The curse of Boff. Again.

[BoffinMum]

You are not going to believe this, guys. The lovely temp (and she really is lovely) who came today has had to leave because her mum was rushed into hospital. We don't know if/when she'll be coming back. So we are without childcare again! I am currently in Paris and DH was supposed to be going into work tomorrow because he hasn't been able to get in all week. He has no leave left either. Crikey! Anybody want three lovely children, two with diarrhoea?

I'd agree with Boffin about the whole child abuse thing. I've seen more child abuse working as a nanny than I ever have when I worked in inner city Surestart schemes.

The thing that really worries me is if it's unacknowledged that it can happen in 'nice' families and these kids are the ones going on to run the country then heaven help us all.

With regard to nannies, every barrel has its bad apples but the rot does seem to be spreading. I find the sense of entitlement from people my age and the children I look after quite galling actually. Duty is now a dirty word never to be uttered in case it puts 'pressure' on them to do something they don't want to do. Heaven forbid!

1. Does everyone else think the rot is spreading, as Tavvy says?
2. What do parents do about it?

Surely work ethic and doing one's best etc should be taught at home not school? I am very old and I wasn't taught those at school and wouldn't have expected to be. Neither do I expect school to teach them to my ds. That is one of my jobs as his parent. Along with good manners and discipline - although I expect these two to be reinforced at school.

1. Yes, I do.

1. I despair.

Seriously, though, I think that the root causes of this rot lie in social policy, including but not limited to education, over the last two, maybe three, decades. I think that it will take significant changes in social policy to reverse the trend though I am not sure that it can be and if it, it will take a long time. For me it is the single most depressing - possibly the only really depressing - thing about living here.

Tell us some good news BoffinMum - do you think that one of the two candidates you saw on Saturday will work out? Or perhaps you'd rather not say yet in case they read MN, too.

I nearly did type up a full on Boff style report on the proceedings, but then I thought discretion ought to be the order of the day.

I will say though that I am now bloody terrified of hiring anyone at all in case I get it wrong. I'd really rather retreat to bed and pull the duvet over my head.

How about you all come over and do a panel interview with me???? Coffee and home made Apfelstrudel will be provided ....

i wondered how interviews went

bung blondie an email boffy

I suppose it starts with defining 'professionalism,' for nannies. It's rather an elusive term.
The way I define it is that I do my job to the best of my ability, uphold the terms of my contract, keep my moods and personal life seperate and provide what I'm paid to provide, which is a warm, safe, organised, caring environment for the children along with a healthy balanced diet and stimulation for the little one who is with me all day. It also means I can follow instructions as well as work on my own initiative without throwing a major strop about doing something 'extra,' if it helps make the household run more smoothly. FOr me it also means being trained, punctual, courteous and remembering your conduct reflects on the family and influences the children. Knowing when to keep your mouth well and truly shut is a good one to remember as well, respect the families privacy. This could go on and on
I'll shut up now.

Hope the interviews weren't too traumatising
Sending e-chocolate and a crate of e-wine.

How about a virtual interview panel - well, suppose it would need to be a post interview review panel or something like that, as we would advice pre/post the interview itself.

As blondie says... bung blondie an email and cc me in on it, then both blondie and I could be on your pannel.

Pity I don't live nearer, quite fancy a trip tomorrow today.

Me too!! I want in!!

Re: work ethic etc being taught in school it's not so much that it should be taught in school (and I had plenty of it at home, thankfully) it's that school is the first place you learn to work and take responsibility for yourself. In ye olden days, aka my old-style primary school, if you didn't do your homework you were punished, if you didn't do as well as the teacher thought you should then you had to explain yourself and there was a very strong expectation that you would go out of your way to help a teacher by opening a door or a smaller child in the playground. Got to secondary school and it's all you-you-you, your exams, your marks, if you don't want to do the work then you don't have to we can't make you, if you turn in substandard homework don't worry because you're having a bad day, if you don't revise for a test then better luck next time, don't be too clever or step out of line because the exam board won't like it and the end point of all this is not for you to be a good human being but for you to go to university and get a really well paid job. It's just reinforcing selfishness instead of the more positive qualities so maybe I should have said that they weren't being reinforced in school, but then they're teaching the direct oppposite - don't use your initiative, don't do more than you have to and if you can come up with an excuse then it's all okay.

1. Yes and that's one reason I'm in favour of registration.
2. If I knew I'd have set up a pressure group to do it.

Tavvy - what kind of abuse are you talking about?

replied to email, ask her the questions i asked you and see what she replies but no 1 could be a real possibilty for you x

frakkinaround, a very interesting analysis of secondary education. That you, you, you orientation certainly continues at university, based on the idea that people know what is in their interests (i.e. study, thought), and do it. However, more and more economists seem to be saying these days that these perfect economic models are bullshit, because people rarely act in their own interest; they can go astray, or they can be misled. Or bad health or laziness or tiredness can interfere. For example, not going to go for a walk or go to the gym; I've been working for 20 hours and am tired/ I'm too lazy/ my DC is ill and I don't have the childcare to leave him/her for a proper session of exercise. All that is perfectly valid behaviour. But buggers up a person's interests.

Does that mean I am for a "nanny" state? (and if so, please let it be a nice, sensible nanny, not a feckless, spit-roasted chick!)

Strange - I found university actually much more helpful for developing responsibility. Partly because tutors tend not to care about 'you' that much and if you fail then tough, you failed. Retake? Once with a capped mark. I volunteered, and then worked, in an advice centre and a lot of students had very rude wake-up calls. I think the lack of consequences in secondary school meant people didn't quite have a straighforward view of reality! Yet it would have been so easy reinforce a good work ethic and the sense of duty in secondary school. The you, you, you culture has one problem - you can't really fail.

PMSL at your last comment though!

boff thinks i sound posh

she also said things that i cant mention about the nanny, that we can not mention from the place where we do not mention - pmsl

Fab.

Being locked in dark cupboards, beaten, having their things destroyed and thrown at them, constantly being told they're rubbish, hopeless, stupid etc. Constantly screamed at for nothing, dragged up stairs by the hair for not being 'good enough.'
Children being drugged all weekend to keep them quiet so doctor parents didn't have to deal with them.

I'm not referring to families I have worked for necessarily but what I have seen generally over the years by parents and nannies.

Worst case I had was when I worked in education. The child was being abused in so many ways but because her father was a headteacher and her mother a doctor apparantly it 'didn't happen.'

at abuse, Tavvy.

Poor children.

Same as 20 + years ago. Please tell me something was done.

I encountered this in the 1990s as a teacher.

Kids humiliated in front of their classmates on sports day because even though they won a race 'it wasn't fast enough'.

KSII kids tired and pale, kept up until midnight every night doing more and more 'homework' as if it's some kind of intellectual race.

Private school kids whose uniforms stank of smoke and whose nails were never cut, hair never brushed.

But I think the worst one was when I was a nursery nurse and one starfucker mother went upstairs to shag the boyfriend, and left her 3 and 4 year old playing in the garden, and told them to put on their own suncream. The kids did their best, but only had little hands, and they came in on Monday with great red marks and blisters the size of their hands where they had missed bits of each other. They were supposed to go swimming with the other children that day but were crying. I was so horrified when I helped them undress, and I took one look and realised these kids had second degree burns and should be in hospital outpatients to have them dressed. I rang the mother and said she needed to take them to the doctor. She refused and then I put my foot down and said it was either that or I would make a scene and take them up to A and E myself. Relunctantly she came to get them and sort it all out, but I could never look at her without bile rising after that.

Bitch. Imagine doing that to your kids because you want a bit of nookie?

Oh, and chlorinated water stings, too!

tavvy+boff - they are awful stories

the sunburn one was abuse+neglect and ss should have been called in

Boff those poor wee munchkins

I au paired in the States for a single mum who on MY day off would lock the kids out of her bedroom and stay in there with whichever bloke she had brought home the night before. Thus my day off would disappear swiftly as these babies (aged nearly 4 and 1 FFS!!!!) would not get fed or changed or anything til mid afternoon if I didn't do something. As nannies/au pairs we get to see A LOT of stuff that goes on behind closed doors. But so much goes unnoticed/ignored/tolerated if the outside image fits our perception of acceptable IYSWIM?

I think as a general rule society has lost a lot of it's "takes a village" ethos. There's so much competition/paranoia/anxiety/pressure in family life to be the best/provide the best that a few simple things have been forgetten. children are overscheduled and put under crazy pressure to perform from an early age, yet they are also brought up with a ridiculous sense of self-entitlement and lack of accountability. It's such a paradox: be the best or else, but if you don't then don't worry there must be a good reason for it, it's someone elses fault.

My sister is 18 and she and her friends have slacked off the last year and all got crap results. Their excuse: school didn't "interest" them. So now they have poor results which will and are affecting them already and the school's response instead of telling them all to pull their bloody socks up, is to declare this years class is too "creative" for the established more academic curriculum and therefore their results are neither the pupils responsibility or the schools!!! Madness.

Where have all the logical consequences gone? Why does no one take personal responsibility for themselves any more? I hate that there is always an excuse for poor behaviour/low achievement, when in my day (lol I am only 31!!!)our teachers made us explain ourselves and redo any shoddy work until it met their standards/expectations of us. It made me very quickly do it right and do it well first time. I learnt hard work = good results and that's carried through into my career.

The "lottery" dynamic has become so pervasive that hard work /= good results. I read this theory a few years ago, and it is quite persuasive. Basically, the all-or-nothing, it-could-be-me (forget about "you") totally undermines the reward-for-effort ethic, because the effort of buying a lottery ticket does not guarantee the reward, but nor is it a very big effort for such a great reward. This isn't even capitalism, which is quite a rational and even beautifully fair system (greater risk = greater potential reward, but people can minimise their risk if they are willing to accept lesser rewards) compared to the lottery dynamic.

Apply the lottery ethic to school, and you have the phenomena you're complaining about. Not even school, necessarily, because I'm not sure whether my cousin got any O Levels, but he started working and by the time his contemporaries had graduated, he had worked his way into a position of some experience and seniority. Now, I was a bookish type, and laid my path through school and university, but that doesn't mean we both didn't work!

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell does point out that opportunity has a lot to do with success, although he supports hard work. However, he also seems to show that being "good enough" is enough after a certain point - that is: talent must be allied with work and confidence and other advantages. It's a very interesting read, for far more than the "10,000 hours" part of the theory that made the most stir (that was the chapter that I read, excerpted in the Books pages of some newspaper).

those cases are appalling. I was hoping that I'd been the only person to see some behaviour that, although it wasn't abusive, wasn't appropriate parenting but it seems some people have seen worse than me. There's another aspect to the lack of the it-takes-a-village IMO. You're no longer under scrutiny and you don't worry about what the curtain twitchers are going to think of your parenting skills. Much more effective as a deterrent than Social Services.

And people worry people employed to work with children being abusive...

This thread is going totally OT.

I don't know if any of you are parents, but I have to say I feel patronised, scrutinised and 'nagged to fuck' at the moment (as Jeremy Clarkson put it recently) by people who think they know it all better. This includes politicians/civil servants, providers of services I have to use and even my employers at times.

Example: I am a 42-year-old education lecturer with a childcare problem completely not of my own making. I need some support from my employers, who spend a lot of time whiffling on about Equal Opps.

We have an onsite nursery here that offered me a place last May, but which I let go after I had got the first disastrous nanny to finally sign her contract. However some of my colleagues came up to me when they saw me having to bring Felix into work and struggling a bit, and they said that it was possible to book ad hoc slots at the nursery if you needed emergency childcare.

Of course I jumped for joy to hear this, and went over there the next morning.

Some be-lipsticked, sedentary jobsworth was sat behind a desk in nursery reception and finally deigned to let me in. I enquired about booking vacant places and was told "That's only for children already here."

I had the temerity to ask "Why?"

Her lip curled. She bristled at being challenged. "Well, of course, it's because they wouldn't settle and it would be bad for them if they weren't already members of the nursery".

Now, I have problems with this on many levels. 1. I am his mum, and an educated one at that, and if I decide he is better off in a nursery for the day rather than being hoiked about campus and left with complete random strangers, surely that should be up to me. 2. It's clear their incentive is to have as few children as possible in nursery each day to reduce workload, so they are in conflict with potential users, but try to justify this with a pseudo-psychological rationale we are supposed to submit to without argument. 3. There is no actual evidence that my child (or indeed any child in that situation) wouldn't settle better in nursery as opposed to being hoiked around - in this case they have actually bastardised Bowlby and attachment theory, and misapplied it for their own purposes. However I bet she wouldn't even know who Bowlby is if challenged.

Reader, I am ashamed to say in response I bristled back and was very formal and analytically rude to this woman (full on Boff treatment), but in my defence I think after 22 years of trying to deal with self-satisfied jobsworths as a parent, I can plead mitigating circumstances.

So it's not all about parents being crap - I think the village/child thing comes closest. At the moment I am in a hamlet rather than a village in terms of support, and there's not much prospect of change.

I think that very few institutions, companies etc live their mission statements IYKWIM. What they say they aim to do is very often not accomplished in practise, for all kinds of reasons that mainly have to do with how they select, train, motivate and pay their staff. (I am not talking about absolute levels of pay here, by the way, but rather structuring pay in such a way that people do what you what them to do.) Your employer's commitment to equal opportunities clearly is not lived at all levels but I would be very surprised if it was. I can understand how satisfying it is to vent one's spleen at times (have done it myself on a number of occasions ) but I think that you need to think about charming people to get what you want - even they appear as jobsworths to you. Sorry, really don't mean to add to the list of people patronizing you , but I am afraid that that is my experience.
Actually, while it would no doubt help you out in the short-term, I doubt whether it would be such a great idea to leave your DS in a place run by someone you obviously dislike from the word go.
My advice would be to continue to focus on finding a good nanny. I do feel for you, though, as your job is clearly not one where you can just take unpaid leave for a fortnight or so to sort things out. Are you making any progress on the hiring front at all? I must say that I find it incredible that no-one seems to be able to help you find a good nanny, not even a temp, in these days of recession.
I assume that there is no relative (e.g. your parents, an aunt etc) youcan ask to help out very short-term.