There’s a version of this conversation that focuses entirely on compensation and benefits, and compensation matters. But the families that career nannies describe as genuinely good employers aren’t always the highest-paying ones. Some of them are. More often they’re families who’ve figured out something about how to treat a professional in an unusually personal working context, and what they’ve figured out doesn’t cost anything beyond thoughtfulness and some honest self-awareness.
At Seaside Nannies, we hear about this from both sides. Candidates tell us about families they’ve worked for that they’d go back to in a moment. Families who’ve had long, stable placements often have a clear sense that they did something right without always being able to articulate what. Putting the two together produces a picture that’s consistent enough to be worth sharing.
They Were Clear Before the Nanny Started
The families who are easiest to work for are almost always families who were specific and honest during the hiring process. They described the position accurately, including the parts that were genuinely demanding. They gave the nanny a real picture of what the children are like, what the household operates like, and what the job would actually involve on a normal Tuesday. The nanny who starts a position and finds that it matches what she was told has the foundation for a good working relationship. The nanny who starts and discovers a gap between the description and the reality starts with a deficit that’s hard to fully close.
Being clear before the nanny starts also means having the employment agreement, the compensation structure, and the household expectations in writing before day one rather than sorting them out as things come up. The families who do this are telling the nanny something important about how they operate: that they think ahead, that they take the professional relationship seriously, and that she can expect the same directness going forward that she got coming in.
They Communicate in Both Directions
The households where nannies stay longest tend to be households where communication is genuinely two-directional. The family isn’t just delivering instructions and receiving daily reports. There are regular, real check-ins where the nanny’s observations and professional perspective are actually invited and actually heard. When the nanny says something about how one of the children is doing, the family engages with it rather than filing it away. When the nanny raises a concern about how something is working, the family responds to it as the professional input it is.
This doesn’t require formal scheduled meetings, though some families find that useful. It requires a baseline of mutual respect that allows a nanny to say something honest without calculating the risk of saying it. In households where that baseline exists, problems get addressed early enough to stay small. In households where it doesn’t, problems accumulate until someone leaves.
They Respected Her Time Off
The clearest marker of how a family views the professional relationship is how they treat the nanny’s time when she’s not working. Families who genuinely respect days off, who don’t text on weekends except for actual emergencies, who don’t gradually expand the working hours through accumulated small asks that individually seem reasonable, are families that demonstrate they see the nanny as a professional with her own life rather than as a resource that’s available when needed.
This is harder than it sounds for some families, particularly those in high-pressure professional lives where the line between their own time and work time is blurry. The habit of reaching out when something comes to mind, regardless of the hour or the day, extends naturally to household staff in a way that the family often doesn’t notice. The nanny notices. Over months and years, the families who held that line consistently are the ones she remembers as genuinely good employers.
They Acknowledged the Work
Not effusively, not constantly, but specifically. The family that says “you handled that really well” about a specific thing that was genuinely handled well is communicating something different from the family that says “we’re so grateful for everything” as a general expression of appreciation. Specific acknowledgment tells the nanny that the work is actually being seen, that the family has enough awareness of what the job involves to recognize when something was done particularly well.
For nannies doing skilled work in a professional context, that recognition is not incidental. Work that feels genuinely seen is work that people invest in more deeply. The families who acknowledge it specifically and honestly are building the kind of working relationship where a nanny wants to bring her best rather than just doing the job.
