COVID precautions, nannies, and nanny shares

Hi there - I am just starting out in a nanny share with another family. I have a 9 month old boy, and the other child is also a 9 month old boy.

We've been advised by our pediatrician to ask our nanny to mask until the current surge is over. We're also asking her to test 1x/wk before the start of each work week. We're providing tests for her.

Our nanny has 4 school-age children which puts her at a pretty high level of exposure. She and her entire household are fully vaccinated. We didn't ask her to comply with any social restrictions beyond what any reasonably COVID-cautious person is doing right now. In talking to her we got the sense that she would be very protective of the babies wrt exposure.

Hope this helps.

We recently contracted Covid and it’s fairly certain it’s from our nanny’s school age kids as her whole family is ill. N95s work well if the person is willing to do that. Our neighbor’s nanny caught Covid from her son but luckily it was over winter break so they had not seen her. It all depends on your risk tolerance at this point. Nanny’s are not generally well paid and even if they don’t have kids will live in shared housing increasing risk. That said, we are glad our boy sees has seen nanny’s loving face for the last 18 months even though we did get COVID. Now that kids are back in school and seeing friends etc. there are many more risks.

Our nanny has guaranteed wages. So if we go on holidays and I do not need her, she is paid Regardless. At The beginning of Covid we had just hired our nanny and she had only been working two weeks before me completely shut down.
We paid her for the time she was off until we felt it was OK to bring her back into the household. So basically we paid her for four months even though she wasn’t working for us. 
When searching for a nanny we made sure that we had somebody on the same page as us. She,  like us are fully vaccinated and limit our potential exposure.
The family & Nanny also  test once a week at our house. I supply the test for her. 
She does not wear a mask and I don’t require her to but I’ve heard other people make their nannies do so. 
I am not a share and specifically pay our Nanny  to be exclusive to us only.  We pay her $40 an hour plus benefits. 
I would assume when doing a share that you would have to get a family with the same values as yours. 

For our 6-month old, we just made sure that our nanny was boosted and that we got the sense she takes COVID seriously by avoiding large gatherings and things like that. At least while this surge is ongoing. We didn't place any "restrictions" on her beyond that - I felt that once trust was established, we had to just roll with that.

We preferred a nanny that did not wear a mask when watching our daughter, as we believe it would negatively impact the attachment and development and relationship. I understand this may be different for different families, and its all about your comfort level. We have taken COVID very seriously from the start, and are still pretty much hunkered down. We also didn't think it would be fair for us not to be masking inside if the nanny was.

These concerns are why we avoided a nanny share for now, although I acknowledge that is a privileged place to be.

Our nanny and children wears masks outside in public places but not inside our home or the other home of the family that we share the nanny with.  Our nanny has children of her own who are vaccinated so we just ask that they are careful but one of them has a full time job in a retail setting so there is only so much that we can do.  Biggest recommendation I would have is just to constantly check in with the other family and your nanny about what their respective comfort levels are.  Things are changing on almost a daily basis so what might be okay one day could be different the next.

We decided it was unreasonable to set guidelines for someone's personal life or try to manage them across families, so we chose a daycare center that we felt had good protocols in place. It has been going really well, and is one less thing for the parents to have to "manage" day to day. Now we send our kid and we don't personally worry about how the teachers spend their personal time, because we know the center is doing what it can and has processes in place for every little thing. I can say it's been extremely helpful. 

We just started with a single nanny for our 4.5-month-old, after trying to make a nannyshare work. The share didn't work out because the other family had strict budget requirements and ended up going with a daycare. Their general COVID precautions were similar to ours, though. (Aside from, ya know, going to a daycare. It was a small one though, only 4 infants.) I think it's a lot easier in the Bay Area to have these conversations than in other places where they may not be as COVID conscious!

The nanny we found already takes many precautions, such as wearing a mask all the time and avoiding gatherings. Her children are grown and do not live with her (ie go to school and be a potential vector.) You can ask them what they did the past weekend, since that gives you a good general idea of what level of precautions they're already taking. As a formality, I wrote up an addendum to our contract that specified the COVID precautions we expected (I'm in SF so some of it's specific to SF): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vham_V-7pSiv2ZhgfuC87IblvGMFKbsRTTD…;

In general, I chose to control our environment more than strictly controlling behavior while not at work. Every morning before the nanny arrives, I open the windows in the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. And then I set the air purifier in the living room to run for 8 hours. My husband and I work from home and still mask up upstairs around the nanny, although we take masks off downstairs in our workspace (nanny is never there), and close the door after turning on the air purifier there.

I joke that perhaps I am the most qualified person to write something like that, because I spent all of 2020 in charge of website content strategy for San Francisco's COVID response!