When a family loses a great nanny, the explanation they give their friends is usually something about how she “got a better offer” or “needed something closer to home” or had a “family situation.” Sometimes those things are true. More often, they’re the polite version of a more complicated reality that nobody on either side of the relationship wants to say out loud.
At Seaside Nannies, we talk to a lot of experienced childcare professionals who’ve left positions that, from the outside, looked like exactly what anyone would want. Good salary. Nice family. Great kids. Beautiful home. And yet they left, often fairly quickly, and often for another position that paid the same or less. Understanding why this happens is useful information for families who want to actually keep the people they hire, and it’s useful information for nannies who are trying to figure out why they keep feeling the pull to leave situations that should be working.
The Compensation Looked Right But Wasn’t
Pay is the thing families talk about most when they’re trying to attract good candidates, and it matters. But good nannies in Los Angeles – and this is a market where experienced candidates have real options – are looking at the full picture of what a position actually costs them, not just the hourly rate.
Mileage is a significant one. A family who expects their nanny to drive the kids to school, activities, appointments, and playdates all day and doesn’t compensate adequately for the vehicle use and gas is essentially cutting into that hourly rate in a way that doesn’t show up on paper. So is the family that expects their nanny to buy things throughout the day – snacks, craft supplies, birthday party gifts for the kids’ friends – and then makes the reimbursement process slow or complicated enough that the nanny starts absorbing costs rather than bothering.
Then there’s overtime. California law requires overtime pay for hours worked beyond eight in a day or forty in a week, and families who routinely run late or regularly extend the nanny’s hours without properly compensating for it are, whether they realize it or not, creating resentment that compounds over time. The nanny who seems fine with flexibility often isn’t fine – she’s just not saying anything yet.
They Didn’t Feel Like a Professional
This is the one that’s hardest to explain to families who genuinely like their nanny and treat her warmly. The relationship can be warm and the day-to-day environment pleasant and the nanny can still feel, at a fairly fundamental level, like she isn’t being treated as a professional.
What does that actually look like? It looks like the family making changes to the schedule without asking, just informing. It looks like guests or family members wandering in during the workday and treating the nanny like hired help rather than a person with a name and a job. It looks like the parents overriding the nanny’s decisions in front of the kids, which undermines her authority and signals to everyone in the room that her judgment doesn’t carry real weight. It looks like being given tasks that have nothing to do with childcare without any acknowledgment that this falls outside what was agreed to.
In Los Angeles, where the gap between wealthy employers and the people they hire can be very pronounced, this dynamic plays out in specific ways. Nannies who’ve worked in this market long enough can usually identify within the first few weeks whether they’re genuinely respected as a professional or whether they’re seen as a service. The ones who feel like a service start looking for other options pretty quickly, regardless of how good the compensation looks on paper.
The Kids Were More Than They Signed Up For
Experienced nannies know what they’re capable of, and good ones are honest with themselves about it. What makes a nanny leave isn’t always that the kids are difficult in some objective sense – it’s that the level of need exceeds what the position was described as or what the nanny can sustainably provide.
A nanny hired for two school-age kids and a toddler is going to have a very different experience than a nanny hired for the same three kids where one has significant behavioral challenges that weren’t disclosed during the interview. A nanny who accepts a position with a family who “works from home” and later discovers that means both parents are physically present but completely unavailable and expect the nanny to manage everything while navigating the weird tension of having employers literally in the next room is going to feel set up.
The pattern that leads to departures here isn’t usually that the nanny couldn’t handle what she was given. It’s that she wasn’t given accurate information to decide whether she wanted to take this on, and by the time the full picture became clear, she was already in the job and the fastest exit was to find something else.
There Was No Room for a Real Relationship
This sounds counterintuitive for a job that’s inherently relational, but some families structure their household in ways that make it very hard for a nanny to actually connect with anyone in a meaningful way. The parents who give detailed daily instructions via text but rarely have a real conversation. The household where the nanny feels like she’s being monitored constantly through cameras but never gets direct feedback. The family where the only communication she receives is when something went wrong.
Good nannies – the kind who build long careers in this field and genuinely love the work – care about the families they work for. They want to feel like what they’re doing matters and that the people they’re working with actually see them. When a family is too busy or too guarded or too focused on the transactional parts of the employment relationship to let that kind of connection develop, the nanny doesn’t stop being a person who wants it. She just goes somewhere she’s more likely to find it.
The Position Wasn’t What They Were Told It Would Be
At Seaside Nannies, when we see nannies leave positions quickly, this is probably the most common underlying reason, even when other factors are also present. The family described the position one way during the interview process and the reality turned out to be something meaningfully different.
Sometimes this is deliberate – families who know that certain aspects of the position are challenging and downplay them because they’re afraid of scaring off good candidates. More often it’s not deliberate at all. Families don’t always have a clear-eyed sense of what their household is actually like or what they’re actually going to need from someone. They answer interview questions based on their intentions rather than their reality, and the nanny arrives to discover that the “very flexible” schedule is actually pretty rigid, or that the “light household tasks” are actually a significant chunk of each day, or that the “easygoing” kids have some specific challenges nobody thought to mention.
This is one of the reasons we work so hard on the front end to help families articulate honestly what they need. A nanny who knows exactly what she’s getting into and chooses the position anyway is a nanny who’s much more likely to stay. The alternative – attracting candidates with an appealing version of the position and hoping the reality doesn’t push them out – almost never works for long, and it’s a genuinely expensive cycle to keep repeating.
What Families Can Do
If you want to keep a good nanny, the most important thing you can do is treat the employment relationship with the same seriousness you’d bring to any professional relationship. That means being honest during the hiring process about what your household is actually like. It means making sure compensation is genuinely fair when you factor in everything the position requires. It means communicating clearly and respectfully, including when things need to change. And it means recognizing that the best nannies have options, and what keeps them in a position isn’t just pay – it’s whether they feel valued, respected, and like they’re doing work that matters.
The families who lose great nannies repeatedly aren’t usually bad people. They’re usually people who never really thought carefully about what it takes to make this kind of employment relationship work long-term. Taking that seriously upfront is what makes the difference.
