Family assistants hired to support households with children find themselves managing work that extends well beyond traditional childcare into territory that looks more like household coordination and light household management. The role combines caring for children with keeping the household running smoothly, and understanding what that actually means in practice helps both families and candidates know whether family assistant work is the right fit versus a pure nanny role or a full household manager position.
The Household Calendar Coordination
Family assistants often manage the household calendar beyond just children’s schedules. This includes coordinating parent schedules with children’s activities, managing vendor appointments for household services, scheduling playdates and coordinating with other families, booking travel arrangements when needed, and keeping the entire family’s schedule organized and running smoothly. The calendar work extends from childcare scheduling into broader household coordination.
A nanny manages children’s schedules. A family assistant manages the household schedule with children as one component. The difference is scope and complexity.
The Errand and Household Task Management
Running household errands is typically part of family assistant work: grocery shopping for the household not just children’s food, picking up dry cleaning and handling other personal errands, managing household supplies and reordering when needed, coordinating returns and exchanges, and handling the logistical tasks that keep a household functioning. These errands happen during the work day, often while children are at school or activities.
The family assistant who thinks the role is purely childcare discovers quickly that household errands are a significant part of the work, and families hiring family assistants should be clear upfront about what errands they expect help with.
The Light Household Management
Family assistants handle household coordination that stops short of full estate or house management but goes beyond childcare. This might include coordinating with housekeepers or other household staff, managing vendor relationships for regular services, handling household organizing projects, coordinating household maintenance issues with landlords or service providers, and generally keeping household operations organized.
The boundary between family assistant and house manager varies by household, but typically the family assistant coordinates existing systems while a house manager creates and manages those systems. The family assistant implements, the house manager designs.
The Meal Preparation Scope
Many family assistants prepare meals for the whole family, not just children’s food. This includes dinner prep for family meals, meal planning based on family preferences and schedules, grocery shopping for family meals, and sometimes batch cooking or meal prep for the week. The cooking responsibility extends beyond the child-focused meal prep that nannies typically handle.
Families hiring family assistants should be clear about cooking expectations, because preparing full family meals is significantly different from making lunch for toddlers.
The Travel Coordination and Packing
Family assistants often coordinate family travel logistics: researching and booking family trips when needed, coordinating packing for family members, organizing travel documents and itineraries, and managing the household during family travel periods. The travel work goes beyond just accompanying children on trips to include the planning and coordination work that makes family travel happen smoothly.
The Household Communication Hub Role
In many households, the family assistant becomes the communication hub who coordinates between family members, manages information flow about schedules and household needs, communicates with vendors and service providers, and keeps everyone informed about what’s happening. This role requires strong organizational and communication skills beyond what childcare alone demands.
The Organizing and Household Projects
Family assistants handle household organizing projects: managing children’s spaces and belongings, coordinating household storage and organization, handling seasonal transitions like winter/summer clothing swaps, organizing family photos or documents when needed, and tackling the ongoing organizing work that households generate. These projects happen alongside childcare responsibilities and require time management skills to balance both.
What Family Assistants Don’t Typically Do
Understanding what falls outside family assistant scope helps clarify the boundaries. Family assistants typically don’t handle deep cleaning (that’s housekeeper work), don’t manage household budgets and finances (that’s house manager or estate manager work), don’t supervise other household staff beyond basic coordination (that’s house manager work), and don’t handle major household administration beyond basic coordination (again, house manager territory).
The family who needs someone doing these higher-level tasks should hire a house manager, not expect a family assistant to expand into that role without title and compensation changes.
The Skill Set This Requires
Successful family assistants need childcare competence plus strong organizational skills, comfort with multitasking across different types of work, the ability to prioritize competing demands, good communication and coordination abilities, and flexibility to shift between childcare and household tasks throughout the day. It’s a different skillset than pure childcare requires.
Not every excellent nanny would thrive as a family assistant, and not every talented household coordinator is skilled at childcare. The role requires both competencies.
How the Work Balance Shifts
The balance between childcare and household work changes based on children’s ages and family needs. Families with very young children might need mostly childcare with some household coordination. Families with school-age children might need mostly household coordination with after-school childcare and activity management. The family assistant role adapts to what the household needs, which means the day-to-day work can look quite different across families.
Candidates considering family assistant positions should ask how the time splits between childcare and household work, because a 70/30 split feels very different from a 30/70 split.
What Makes It Professionally Appealing
Family assistants who love the role describe liking the variety between childcare and household work, enjoying the organizational challenge of keeping complex households running, appreciating that they’re supporting the whole family rather than just children, and finding the problem-solving aspects of household coordination professionally engaging. The role appeals to people who like managing complexity and variety.
What doesn’t appeal to everyone is the constant shifting between different types of tasks, the need to be responsive to multiple family members’ needs, and the reality that you’re never doing just one thing all day.
At Seaside Nannies, family assistants describe the role as more complex and varied than pure childcare, requiring skills beyond what traditional nanny work involves, and appealing to professionals who like supporting households across multiple domains.
