Recession and Nannies in Canada

Yesterday, CNN.com did a story on how the childcare industry is being affected by the recession. The article reports that nanny agencies are reporting a 45% decrease in business due to the current state of the economy. Apparently, the recession is affecting nannies, babysitters, and day care centres in the United States. As with other aspects of the recession, the US has been hit harder than Canada. CanadianNanny.ca has not seen a large decrease in the number of families looking for nannies across Canada. This is caused the by low cost to register for parents, and nannies can register for no cost. However, it is evident that families are finding new ways to be able to afford this type of personal care for their children.

Many families are now opting for nanny sharing, where they and another family provide a full time schedule to a nanny, at a lower cost to each family. Many families will do this with other family members or friends, but so many more don’t have a family they can share with. CanadianNanny.ca has a feature allowing these families to find each other across Canada. The “Nanny Share” feature is included with a parent membership, and allows parents to see ads posted by other parents. Some ads boast that the family already has a nanny and are looking to share, while others are looking for a family and a nanny at the same time.

Nanny sharing is great for nannies as well. By working for two families, the nanny is able to have a full-time workload, even if each individual family is unable to provide them with more than part-time. Depending on the arrangements made between the families and the nanny, a nanny may find that the amount of money he/she makes is more than if she was working for one family. As an added bonus, if two families require care at the same time, the children can play with each other alone or together with the nanny.

This clearly helps families to receive the quality, one-on-one care of a nanny, while sharing the cost of that individual with another family in the same position. But in addition to this, it keeps nannies in Canada employed! For nannies, rather than working for one family part-time and needing to find some way to compliment that income, they work for two families providing them full-time hours.

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