For what she is willing to pay, Vicki Cirillo-Hyland should be able to hire Mary Poppins to care for her two children. But despite offering $500 a week, health benefits, paid vacations and holidays, overtime, use of a car and tuition reimbursement, Cirillo-Hyland has come up short.
“I didn’t anticipate it being this difficult,” lamented the Bryn Mawr, Pa., dermatologist, who has gone through three nanny placement agencies with no success.
A year or two ago, Cirillo-Hyland would have had no problem finding the perfect nanny–and for a lot less money. But the supply of nannies, never plentiful, has shrunk to the point that salaries have risen sharply and employers are offering perks and benefits that at one time only the ultrarich could even consider: cars, health club memberships, country club access, and signing and year-end bonuses up to $2,500, according to nanny agencies.
Desperate parents can blame the booming economy for the nanny crunch.
The agencies say low unemployment makes it easier for potential child-care workers to find jobs in other fields. At the same time, parents with more money at their disposal are willing to spend more on in-home child care.
“It’s somewhere between terrible and disastrous,” Suzette Trimmer, owner of Your Other Hands in Philadelphia, said of the shortage.
Parents across the country are suffering from sticker shock, though the situation is most extreme in high-priced cities such as Los Angeles and New York, where well-heeled professionals are paying as much as $800 to $1,000 a week for caregivers, said Mary Clurman, who publishes Nanny News and runs an on-line nanny agency.
“No doubt about it,” she said, “there are posh jobs out there.”
For agencies, the low nanny supply has meant higher recruitment costs, longer waiting lists and fewer candidates to send to families, who typically interview several potential employees before making a choice.
In this seller’s market, though, parents can’t afford to sit back and wait for an agency to send over a nanny. Aggressive parents are scouring day-care centers, looking overseas, advertising on the Internet and starting bidding wars.
Tricia Shore, a nanny in Media, Pa., said she has more than doubled her salary since her first nanny job a few years ago. And for the first time since graduating from college, she is getting health benefits and can afford her own apartment, something that was impossible on the $6.95 an hour she earned at her last job at a day-care center.
“It’s very long hours,” said Shore, who works from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and shares an apartment with a friend. “But they are very, very generous.”
The nanny market began to get tight about two years ago, according to Harriet Grant, co-president of the National Association of Nannies. Live-out nannies, who made $6 to $8 an hour, now command $8 to $12. Live-ins, who were making $6.25 to $7.50 an hour, now earn $11 to nearly $13 an hour.
“It’s your basic economic rule. Low supply, high demand, price goes up,” said Wendy Sachs, owner of the Philadelphia Nanny Network, which has raised its fee from $2,000 to $2,600 in the last 18 months to pay for increased recruiting. “I don’t remember having a day in 15 years where we didn’t say, `We don’t have enough nannies.’ But we didn’t know what not enough nannies was until we got to this point in time.”
A survey by Nanny News found that nearly all nannies got paid holidays and vacations, more than 60 percent got paid sick days, 40 percent got health insurance, 20 percent got large cash bonuses and 14 percent got club memberships, while others got gas money, Internet access, cellular phones, use of a car off-duty, airfare to nanny conferences and frequent-flier coupons.
Betty Jo Earnest, a 49-year-old mother of two, is a top-of-the-line nanny. Intelligent, patient and a natural-born teacher, she is every working parent’s dream.
In the affluent suburb where she works, the word is getting out.
Earnest’s salary jumped in the last year. She also gets three weeks’ vacation, 15 paid holidays and overtime. One family even asked if she would go to the Caribbean with them on her weeks off.
Because of the increase in her salary and demand for her services, “I can work as much as I want,” Earnest said.
Though families are willing to pay more, they expect more. Nancy Clementi pays up to $600 a week, medical benefits and gas allowance, but the nanny must have at least an associate’s degree in early-childhood education.
“One of the problems in finding good, reliable child care is we don’t really have any system for training child-care providers,” said Clementi, a vice president of a pharmaceutical company who lives in Rosemont, Pa., and has a 4-year-old son. “If you look at the U.K. and most of Europe, there are actually training programs for women to do child care. A British nanny trains for two years and has to take a licensing exam.”
