Wanted: Toddler's Personal Assistant book review
Yes, you're the one that's paying me, but paying me is so low on the totem pole when it comes to who actually is in control, who actually has the power.
That's one of the things I kept thinking about while reading Wanted: Toddler’s Personal Assistant by Stephanie Kiser. This is a nonfiction memoir with the tagline, How Nannying for the 1% Taught Me About the Myths of Equality, Motherhood, and Upward Mobility in America.
I saw this book in one of the literary journals, and I was like, wow, captivating title. Can't wait to read it. So excited. The book was fascinating.
I love the title Wanted: Toddler’s Personal Assistant because that was the truth.
There's a story where Stephanie is taking care of one of the younger siblings. The older one is having a playdate, and the doorman comes upstairs and says, “Do you know that these kids are throwing things off the balcony?” Throwing the rattle. Throwing the teddy bear. Throwing the bottle.
Stephanie is nannying for the 1%. The upper, upper, upper echelon in the United States. These are your billionaires. These are the people who can pick you up in a town car, take you to the helipad, and fly you over to the yacht.
We're not even talking about buying all of our groceries at Erewhon. You actually might not know what's in the fridge because what you keep in your fridge is beverages and bottled water. There's also a chef's kitchen, and that actually has the food.
This is your 17-year-old child having their apples peeled before they go to soccer practice. This is that.
Stephanie was nannying as a full-time role. I'm talking $180,000 a year, health insurance, all of these things. She would get the kids ready, take them to school, sometimes care for younger children during the day, pick the kids up, and take care of them after school. But she's not preparing snacks. They have a house manager and a chef doing all of that.
She's definitely the caretaker of these children because the top 1% can afford to have multiple, multiple, multiple staff members in their homes.
And then you find out that there are times when she gets to drive the families' cars. She's managing house managers and other staff, coordinating things like groceries and household needs.
The first thing that stood out to me was privilege.
Stephanie was incredibly privileged to be in this position of power within the household. A lot of times, the default parent would be the mother. She would be the one hiring the nanny, explaining where everything went, how the other nannies did things, and how Stephanie could be in charge of the other household staff.
But Stephanie also starts talking about class and the privileges she was given with the kids that other people weren't. She would take them to the playground and say to another nanny, “Oh, I've never seen you before.” And the other nanny would explain that she was always there. Stephanie just hadn't noticed her because she was the brown nanny or the Black woman nanny.
Oh.
Then we learn about Stephanie's own background. She became an athlete, which allowed her to attend a private high school. Eventually, she went to college on a sports scholarship. Through those experiences, she met people who were living very different lives. People who got Porsches for their sixteenth birthdays. People who didn't learn how to drive because they'd always had a driver.
That was when she noticed she wanted a different life, one that was very different from where she came from.
Stephanie grew up with a lot of financial instability. She talks about her grandmother giving her money for things. She knew there was a monetary divide. She knew she wasn't rich. She knew what food insecurity felt like and what it was like not to have a fully stocked fridge. She also grew up in a conservative Republican family where she was taught that rich people were terrible and that they were the ones hurting everyone else.
Then somebody gave her a book, and she started questioning those beliefs.
Did she actually think rich people were terrible, or had she always been told that rich people were terrible? Did she think America was an amazing place, or had people always told her America was an amazing place?
One of her examples involved healthcare. During a medical emergency in England, she saw a different healthcare system firsthand. She started reading and learning on her own and questioning what she'd grown up believing.
"When you grow up with things, you just expect them to be true. You expect them to be real life."
Later, as an adult, you have to determine whether those things are actually true or whether they were simply true for the people who taught them to you.
Then Stephanie ends up in these homes where the refrigerator is full of bottled water and seltzer because the actual food is in the chef's kitchen.
These families don't even see the food being prepared. They only see the finished plate of snacks. They're not recognizing that somebody is peeling those carrots in the back room. The difference between the world Stephanie grew up in and the world she was now working in was fascinating.
Part of the reason Stephanie could become this big-time nanny was because of her education. When people tell you a college degree isn't worth it, do not listen to them if they have a college degree.
I have a college degree. I also have a law degree. I cannot tell you that a college degree isn't beneficial because I have definitely benefited from it.
Stephanie was in rooms and places because of her degree. She was able to function and network in these rooms because of her degree. Not so much because of the degree itself, but because of the people she was around as a result of getting that degree. The people she was rubbing elbows with.
I personally am an extrovert. I like to talk to people. I like to network. I love to rub elbows.
But that is a practiced skill. It's a soft skill you can learn. I get a lot of that from being in uncomfortable positions, from being in rooms where I am definitely not the smartest person and I have to just listen and read the room.
Those are experiences you get from going to college, going to law school, and being in places where you're not the biggest, brightest, or boldest person and you have to learn from others.
Stephanie never would have been in those rooms to interact on that same level without those experiences.
The other thing that was really, really fascinating was the truth about mothering. Even within the top 1%, at least in the United States, there is still a default parent.
What Stephanie noticed was that even though she was doing a lot of the caretaking for the kids, the mothers were still the default parents. If something was happening, the kids would typically reach out to their mother.
Mama, help me with this. Mama, help me do that. Mama, help me do this.
The people hiring Stephanie were typically the mothers. The people doing the interviews were the mothers.
The dad might poke around and find out what was happening, but a lot of times, it was still on the mother to hire help because she needed more help.
Which I kind of felt a way about because that was our case, too.
We had a nanny for my daughter when we lived in Kentucky. She was this sweet lady who was a retired schoolteacher. I had never considered having a nanny. I definitely thought it was a frou-frou, la-la type of thing that you only saw rich people doing on TV. That's not true.
We were about nine months into the pandemic. I had stopped working, and I was desperate for adult interaction, to read books, and to get back to who I was after having the baby.
My husband is from Ghana, and when he grew up, it was common to have an extended family member, maybe a second or third cousin, come live in the house and help take care of the kids, drive them to school, and do those kinds of things. And because of the pandemic, there weren't really daycares we could sign her up for. There weren't other things we were ready or comfortable doing.
This was our first time having a kid. The whole thing.
Having a nanny was amazing.
We are not in the top 1%.
The difference was that we used our nanny for three or four hours at a time, almost like babysitting. Stephanie would be there for twelve hours a day.
But what I found fascinating was that even when you move up these ranks and get millions and millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, it's still the same old thing.
The woman does the caretaking. The woman is providing for the kids. The woman is finding out what they need and what they don't need.
Stephanie mentions in the book that she doesn't want kids. Partially because of the way she watched her mother, especially how attached her mother was to her father. She kept trying to have more children with him to keep him attached.
But Stephanie had also spent years raising somebody else's kids.
She raised one family's kids and then another family's kids.
It's a lot of work.
Why would she want to do that for herself when she'd already experienced so much of it and didn't really see the appeal?
I think that's interesting, and it speaks to the myths of equality part of the book.
One of my favorite stories involves Stephanie working with a family that has a newborn.
They bring in a night nurse. Stephanie is thinking, okay, I'm working here. These are the rules. They're hiring someone else. Is my role threatened? What's going to happen?
This lady comes in and basically says, “That won't work for me. I need this. That bed isn't going to work for me. Call me when you get the things on my list of requirements.”
Okay. Bye.
And Stephanie is like, I didn't know you could talk to them like that! The night nurse explains that these people need her. She doesn't need them.
They need her so they can sleep at night while she takes care of their child. If she doesn't have the proper bedding to sleep well and be able to take care of their child, that's not going to work.
She knows who has the power in that situation.
"They need me. I don't need them."
We don't see too many of Stephanie's nanny roles after that, but I imagine she took that lesson with her. She could start walking in that confidence of knowing she's the one who knows what the kid wants to eat. She's the one who knows what to do when the kid gets upset or frustrated. She's the one actually doing the work.
Yes, you're the one paying me, but paying me is so low on the totem pole when it comes to who actually is in control and who actually has the power.
Not to say that the parents' role isn't important, but I'm doing the nitty-gritty, during-the-day stuff.
That's worth something here.
That's worth something.
And especially with the top 1%, the money is nothing.
The money is nothing.
Raising a child is so much more than having a baby.
I find that a lot of times when you see people who are so frustrated with having kids, it's because they wanted the baby. They didn't necessarily want to raise the kid. It gets a lot different when you get into raising a child.
The baby is only a baby until they're about one year old, and then you have the rest of it.
But Stephanie also shares some of the extremes of nannying for wealthy families. She goes on an interview, and somebody wants to hire her for their 16-year-old son so she can get him to and from practice and make sure he brushes his teeth.
And she's like, okay. No.
Stephanie, I hope you write more books after this because I would love to know what else you're doing.
I would also love to find out if you become one of those OG nannies who's doling out advice to the younger nannies. Telling them, no, you're the one who's in control. You're the one helping these families make their lives easier.
Between the conversations about class, education, motherhood, and the actual power that caregivers have, I found this book fascinating.
Very, very good.
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Until the next book review,
Kyla
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