Co-Parenting with Nannies
One of my readers asked if I was going to discuss childcare decisions by couples in my book on marriage. He brought forth an interesting observation about the rise of nannies doubling as primary carers or co-parents in India over the last decade.
The nannies bathe, feed, entertain, console and pretty much raise the child almost independently with little to no involvement of the parents. They accompany the families on social occasions, holidays, etc. It’s become a form of status signalling.
Having lived in a few countries outside India, he thought that the extent to which this phenomenon has proliferated in India is unique to our country. He asked me to share any insights I may have on this phenomenon through my research and conversations with different married individuals and couples.
While he brought up important questions about the impact of this decision on development of children, I have little to no insight to offer on that aspect, mostly because that’s not the focus of my research or book.
I have been focussed on understanding why couples make the decisions they make with regards to childbearing and rearing, and how that impacts the quality of their marriage. So, I wrote back to him with my observations on the former. I thought I’d share this with a wider audience, to gather more wisdom.
Overall, what I have learnt through conversations with couples from India and other countries is that childcare in India is more complex than it is in Western countries, and that influences the parenting decisions in particular ways.
The specific decisions vary by cities, communities, family structures and individual circumstances. However, I will attempt to break down the complexity of these decisions more broadly, based on my conversations, thus far:
1) There is greater mobility within the country, due to jobs, and hence, people do not have support of their families with respect to childcare. Funnily enough, I have heard that grandparents in India are much more enthusiastic about spending a few months abroad versus another city in India to support with childcare. Even within the same city, the grandparents are reluctant to move in with their children to support with childcare. So, unfortunately, parents in India are forced to rely on external support.
2) As for external support, we haven’t seen enough professional daycares develop in India, including in large metropolitan cities. For eg, in the UK, you have daycares dime a dozen, and they are regulated by OFSTED, a central rating agency, that monitors their performance and rates them which makes it easier for parents to use that option. The few “professional” daycares that exist are either not conveniently located (close to home or workplace) and do not operate the hours that align with Indian working hours (>12 hours a day on an average). As a result, parents in India have had to rely on other forms of support to raise children (aka a nanny) because the women’s labour participation hasn’t consistently gone up to justify the development of such support infrastructure for double-income families with children.
Now, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but they influence each other. This is why you see so many well-educated women dropping out of the workforce when they have children, and opting to be stay-at-home parents despite their affluence.
3) While we do not have sufficient daycares, labour is cheap in India. So, outsourcing to a nanny is a viable option. You’d typically spend ~5% of your salary on a nanny in India, versus 15-20% in the west. However, this help is not professional, reliable or regulated, unlike it is in Singapore, for instance, which has a well-established professional live-in-help infrastructure. Hence, nannies in India require extensive supervision. This supervision is usually provided by grandparents, if they are around. If not, one of the parent either works from home or drops out of the workforce depending on their available options. Unfortunately, it’s women who stay home most of the time even today as there remains a larger gender-gap in assuming household responsibilities even today. However, given that most well-educated women stay home only reluctantly due to limited choice, my guess is that it’s hard for them to assume 100% childcare given their other interests. When you are a stay-at-home partner, your household responsibilities also shoot up significantly, which along with raising a child becomes harder to do consistently, without support.
4) The concept of au-pairs, child-minders or babysitters does not exist in India. I am sure if it did, people would supplement their emergency needs with such infrastructure, if they were as professional, trust-worthy and reliable as they are in some of the western countries. As a child grows older, you don’t need nannies around for as many hours, but people in India don’t get rid of them and instead get used to the slack offered by the nanny’s spare capacity. As for the people who take their help along for social events and holidays, it’s predominantly restricted to those people who grew up with a lot of such live-in household help either in affluent families or certain communities with traditionally joint families and live-in help. Is this a form of status signalling? Or is this just conditioning? I don’t know. But this isn’t a widespread phenomenon beyond such affluent classes or communities.
5) Work-culture is still not as parent-friendly in India. Taking a day-off or working from home when your child is sick is still frowned upon in India, because it is assumed that you have a wife, grandparent or a nanny to take care of such things. Hence, the working parent isn’t able to support the stay-at-home parent with occasional parenting needs. This results in a form of single parenting, which can be exhausting for the stay-at-home partner, who then starts relying more and more on the nanny. Once you have built sufficient trust in the nanny, you might potentially outsource much more of the parenting to them, to be able to go back to work or pursue your own interests. But I haven’t got the perception from these stay-at-home parents that they are not involved. They may be less involved compared to another child’s parent who has made different choices (as a result of different circumstances), but this parent is definitely more involved than their partner who is more work-focussed (usually men).
6) Families (esp. grandparents) in India continue to influence childcare much more than in India than in the west, even if it is just offering their opinion on daily decisions to the parent w.r.t raising the child. I have heard of grandparents who insist on the child not being put in daycare, since they will fall sick and instead being kept at home, and raised by the mother or a nanny even in the safety of their own house. People in India have poorer boundaries with their parents than those who live abroad, and hence, end up making decisions that please others versus themselves.
Given the complexity of childcare in India, a lot of younger couples are choosing not to spend their time, money and resources on rearing children altogether, or even delaying it till a time when they feel they can afford it financially and emotionally, so they can be more involved in raising their child.
I’d love to hear what personal circumstances drove child-bearing and rearing decisions for you as a couple, and the impact of these decisions on your marriage. You can leave a comment here, or write to me.
What a nuanced view on childrearing in India!