slave rebellion.

After the treaty, the Maroons became enforcers for white slave owners. Michelle Cliff includes this truth in her novel but absolves Nanny from blame by declaring her dead. But the land granted as a result of the treaty in 1740 was written to “Nanny a free Negroe and the people under command.”  The real story blurred the line between the two sisters in the legend—Sekesu, who accepted her own slavery and the doctrine of white supremacy, and Nanny, who because of her exceptional abilities supposedly rejected it outright. I was no longer sure if I wanted to write a book about a figure like Nanny, who was inspiring but also deeply problematic. I thought that it was the end of my project.

I’ve lost the urge to put all my faith in a single hero. Throughout the uprisings this summer, I’ve watched a mass movement of people fight to dismantle white supremacy, together, as a collective force. In her book, Gottlieb suggests a possibility that there might have been more than one Nanny. The name is an anglicized version of the Ashanti word nana, a title of respect given to leaders and elders, and the word ni, meaning “first mother.” In British Jamaica, Nanani became Nanny. William Cuffee might have in fact killed one Nanny, only to have another rise up and become more powerful.  In Thicknesse’s memoir, he described seeing the Windward Maroons’ “Obea women,” multiple women, wearing the teeth of dead British soldiers strung together as “ankle and wrist bracelets.”

I’ve decided to write about more than one Nanny; the one who died in 1733 and the one who lived. I’m writing about another woman, Akua, who in oral history was elected by other slaves as the “Queen of Kingston,” and was one of the architects of Tacky’s War, a slave rebellion in 1760 that the Maroons were instrumental in suppressing. What strikes me most about all of these women is not how exceptional they were, but how, together, they exposed how weak white supremacy was. British forces on their own weren’t strong enough to defeat the Maroons. They needed “Black shots,” like William Cuffee, and when they failed, they tried importing Miskito Indians from Central America. People from both companies kept deserting to join the Maroons, making their ranks even stronger. The planters and slave masters who encroached on Maroon territory lived in fear.

 Nanny became our hero, but even when she failed, other women kept resisting. The idea that there is a beginning and an end, a single leader and a single traitor to a movement, is an illusion. Even Sekesu may have resisted. Female slaves resisted exploitation by men like Thomas Thistlewood by running away whenever they had the chance, when they couldn’t fight. “Nanny” could have acted like a protective cipher, a label for a moving target, while the many women who struggled to bring forth the empire’s collapse went about their work, unnoticed but no less powerful for it.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Leaving kids with nannies for long hours is an act of negligence: UAE cops

A psychologist noted that leaving kids to maids and nannies may affect their behaviour and actions.
Leaving children with nannies or caretakers for a major part of the day "poses a threat to their safety" and can also negatively affect their behaviour, the police have warned parents. The police said doing so can be considered an act of "negligence" as it leaves children vulnerable.

The Abu Dhabi Police on Saturday launched an awareness campaign to educate families about the negative effects of leaving children under the care and supervision of nannies and maids for extended periods of time.

Colonel Saeed Hamad Al Kaabi, acting director of social support centres at the force, said: "The police are conducting campaigns and awareness programmes for families to protect children's psychological, physical and public safety. The centre is focusing on protecting and caring for families and children. Our commitment is to use the best police practices and precautionary measures to ensure that children receive the best standards of family stability."

He appealed to parents to not leave their children with the domestic help for long hours, explaining that the country's law will hold them responsible for negligence and failure to do their duties. He stressed the need to take necessary measures to ensure children's safety and wellbeing.

According to Al Kaabi, most nannies do not possess the required skills to raise children and deal with their character development, "which negatively affects their psychological, health and behaviour". He urged mothers to provide care and closely monitor kids and protect them from risks.

Risk of losing kids' love
Parents risk losing kids' love if they don't spend enough time with them, said psychologists practising here. Nasir Al Riyami, a psychologist and hypnotherapist at the Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, said leaving children with relatives and nannies is a growing trend "as we live in a busy world". But families need to be aware of the risks involved. "Parents should know that they are at the risk of losing child attachment," said Al Riyami.

"The child will feel neglected and this will affect their attachment towards parents. After they grow up, most of these kids will choose to spend time with other people and not their parents. Parents may need to sacrifice and spend time with their children for proper upbringing and to strengthen the bond."

On the child's safety and security under the care of nannies and maids, Al Riyami said parents need to know the caretakers well enough to hand them over the responsibility of taking care of their kids.

"Parents should accept nannies as part of their family because they are left with the responsibility of taking care of their children while they are away," he said. "Nannies and maids should be treated with respect. Pay them well and give them gifts for their services as this will boost their morale and eventually help in giving more attention to kids."

Dr Dolly Habbal, a PhD in clinical psychology at the Advanced Cure Medical Centres, highlighted the mother's role in child's upbringing in various aspects - religious, social, and psychological - stressing that the "present trend" of families leaving their children to be taken care of by others is "not a good idea".

"Raising a child is something important and requires parents' physical presence to instil good values, monitor what they do and watch on TV and teach them good morals and values," she said. "Significantly relying on domestic help to raise a child also negatively impedes a child's linguistic development.

"A mother's duty includes taking good care of her child. Families should limit the role of domestic help to house chores."

The psychologist noted that leaving kids to maids and nannies may affect their behaviour and actions.

"Upbringing of a child is parents' responsibility. They shouldn't let others do it for them or they will lose their love as they did not spend enough time with them," said Habbal.

(Source: Khaleej Times)

When the Nanny Leaves

Parents may underestimate how profound the loss can be to young children when a nanny leaves, writes Alexandra Sacks, a psychiatrist and co-author of a forthcoming book about the emotions of pregnancy and the postpartum period, in the NYT. Read on: 

As they walk out the door each morning, working parents are grateful for the nannies who care for their children in their absence. And yet, those same parents often struggle with the knowledge that their young children spend more waking hours with their nannies than with their mothers and fathers.

So when the time comes for the nanny to move on, parents may underestimate how profound the loss can be. As one mother in my women’s mental health psychiatry practice said, “I didn’t realize that she had become part of our family until she told us she had to leave.”

The start of a new school year, when child care needs change, is high season for nanny turnover, said Alene Mathurin, a former nanny who now works as a community organizer for other nannies through her blog “My Nanny Circle.”

“Families often arrange for nannies to leave when children are away at summer camp or on family vacation so it’s less disruptive for their school year routine,” she said.

If the nanny and the parents have a healthy relationship, it can help soften the emotional impact of the departure on a child. Research shows that it’s best when parents don’t let their own emotions interfere with helping their child mourn the loss of a caregiver. Showing that you can relate to children’s sad feelings about a nanny leaving may help them feel safer and more cared for.

Sometimes, parents are so stressed by the logistics of the departure of a nanny or babysitter — who will handle school drop-off? — that they may overlook the nuances of their child’s emotional needs. Parents may also struggle with their own separation anxiety: Fear about how they will fare without the nanny and guilt about their own daily goodbyes are complicating factors.

In a 2014 blog post titled “Is It Hard to Think About Nannies?” on Psychology Today, Susan Scheftel, a psychologist at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, described how parents’ anxieties about a nanny-role can cause them to ignore how important a nanny has become. “She is there when and because the parents are not,” Dr. Scheftel wrote. As a result, Dr. Scheftel said, “Families may need to deny their enormous need for assistance by refusing to acknowledge the nanny’s role or her individual humanity.” This can contribute to tension between a caregiver and the parents that may either contribute to her exit, or create stress in the home that interferes with a child’s sense of stability when it’s time for the nanny to leave.

Cameron Lynne Macdonald, a former nanny and medical sociologist, found in research for her 2010 book, “Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Micropolitics of Mothering,” that some families expect nannies to play a paradoxical role she called the “shadow mother.” (Yes, nannies can be men, and serve as shadow fathers, but research tends to focus on women.) In such cases, parents expect a nanny to form a strong bond with a child but also appear invisible in the family, “to be simultaneously present and absent in the children’s lives,” she wrote. By asking a nanny to work in the shadows, parents may avoid their own feelings about how psychologically important the nanny has become, and so may be less sensitive to their children’s needs around the separation.

Some parents do this because they are afraid that a deeper bond with a nanny will interfere with their child’s healthy attachment to them. In fact, studies show the opposite. When a child has a high-quality bond with a caregiver, this can actually help complement and reinforce parental attachment. Therefore, children who are more securely attached to both their nannies and parents feel more secure over all.

In a report in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in March, Dr. Jessica Yakeley, a British psychiatrist, found that children have enough psychological room to attach to both parents and a nanny or multiple other caretakers.

Families and the child care workers they hire share a complex relationship that merges the personal with the professional.

Ms. Mathurin, whose mother left her in the care of a grandmother in St. Lucia at age 3, said that transitions can be especially stressful for nannies who themselves may have a complicated family history. “We don’t realize the toll it has on women to leave their loved ones behind, and then love the children they work with,” she said.

In her research, Dr. Macdonald interviewed nannies who said they in turn found the burden to perfect the art of “detached attachment” exhausting: How can you adequately bond with a child just enough, but not so much that it would make separation traumatic and make the parents feel lesser-than?

Around transitions, parents, children and nannies alike may experience a range of emotions including competition, guilt, abandonment, relief, resentment and love. An open and reflective dialogue including all parties — parents, nannies and children — can make saying goodbye a little easier.

Following are some suggestions to help ease the transition.

Parents — assess your baggage. Talk to your partner, friends, mental health professional or anyone else you trust about your nanny’s role in your family. Unresolved baggage may bubble up and lead to unrealistic expectations and more disruptive transitions if a nanny has to leave.

Practice fair employment. Employers and child care workers should be clear about their expectations. A written contract that is respectful to both parties should be followed. Look to groups like the National Domestic Workers Alliance for ethical employer guidelines, such as terms around notice of resignation or job termination. The more mutual trust and respect you and your nanny share, the better you will be able to work together to help your child prepare for a transition.

Keep communication direct and open. Create an environment in which your nanny feels comfortable talking to you about issues that relate to job satisfaction. Give your nanny advance notice if you can no longer maintain a full-time position when your child starts school. Once it has been decided that a nanny is leaving, ask for her advice on how you can both support your child.

Work together to put the children first. It may be helpful for the nanny to sit down with a child and explain why she has to move on. It may also help children to hear that they didn’t do anything wrong, and that the nanny’s goodbye is not their fault. Let your children’s questions be your guide about what information they’re capable of handling. Drawing the nanny a farewell card can help young children who may not be able to put their feelings into words.

Facilitate a smooth transition to the next caregiver. If possible, allow for a gradual period of overlap and minimize other changes in a child’s routine. Transitional objects like stuffed animals can help children find safety in familiarity — this is not the time to try to throw away a beloved blanket.

A Qatari's tribute to his Filipina nanny is the best thing on the internet right now

He thanks her for being part of his family, speaking in her native language.

While we routinely hear stories of abuse and hardships endured by domestic workers in the Middle East, there are many heartwarming ones as well.

It doesn't erase or remove the problems with the kafala system and societal racism, but this young Qatari man's heartwarming tribute to his Filipina nanny shows that, despite the flaws, incredibly positive relationships can be formed between immigrants and the families they work for.

Speaking in Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines, Qatari writer Nasser Al-Naama describes the lasting bond he and his family has formed with his nanny Yaya Zubaidah.

The video has since gone completely viral.

"I always conceived us to be a family of seven; the 7th member being our nanny from the Philippines – Zubaidah," Al-Naama says in the video.

"For more than twenty years since my birth she became a quintessential part of my entire family’s life and I can’t imagine what my upbringing would have been like without her in it," he says.

"An immediate kinship with Filipinos".

"I feel an immediate kinship with Filipinos anywhere I go in the world," Al-Naama adds.

"As a Qatari, I sincerely want to thank the Filipino community in Qatar for all their hard work and undeniable contribution to the development of this country."

And Filipinos are saying thank-you.

17 Aug

Qatar Living 

 ✔@qatarliving

Qatari writer Nasser Al-Naama speaks Tagalog! #DohaInsider #Qatar#Doha #Philippines #Manila #Puso #Filipino #Tagalog #Kabayan#Pinoy pic.twitter.com/cyNN41fB5m

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Jonathan Favor @jonathanfavor

Thank you for this heart warming message. The Filipinos will always be one with Qatar. Salamat = salam!

5:47 PM - Aug 17, 2017

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(Source: Stepfeed)

The world around nannies

During my routine evening walks, I see some six or seven small children verbally abusing and beating their nanny while playing. The nanny looks so feeble in front of them to defend herself. She tries to convince them, but in vain. I see a girl pleading for some mercy and the kids find it funny to abuse her. They enjoy screaming, yelling at her and occasionally beating her. I wish I could understand their language, but alas, I cannot. I wonder if the parents know about what’s happening around them.

I often wonder if the higher salary, bigger title or extra professional recognition can make up for leaving a toddler in tears each morning, or returning to a teen who is hurt and angry each night. Even if they can afford the best child care or hire a nanny or a housemaid provide the warmth and doting attention they remember having as children? Why do parents have to make such a primary personal sacrifice because of their careers? All because for some extra bucks, for that title, for that position? But how will they get to see the growing days of their children? Can that post, title or money buy them that pleasure?

And how can I forget an incident where a nanny was renting out the baby for beggars? When I was working in Bangalore, one of my colleague’s techie friends had a shock of her life. A city which is known for its outsourcing - from projects to hired killings -- went a step too far and too cruel. A housemaid hired by an MNC couple rented out their baby for Rs 100 to a racket of beggars on the streets of Bangalore.

Early every morning, the couple used to dress their seven-month-old baby with the finest of all clothes, keep fresh milk and costly eatables ready and leave the child in the hands of a maid who was hired through an established agency. But as soon as the couple left, the maid used to mix sedatives in the milk, remove all the costly clothes and dress the kid in torn and dirty clothes. And then, he would be picked up by agents who run a flourishing racket of beggars on the streets of Bangalore. For the whole day, the drowsy child would be carried by a beggar on her shoulders and dropped back in the evening to the maid's hands. The maid used to spend her time happily watching the serials and movies on the television and eating all the stuff left behind for the child.

Every day, the couple was surprised and stumped to find their child inactive and drowsy. He never used to play or create a ruckus. One day, the mother of the kid returned home early from work. To her shock, she found the maid in front of the TV and the baby was missing. The maid went into a panic and was confronted by the mother. The maid then confessed and told her that the child had been rented out and would return by evening. The mother was shocked to find her kid come back dressed in tattered and dirty clothes and sleeping on the shoulders of an unknown woman whose job was to beg daily.

I laud my former colleague, and one of my good friends, Ashwini Katgeri, in this regard. She quit her job once she was expecting and even though her son is going to the kindergarten she hasn’t taken up her job yet, all because she wants to spend time with her child and would never entrust him to the hands of a nanny or a housemaid. She doesn’t want to outsource the job of being a mother to her three-year-old son.

Here, most Qataris have one or more maids – one to cook, one to clean the house, one to look after kids, one to water the plants, blah blah blah. And some even have maids or nannies to look after each of their kids! And not all the maids are like my neighbour’s Sri Lankan maids, who are strong enough to manage the Qatari kids. Some are so young and look so delicate and fragile that I wonder how they manage those children and their tantrums. On the one hand, I see how Lankan nannies next door abuse Indian kids, and on the other hand, I see how some nannies and housemaids are verbally and physically abused by the children themselves.

Unlike my neighbours, who go to work, often for even night shifts, I don’t think many Arab women go to work, even if they do, not for night shifts definitely. And since most of the time, the children spend time with their nannies and hardly get to see, talk or spend time with their parents, I think many such incidents go unnoticed. Or the kids are too young to tell their parents that they are being abused by their housemaids or nannies or in turn, maids and nannies are too scared to report to the parents about being abused and bullied by the kids. Or it may so happen that the maids or nannies are too scared to report it for the fear of losing their job.

Children often follow and try to imitate what elders do. If the parents mistreat the housemaids by screaming at them and the children are witnessing it, they also feel and take it for granted that such a kind of treatment is acceptable and they try to replicate their parents’ behaviour.

Seeing the kids always with the nannies, I sometimes even wonder if the children see their parents at all while they are growing up. I see how the nanny next door pinches and constantly beats our neighbour’s girl and the little girl hardly sees her parents, as both are busy with their work. And how will they get time to bond with their parents?

But even if they are good and treat the children well, I also see another negative aspect of this cycle. Since most of the maids or nannies are from different languages and cultures, the kids will quickly pick up their culture and habits. And I now realize why most newspaper ads seek housemaids or nannies from a particular region or religion or language. Being Malayalees, my neighbours have Sri Lankan maids and both the maids talk to the children in Tamil and the kids have picked up Tamil and not Malayalam.

If a Qatari family takes a Lankan or a Filipino nanny, definitely the kids will pick up Tamil or Filipino and not Arabic. It will say A for Apple in Tamil, Mansanas in Filipino and not Tuwfaha in Arabic!  And what about religion? If they have a Hindu or a Christian maid?! The kids will learn to worship the same way that their Hindu or Christian housemaids do, and have little knowledge about Islam or Islamic worship!

Many nannies and maids can leave a bad impact on the kids. The manners and habits they teach the kids might not be desirable ones. Plus what’s the guarantee the children are fed well and getting adequate nutrition?

I wonder if the parents really get to see their children, as I see most of them are out with friends, shopping, at work or away on business trips. When the children reach their teenage and do not require babysitting by housemaids or nannies anymore, parents try to exert some control over their children's lives, but are unable to do so as their children have little connection with them! I don’t think most of these parents even know anything about their children or their studies or lives, as everything is taken care of by the nannies or maids, right from dropping off and picking up the children from school and sometimes even attending parent-teacher meetings! Many of these children see their nannies or housemaids since their birth and develop a close relationship and bond with them. They are almost like substitute mothers. I have often seen how young children run to their maids instead of their mothers when they hurt themselves.

I think many Arab women from upper-class families, who were pressured to marry early and have children early, leave their children to the care of maids and nannies and spend most of their time going out and having fun, trying to catch up on the years they missed being young and free. But I cannot generalize things as well, as there might be some women who are balancing things properly and taking care of their kids too. Many of them work as teachers and serve in government jobs so that they can start and finish work at the same time as the schools, allowing them to go home and spend time with their children.