I had a friend who did a NNEB course straight from school, 2 year course to qualify as a nursery nurse, she finished college on a Friday and flew to America the following day and was a nanny for 2 years with a family with 2 young children.
The vast, vast majority of nannies on the market in the US then and now have no such training. Most have 'on the job', long term experience of babysitting by the time they leave high school and embark on their careers. Or they are early years teachers between jobs, again, with a long list of references from babysitting, and not just certificates. A two year course would be seen in the US as equivalent of an Associates degree in a community college, and not necessarily proof of any sort of sustained interest in taking care of children.
The au pair rules were changed in 1997 to mandate 200 documented hours of hands-on childcare experience for au pairs seeking to work in the US. This is a history many, many American teenagers applying for nanny jobs could easily provide. The US government prioritised hands on experience as opposed to certification for au pairs.
There were alternatives. She wasn't in Hollywood or NYC. These people wanted childcare on the cheap and you get what you pay for. They could have employed someone like my friend, not an aupair, not a Norland nanny.
The vast, vast majority of childcare in the US is low paid work, and the vast, vast majority of children emerge from the experience perfectly fine, physically healthy, well socialised, and definitely not dead. There are many, many conscientious, decent women (and some men) out there turning up every day and giving of their best with other people's children.
The Eappens did not prioritise their children and the fact is they chose their careers, they chose when to have children. If they were a couple of teenagers on minimum wage using cheap childcare they would get much more vitriol
This is a gross slander of the Eappens. It is a slander that was leveled at Deborah in particular when the case made the news, and it is not fair. Deborah worked three days a week and came home for lunch frequently on days she worked. She chose to take the mommy track. She had spent four years in university, four years in medical school and four or five years training in ophthalmology after that. Assuming no gaps, she would have been in her 30s when she had her children.
You don't have an unlimited biological window in which to have children. You want them to have the benefit of your energy and enthusiasm when you are relatively young.
This condemnation of the Eappens and the choices they made is appalling.
They did not cause the death of their child through their choice of childcare employee.
Somebody inflicted injuries on baby Matthew that caused his death.
The vast, vast majority of young professional couples in the US make exactly the same childcare choice the Eappens did - they hire someone young, someone who represents herself as able and willing and enthusiastic about working with babies and small children - and their babies do not end up dead.
What is happening here is victim blaming at its most vile. A woman dares to keep working in a professional capacity after having a child, and is on trial forever afterwards when it all goes wrong for her child.
www.nytimes.com/1997/10/24/us/a-murder-trial-about-more-than-a-nanny.html
...the reaction to Matthew's death among some Americans appears to fit with a lingering unwillingness among them to accept the idea of working mothers, said Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and author of ''The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families'' (Basic Books).
Two-thirds of American mothers of children under 6 work, Ms. Coontz said. Yet instead of creating a national child care policy, she said, ''we say to individual women, 'You go out there blindfolded and get the best child care you can, and if you can't, we're going to blame you.''
The criticism of Dr. Eappen prompted one Boston Globe reader to write in outrage that when welfare mothers stayed home with their children, they were branded lazy; when working mothers put their children into day care, they were accused of ''dumping'' them in germ-infested settings; and when they used au pairs, they were accused of abandoning their children to inexperienced teen-agers.