The Welfare Nanny Diaries

By Rinku Sen and Gabriel Thompson, ColorLines. Posted September 28, 2006.

Sandra had only recently received her license to provide childcare, in 2001, when she first came across Khalid and his mother, Tanisha Watson, at the Jesse Owens Playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The park had become an afternoon retreat for the five kids that Sandra was supervising, located two blocks from the house she shares with her mother. After working with youth at various agencies for the previous two decades, Sandra had decided to convert the first-floor apartment into a classroom and play area-naming it Kwame's Place after her 10-year-old grandson-and was thrilled with her new job as neighborhood caregiver.

Tanisha was exhausted, with good reason. She was working from midnight to 8 a.m. as a payments operator at Bank of America's office in the World Trade Center. During the evening Khalid's father stayed with the one-year-old, but when Tanisha got home the next morning, Khalid was rested and ready to play. She'd make breakfast, take a quick shower and head over to the park, struggling to keep her eyes open.

"I watched Sandra for three weeks at the park before I spoke to her," Tanisha remembers. "She had such a rapport with the children that I figured she was their grandmother." Eventually Tanisha approached Sandra and learned that she was a childcare worker; Six months later, with a subsidy provided by the state for childcare, Khalid was the newest member of Sandra's expanding family of little ones.

"I'm already a statistic," says Tanisha, who is 26. "I'm young, Black, not married and with a child. Teenagers that get pregnant, it can feel like the end of the world, that things are never gonna get any better. But I decided that I wasn't going to do that; I wanted to work and study. That's why Sandra was such a godsend." By the time Khalid enrolled, Tanisha had switched jobs and signed up for evening classes at Long Island University, hoping eventually to become a teacher.

"Some mornings I've had to bring him over at 5 a.m. Some nights now I get to her house after class at 10 p.m., and she's already fed Khalid dinner and given him his bath. All I have to do is pick him up and put him to bed." With a new job at Beth Israel Hospital, Tanisha no longer needs the childcare subsidy. Still climbing the economic ladder since having Khalid, she's grateful that someone like Sandra has been holding it steady from below. "I don't know what I would have done without her," says Tanisha.This is the story of the welfare nanny. She is the poor mother's nanny, far more than a nanny in fact. Instead of working for a family in a luxurious Upper East Side apartment, Sandra walks down to three rooms in her mother's Bedford-Stuyvesant home, where she performs the functions of caretaker, teacher, parent educator, advocate and referral service. Few things distinguish her from her clientele-they live in the same neighborhood, they are the same color and they're all occupying the lower shelves of the economy. This army of cheap childcare providers counts almost 10,000 women in its ranks. They make it possible to call welfare reform an achievement in self-sufficiency.

The government funds three kinds of childcare for the poor. Large daycare centers look the most like a traditional workplace, where the wages and benefits sometimes approach those of public school teachers. The next tier is the family daycare provider like Sandra, who sets up for 6 to 14 kids in her own home, is licensed and regulated, but with fewer training and educational standards than center workers. Finally, there is the informal provider, who is limited to two kids. Informals are unlicensed and largely unregulated.

Wages in home daycare range from $1.10 to $6 per hour; annual salaries generally fall between $15,000 and $19,000. Providers are paid by the child, and regulations require keeping a small ratio of adults to children. Unlike the rich mother's nanny, the poor mother's nanny can't go to her client and demand to be paid the minimum wage-it's far more likely that she has to help her clients meet the basic necessities of life.

Virtually all efforts to raise wages over the last 30 years have been tied to professionalizing the workforce. As one advocate says, "Polls show that people are more willing to pay for something called early childhood education than childcare."

But little kids are always going to require that the adults around them do more than teach. Children can't feed, water and clean themselves. They don't know how to comfort themselves. They can't even learn to love themselves unless an adult loves them first. Anyone working with kids is going to have to prepare meals and wipe butts while dispensing hugs and compliments, whether we call them nannies or teachers. These are all elements of mother care, which no one wants to pay for, and which few people want to do other than for their own kids. Most women like Sandra entered the field when welfare reform required the city to pay for childcare for recipients, and the city improved the licensing process. In 2003, there were 8,500 registered family daycares in the city, more than double the 3,400 registered 10 years earlier. These women provide city agencies the cheapest form of labor because they are legally coded as subcontractors who are paid a per-child "stipend" rather than a salary, though New York State's legislature may soon override Gov. Pataki's veto of a bill that would grant such workers collective bargaining rights. This could radically reshape the playing field: 52,000 home childcare providers like Sandra would suddenly have the ability to negotiate with the state over wages and benefits, and could potentially have pensions.

Rinku Sen is the publisher of ColorLines magazine.

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