3 - Parents Employing Nannies and Au Pairs

Abstract

Filippa
Filippa comes rushing into the coffee shop where we have agreed to meet for the interview. She is straight out of a meeting, and she immediately starts talking about her work as a chief executive officer for a large agency and her special interest in helping women in business pursue a career. “I’m a feminist careerist”, Filippa says. This also reflects back on Filippa’s own everyday life. Gender equality is very important to Filippa, a mother of four children between the ages of five and ten years. However, while her husband has always supported her choices to pursue a demanding career, he has completely failed to do his part of the care and housework at home, she says. To solve the ‘jigsaw puzzle of life’, that is, to make the everyday life of managing a home, a family and a job possible, Filippa has hired help. Since their second child was born, Filippa has employed almost ten nannies, and she has recently also started to employ au pairs. This has been an absolute necessity, she says: “My husband works, and if I’m away, I have to cover for my absence somehow. He has said that explicitly, that he can only consider picking up the children from school and daycare once a week. There is no room for more in his schedule”.
Hiring nannies and au pairs has not only been a way for Filippa to get through the everyday, it also has symbolic significance. She compares herself with her male colleagues who are married to women who work part time, or even, in a few cases, to housewives. “I also want a wife”, she says jokingly, and then adds on a more serious note: “I want to show my daughters, I want to show my son too, that a mother isn’t just someone who serves others, who stays at home”. For Filippa, being a good parent is being present and engaged, and she sees herself as someone who always puts her children first. However, that does not necessarily mean that she always needs to be present in person. To be a good parent, you need to make sure that you are content and satisfied with your own life, she says, and that could sometimes mean not doing everything together with your children.