Sitters, Careful What You Blog…
Do you have a blog? If you do, have you ever given the URL to an employer you babysit or nanny for? Might not be the smartest move. No matter what kind of topics you write about on your blog, this story from the NY Times will make you think twice about opening up your personal life to the families whose children you care for…
You can find the entire story here, but we’ll post some bits and pieces of it so you can get an idea of what happened.
In short, a woman hired a 26-year-old nanny who shared her blog link with her employer. The nanny wrote about harmless-enough topics, such as poetry and her “fanatical analysis of the ‘Gilmore Girls,’” but much of her writing also focused on her promiscuous encounters, tales of late-night binges and equally concerning stories.
My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. “This is inappropriate,” he said. “We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot.”
I defended her — at first. Didn’t she have a right to free expression? It wasn’t as though she was quaffing Scotch or bedding guys, or the occasional girl, while on the job. Besides, weren’t all recent college graduates keeping Web logs?
But there was more to my advocacy. Suddenly, with her in my employ, I felt I was young and hip by proxy. I might be a boring mother of two, but my nanny, why, she dined in the hippest Williamsburg restaurants and rated the sexual energy of men and women she met. I was amused — and more than a bit envious.
Now, had everything stayed as it was, maybe it would have been fine and everything would have worked out. But not even the woman’s vicarious curiosity was enough to keep the peace after the nanny started focusing more and more on her blog while on the job, triggering her employer’s paranoia.
When our nanny asked permission to take her laptop to work so she could work on her graduate school applications while the baby napped, I said yes. Then I wondered if she was whiling away time with flirtatious e-mail messages — something she revealed on her blog she sometimes did. And when she came down with a stomach virus twice during a period when the rest of us were sick only once, I wondered about her confessions of boozy nights out followed by coming to work hungover. Paranoia, perhaps, but reading the blog seemed to encourage such thoughts.
That paranoia fueled the woman’s underlying discomfort with the nanny and stifled any communication between them — if the woman wanted to know how the nanny felt about something that happened on the job, you can be sure she’d be able to read about it online instead of discussing the problem face to face.
But there was another element of her posts that unnerved me. Most parents don’t like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.
When our nanny referred to our house on her blog as work in a seemingly sarcastic fashion, she broke the covenant. The more she posted, the more life in our household deteriorated. It almost seemed that as she created the persona of a do-me feminist with an academic bent, it began to affect her performance. The woman who was loving if a bit strict toward the children became in our view short and impatient, slamming doors and bashing pans when my toddler wouldn’t sleep and sighing heavily if asked to run an errand.
Instead of opening a dialogue, I monitored her online life almost obsessively. I would log on upstairs to see if she was simultaneously posting entries below me on her laptop while the baby was napping. Too often she was.
It was all downhill from there. When the woman and her husband had an argument while the nanny was in the house, the woman found a detailed account of it — complete with the nanny’s reactions — on the blog. Three pages of it, to be exact. Needless to say, the couple fired the nanny.
Not that any of you are blogging about anything as extreme as this particular nanny was, but it serves as a good reminder nonetheless that we all have to be careful what we’re putting out there, how we’re saying it and who might find it. Don’t write about families you sit for. Don’t reveal details about the kids. Don’t complain about your job. Don’t let blogging get in the way of your responsibilities. And if you do any of those things, don’t be surprised if you find yourself in a situation similar to the one above.
Anyone ever experienced something like this?
June 30th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Good story!
June 30th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
No way. I’m not a fan of blogging anyways, but this is just plain crazy. It seems as if the nanny wanted to get caught by giving the URL cite to her empolyer. But also something I’d like to mention, this doesn’t just pertain to blogging. Too many of times I’ve heard of employers looking a person up on facebook and myspace too to see how the person is outside of work. Some jobs you may be able to go out drinking on the weekend, and your boss can tease you about it… Nannying is not that job. If you want to be a good nanny, you must be at the job even when you’re not. Nannying is all about having a good reputation and being responsible. Don’t put anything on facebook, etc you wouldn’t want your employer, pastor, or mother to see. It just leads to disaster.
June 30th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Another cautionary tale. I have no xanga/bebo/myspace/friendster facebook.
& my families dont even have my email, they email me via SC!
July 1st, 2008 at 8:11 am
I maintain a photo blog of my son. The families I nanny and sit for love it because sometime their kids make (anonymous) appearances with my son! Their kids love to see the pics I took!
If you are going to maintain any kind of an online life, then you better have nothing to hide. I would not be ashamed at all for a parent to look at my facebook (which doesn’t even have the “send a drink” feature) or my blog or even to google me. I even have some of my parents as friends on facebook and it’s kinda fun!
That article is certainly the extreme, but a good reminder that you should be very careful what you do online!
July 1st, 2008 at 6:18 pm
this is something to think about in job’s other then babysitting. a coworker told me last week that she had heard of someone getting fired b/c they complained about their job online and they weren’t interested in the bad publicity.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I for one in looking for a babysitter as part of my background search, looked up applicants myspace, facebook, blogs etc. I wanted to see if what they told me reflected in their personal accounts online. Most lived very differn’t lives than what was portrayed. Huge was the request that if you are a teenager that likes to drink and party this is not the job for you. I would have applicants apply (teenage) that claimed to be clean from this, yet on their myspace page I would find pictures of them drinking and passed out even. My thoughts “silly rabbit tricks are for kids.”
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Our society has taken an odd twist lately, and people forget about boundaries. In the past, people would keep private journals that they would never imagine letting another person read. Now people post blogs and photos, without thinking of who will see them. I live by the rule that if I put anything online, it better be something that I would be proud to share with my grandmother. If she wouldn’t like it, then chances are other people who could find it might not either. This is something people in almost any profession has to think about as well. I know of several HR people in different companies who search applicants online. There was also the story about a year ago about a student-teacher who was denied a teachers licence because she posted photos of her under-age drinking on myspace.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:30 am
sorry but I don’t think she did anything wrong.It’s like any other job,it you want to go out on your nights or days off then you can and if you want to wirte about it you can/No other job would do that to you.Sorry but that’s how I feel and by the way I am a mom and I don’t go out but I don’t want to say no one elas can’t
July 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I keep a private journal to allow myself to vent when I need to. It’s frustrating when people who nanny are over-shadowed by certain people who have these crazy lifestyles and choose to take care of children as well. I would never share my personal life with an employer. The parents I sit for and I share stuff about our personal lives, but I would never tell them about my romantic life or social life- that’s just weird.
I know of other professions (like teaching) whose bosses are acutely aware of what their employees post online about their personal lives. They check Facebook, MySpace, Livejournal, etc if their employees choose to make that information public. If you want to write and post about that stuff, keep it private and for your circle of friends. If you write about your job in the same place you write about sex & going out and make it public, expect some consequence.s
July 31st, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I can kinda see both sides. I mean if I employed someone and there they were online complaining about how bad of a mother or wife I was or anything that pertained to my family I’d be a bit PO’d too. But also as a nanny and a mom. 6pm rolls around and it’s my life! So I can’t go out and have a late night even get wasted if I wanted too because I’m a nanny? I’m not saying getting drunk on a Wednesday night and having to be at work at 7am the next day. I’m talking about it’s Saturday night and you don’t have to be at work intill Monday. I think there is a line. As long as they don’t cross I don’t see the big deal.
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
For the girl in the story…heck, if I were her employer and I found out she was writing nasty things about me, I would be tempted to fire her. However, on the other hand…why was that woman and her husband having an argument like that in front of the babysitter? That is incredibly unprofessional, so I don’t blame the sitter for wanting to blog about it.
As for this side of the argument:
While stuff like Facebook and Myspace are open to the world, they should not be taken as methods of judging for someone on the workplace. For instance, I used to work at a toy store before it went out of business. On the job, I acted, spoke, and dressed appropriately for my job. However, on my facebook, the stuff I’ve written is definitely a “PG-13″ or “R” rating (mainly language). Everyone on my friend list is above the age of 15 and my Facebook/Myspace/etc is appropriate for them to see, and anyone who knows me personally knows that I act professionally when I need to. Just because I have a potty-mouth online, does NOT mean that I would drop the f-bomb in front of someone else’s kids on the job.
I have no problem with someone like an employer seeing my Facebook as long as ill judgments aren’t made about me even when I come to work and do my best. If I want to go out clubbing on a Friday night after work and post pictures online or write about meeting a great guy…why should that have an effect on my work life?
Honestly, the mom in the story sounds a little whiny…being jealous because a girl in her 20’s met a hot guy? Since it mentions she [the mom] has a husband, she probably went through the same experience some years earlier.
As this mom also mentions, she likes to thing that her babysitters would continue to work for her even without pay. This is where she draws the line between being an employer and someone who can’t interpret reality. The sitter is doing her a service, not slave work. Also, the mom wants the sitter’s personality to always be as she knows it. Someone who is 40 should know better, especially one who works professionally–bringing your personally life to the extreme in the workplace is not okay. This sitter was not showing up drunk to work or having sex with people she met on the couch in her employer’s living room. She just wrote about what she did in her free time for the most part.
However, what I object to the most in this article, is that when the girl is fired, they cite her for reasons other then her blog, even though the online journal was the very reason for it. This is beyond dishonest.