You spent years caring for other people’s children. You were excellent at it. Families loved you, kids thrived under your care, and you built a solid reputation as a professional nanny. Then you had your own baby, took some maternity leave, and now you’re preparing to return to nanny work. Except something fundamental has shifted and you’re not entirely sure how to navigate it.
The guilt hits you immediately. You’re leaving your own infant to care for someone else’s children, and even though you know intellectually that working parents everywhere face this same reality, emotionally it feels different when your job is literally childcare. You’re also noticing that your relationship with your employer family feels more complicated now. You understand their parenting struggles in ways you didn’t before, but you’re also less patient with things that used to not bother you. Your body is different, your energy is different, and your emotional bandwidth is significantly reduced.
After twenty years working with nannies across Chicago and nationwide, we’ve watched many navigate the transition from nannying without kids to nannying as parents themselves. Some thrive in ways they didn’t before, bringing deeper empathy and richer understanding to their work. Others struggle intensely with the emotional complexity and eventually leave childcare for careers that don’t involve caring for other people’s babies while missing their own. Understanding what actually changes when nannies become parents helps both nannies and families navigate this transition more successfully.
The Guilt Is Real and It’s Complicated
The guilt about leaving your own child to care for someone else’s hits differently than standard working parent guilt. You’re not leaving your baby to go work in an office where you analyze spreadsheets or manage projects. You’re leaving your baby to go cuddle, play with, and care for other people’s babies. The cognitive dissonance is intense.
You find yourself thinking about your own kid constantly during work. When you’re soothing your employer’s crying infant, you’re wondering if your baby is crying at daycare. When you’re celebrating developmental milestones with the kids you nanny for, you’re mourning that you might miss your own child’s milestones. When you’re spending hours doing enriching activities with your employer’s toddler, you’re calculating how little time you’ll have for those same activities with your own kid by the time you get home exhausted.
The families you work for sometimes make it harder without meaning to. They talk about how lucky they are to have you so they can pursue their careers. They’re grateful you’re there so they don’t have to leave their kids with “just anyone.” And you’re sitting there thinking about how you are leaving your kid with someone else, and the implication that they’re lucky to have you rather than random childcare makes you feel worse about your own situation.
Some of this guilt is about actual circumstances that are hard. If you’re working fifty hours weekly for another family while your own child is in daycare ten hours a day, that’s genuinely difficult and the guilt reflects real tradeoffs you’re making. But some of the guilt is about internalized ideas that good mothers don’t leave their babies, and wrestling with that while your job is caring for other people’s children creates additional emotional weight.
There’s also weird guilt in the opposite direction. Sometimes you’re honestly relieved to be at work where kids listen to you and you feel competent, rather than home with your own child where you’re exhausted and nothing works and you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. Then you feel guilty about being relieved to leave your kid, which compounds everything.
Your Relationship With Employer Families Shifts
Before you had kids, you could be endlessly patient with exhausted parents who were overwhelmed by parenting challenges. Now that you’re an exhausted parent yourself, you have way less tolerance for families who complain about problems that seem trivial from your perspective.
When your employer tells you about how hard their weekend was because the baby wouldn’t nap and they’re just so tired, you’re thinking about how you’ve been tired for months and you still have to show up and do your job competently. When they’re stressed about going back to work after three months of maternity leave, you’re thinking about how you went back to work after six weeks because you couldn’t afford longer. When they treat minor parenting inconveniences like catastrophes, you’re judging them because you’re dealing with way harder stuff and managing to function.
You also understand their challenges more deeply now in ways that make you more empathetic. You get why they’re anxious about separation. You understand why they want updates during the day. You recognize that some of their “difficult” parenting requests come from their own fear and overwhelm, not from trying to make your job harder. This deeper understanding can make you a better nanny, but it can also make you more emotionally exhausted because you’re carrying their feelings on top of your own.
The boundary between personal and professional gets murkier when you’re all parents together. Before you had kids, families sharing parenting struggles was just information you needed to do your job well. Now when they share parenting challenges, you’re tempted to share your own, which creates weird dynamics because you’re employees, not peers. Some families appreciate the connection. Others get uncomfortable when nannies cross from “professional caregiver” into “fellow parent,” and navigating that line becomes complicated.
You might also start noticing parenting choices you disagree with more strongly now that you’re making those choices yourself. Before you had kids, you could implement whatever parenting approach families preferred without much emotional investment. Now when families make choices that differ from what you’d choose for your own child, it sometimes feels harder to support them without judgment.
What Becomes Harder Physically and Emotionally
The physical demands of nannying feel different when your body is recovering from pregnancy and childbirth or when you’re functioning on the fragmented sleep of early parenthood. Chasing toddlers, carrying babies, playing on the floor, staying energetic all day – all of this is harder when you’re exhausted from your own sleepless nights.
If you’re breastfeeding, you’re dealing with the logistics of pumping during work, managing supply, and potentially dealing with pain or complications while you’re supposed to be focused on the kids you’re caring for. If you’re formula feeding, you’re dealing with judgment from families who expected you to breastfeed longer or comments about your feeding choices. Either way, your body isn’t entirely your own and navigating infant care while managing your own postpartum physical reality is exhausting.
Your emotional bandwidth is significantly reduced. Before kids, you could absorb the emotional intensity of caring for other people’s children without it depleting you completely. Now you’re managing your own child’s emotional needs, processing your own parenting anxieties, and trying to have energy left for the kids you’re paid to care for. There’s just less of you available, and families sometimes notice the difference even though you’re trying to maintain the same level of care.
The schedule inflexibility becomes harder when you have your own child. Before kids, staying late when families were running behind wasn’t great but it was manageable. Now staying late means paying more for your own childcare or leaving your own baby with a caregiver longer than you want to. The impact of families not respecting your schedule isn’t just inconvenience anymore. It’s affecting your own child, and that creates resentment that didn’t exist before.
Sick days become incredibly complicated. When you’re sick, you have to decide whether you can afford not to work even though you have your own child to care for. When your own child is sick, you’re navigating whether to call out from work to care for them, which makes you feel guilty toward your employer family but also like a bad parent if you don’t prioritize your own kid. When the kids you nanny for are sick and you’re exposed, you’re worried about bringing illness home to your own child. The calculation of whose needs come first in any situation involving illness gets messy fast.
What Becomes Easier and Richer
Having your own child also makes some aspects of nannying significantly better. Your understanding of child development is deeper because you’re living it daily with your own kid. You’re more attuned to the tiny shifts in babies’ needs because you’re constantly reading those shifts with your own infant. You’re more confident in your judgment about what kids actually need versus what families think they need.
You bring more creativity to activities because you’re coming up with things to do with your own child and then bringing those ideas to work. You’re more relaxed about mess and chaos because you’re living with it at home and you understand that perfect order isn’t realistic or necessary with small children. You’re less precious about keeping kids perfectly clean or controlling every aspect of their play.
Your empathy for kids’ big feelings is exponentially deeper. When toddlers are having meltdowns about seemingly nothing, you understand viscerally that they’re experiencing genuine distress even when the cause seems trivial to adults. Your patience with developmental phases increases because you’re watching your own child move through them and you understand these aren’t behavioral problems – they’re just how kids grow.
You’re also better at setting boundaries because you have to be. Before kids, you could accommodate families’ requests more easily. Now you have your own family’s needs to protect, which means saying no when necessary and being clear about your limits. This boundary-setting actually makes you a more sustainable employee even though it feels harder initially.
Many nannies find that having their own children makes them genuinely better at their jobs in ways that outweigh the challenges. They’re more grounded, more confident, and more intuitive. Families often notice that nannies return from maternity leave with deeper wisdom and stronger skills, even though the nannies themselves feel like they’re barely holding it together.
Managing the Two Worlds
The hardest part of nannying while parenting is often the mental transition between caring for other people’s children and caring for your own. You spend all day being professional, patient, and emotionally regulated with your employer’s kids. Then you come home and have to immediately switch into being a parent yourself, except you’re exhausted and you have nothing left.
Some nannies find they’re better parents than they feared they’d be specifically because they have clear separation. Work is work, home is home, and having those boundaries prevents the blur that makes both roles harder. They’re fully present at work, then fully present at home, and the structure actually supports both.
Others struggle with the constant code-switching. At work you’re the professional caregiver who has to maintain composure and implement parents’ preferences. At home you’re trying to figure out your own parenting approach while being too tired to make dinner let alone implement thoughtful parenting strategies. The contrast between professional nanny and struggling parent feels impossible to reconcile.
The logistics are real too. You need childcare for your own kid that works with your nanny schedule, which often means long days because most nanny positions have unpredictable end times. You need backup care for when your child is sick or your childcare falls through. You need to figure out how to maintain your own kids’ schedules and routines when your work schedule is built around someone else’s family needs.
Whether to Disclose During Job Searches
If you’re looking for new positions after having a baby, figuring out what to disclose becomes complicated. Do you mention you have a young child? Do you address potential concerns about availability or commitment upfront? Do you wait until it comes up naturally?
There’s no perfect answer. Some families see nannies with their own children as assets who bring parenting perspective and deep understanding. Others worry about divided loyalty or unreliability due to your own childcare complications. Being upfront lets you filter out families with concerns, but it might eliminate you from consideration before you can demonstrate your competence.
What matters most is ensuring any family hiring you understands your boundaries around schedule and understands that having your own child means you can’t be infinitely flexible the way childless nannies sometimes can be. If families need someone who can regularly stay late on short notice or who’s available for frequent overnight travel, you might not be the right fit, and establishing that clearly prevents problems later.
Making It Sustainable Long-Term
Nannies who successfully continue careers after having children are usually the ones who make intentional choices about what kind of positions work for them now. Maybe they transition from full-time to part-time. Maybe they seek families with more predictable schedules. Maybe they become more selective about which families they work for, prioritizing those who respect boundaries around parents’ own childcare needs.
Some nannies deliberately shift their specialization after having kids. They move into newborn care specialist work because the temporary nature of positions fits better with their own family’s needs. They transition into family assistant roles that are less emotionally intensive than direct childcare. They pursue household management positions that use their skills differently.
The ones who struggle long-term are usually trying to maintain the same level of career intensity they had before kids while also meeting their own family’s needs, and something breaks. Either their own family life suffers, their work performance declines, or they burn out completely trying to do both at unsustainable levels.
There’s also the reality that some nannies realize after having their own children that they don’t want to continue caring for other people’s kids. The emotional complexity is too much, the guilt is too heavy, or they discover that what they loved about nannying before kids doesn’t translate to loving it as a parent. That’s a legitimate realization, and leaving childcare to pursue other work isn’t failure. It’s recognizing what works for you in this life stage.
What Families Can Do to Support Nanny Parents
Families who employ nannies with young children and want those working relationships to succeed need to be more intentional about support and flexibility than they might be with childless nannies.
Respect schedule boundaries strictly. When you say you’ll be home at 6pm, be home at 6pm or communicate early if that’s not possible. Your nanny has her own child waiting and her own childcare to manage. Chronic lateness that might have been annoying before kids becomes genuinely problematic when it affects her own family.
Understand that nannies with their own children legitimately can’t be as flexible as childless nannies. They can’t easily stay late on short notice. They can’t take on frequent weekend work. They need their sick days for their own kids sometimes. This isn’t lack of commitment. It’s navigating dual responsibilities.
Show interest in their children appropriately. Many nannies appreciate when families ask about their kids and acknowledge they’re juggling multiple roles. This doesn’t mean treating them as friends rather than employees, but it does mean recognizing their full humanity beyond their work role.
Be understanding about the exhaustion. Nannies who are also parents of young children are functioning on less sleep and more stress than childless nannies. If their energy is slightly different or if they’re occasionally a bit less cheerful, some grace goes a long way.
The Bottom Line
Becoming a parent changes everything about nannying, from the emotional complexity to the physical demands to how you relate to employer families. Some nannies thrive with these changes, bringing richer understanding and deeper skills to their work. Others struggle with the guilt, the logistics, and the emotional intensity of caring for other people’s children while raising their own.
There’s no one right way to navigate this. Some nannies successfully balance long-term nanny careers with parenting their own children. Others transition to different work that better fits their life stage. Both paths are valid, and figuring out what works for you requires honest assessment of what you can sustain and what you’re willing to sacrifice.
After twenty years working with Chicago nannies and nannies nationwide, we know that becoming a parent transforms nanny careers. The question isn’t whether things change. It’s whether those changes make you better at your work or whether they make continuing in childcare unsustainable. Only you can answer that, but understanding what actually shifts when nannies become parents helps everyone navigate the transition more successfully.
