I ALWAYS envied women who handled their nannies with brisk, businesslike efficiency. Surely, I thought when I employed au pairs and nannies in the late 1980's and early 90's, that is how a working motherhood is supposed to be conducted. Off to work the moms trotted, confident they were doing the right thing, that the children were happy and that the baby sitter was loving and able.

The problem was not that I had bad nannies. They were mostly terrific. The problem was that I had trouble viewing the person who was doing the most important job in our household as an employee.

Money just seemed the wrong currency in a mom-nanny relationship. Love. Blood. Lifelong loyalty. These precious offerings seemed more appropriate for Ali Higginson, the beautiful Trinidadian who brought calm and order into our house in 1991 when my daughter, Keenan, was 3, and my son, Tucker, was 1.

Paying someone to care for your children is like paying someone to keep your heart beating. Is there enough money anywhere to adequately compensate for it? "Most days I'd be willing to give my baby sitter anything in the world because she allows me to have my `other' life," said Barb Burg, a senior vice president at Random House in New York who has a daughter, 7, and a son, 6. "If I had a million dollars, at least half would be hers!"

Nonetheless, it is cold cash, not theoretical sums of money or the promise of profound gratitude, that underlies a relationship between nanny and parent. Much as they may love children, typical full-time nannies usually want the $350 to $550 they earn each week to finance college educations, support parents and family back home or build their own lives. "As employers, we often treat them like our family, but you know what? They have their own family," said Gale Gregory, president of Mom's Helper, a domestic-worker placement agency in Jericho, N.Y.

Treating a baby sitter as a family member seems more than appropriate, given the intimacy of the job. Parents who hire nannies like to think of themselves as better, more benevolent than Mrs. X, the Park Avenue mom who assumes absolute authority over her nanny's life in "The Nanny Diaries," the novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Mrs. X is the self-absorbed, manipulative caricature of a mother who mostly populates horror stories, alongside the physically abusive, dishonest nightmare nanny, for whom nanny cams were invented.

Still, the member-of-the-family approach sometimes offers more comfort to the employer - particularly to moms, who usually manage the relationship - than to a nanny. It helps you, as the employer, walk the knife blade's edge between being grateful for the nanny and being jealous. You want your baby sitter to be a perfect blend of love, wisdom and good judgment, but not more perfect than you. You want the children to love the nanny, but not more than you.

You want to grant some authority to the person who knows your children so well, but you want your choices to shape their lives. Kathyrn Huang, 36, now a stay-at-home mother of children aged 6 months and 4 and 6 years in Maplewood, N.J., recalls with a laugh one of her attempts at remote mothering. "I remember telling my baby sitter which side of the street to walk on, because of the sun," she said.

Redefining your employee as a family member may help you get over those emotional quagmires, but it can be a disservice to both of you. An employee is unlikely to wander into work late or borrow thousands of dollars from her employer, but family members sometimes take such liberties as their due. "When they can't make their car payment, you're toast," said one working mother with two children who lives in a New York suburb and didn't want to be identified to save her baby sitter embarrassment. "You have to loan them the money because you need them to have their car."

Family membership is not the super-deal we sometimes suppose it is for nannies, either. When I called Ali last week to get her perspective for this column, I expected her to remember working for our family with pleasure and pride. She did. But she also gently reminded me that I had never paid her overtime. To my chagrin, I remembered that I had compensated her with time off, usually within a few days. I gave her what I would have chosen for myself, but I was presuming too much about what she wanted, just the way your sister or your mother might think she knows, without asking, where you want to vacation or the way you like your tuna fish sandwiches.

Sometimes nannies do treasure being part of the family more than they value their paycheck. Dawn Lemirand-Poepping, the first nanny I hired, 15 years ago, surprised and moved me when I called her recently at home in Beloit, Wis. Now married with two children, she said we had, unwittingly, provided her with a personal blueprint. "I had no clue what a functioning family was like," she said. "You really showed me what it was to be a family, and it was instrumental in my life."

BUT most of the time, the nanny-as-family notion is a form of self-flattery that only modestly improves the employees' lives. True family membership means sharing equally in the family's responsibilities and privileges. No one knows better than your nanny - who sees you come home with shopping bags, renovate the kitchen for $50,000 or rent a beach house for a couple of weeks - that she is not a full-fledged family member, just a close-enough facsimile to make her employers feel better about themselves.

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The Myth of the Super Nanny

By Thomas Haller and Chick Moorman

Reality TV is a national obsession. In any given week, you can watch police officers patrolling the streets of a major city, executives attempting to gain the favor of “The Donald”, boxers slugging it out in an effort to escape the slums, teams racing from destination to destination around the world, individuals pushing their fear to the limit with bugs, reptiles, or heights, and stranded islanders positioning themselves to be the last one standing. In the attempt to become a part of this TV craze, people are trading homes in decoration frenzy, switching spouses in a relationship challenge, and opening their homes to a nanny for a discipline makeover.

Of all the reality TV shows presently entering our homes, the ones that will have the most lasting effect on us as a nation are those that are seeking to reshape our role as parents. And therein lays an unknown and hidden danger. Parents watching shows like “Super Nanny” or “Nanny 911” don’t realize that the techniques being used are often counter-productive to their goal of raising responsible, caring, confident children. They fail to notice that these shows, which claim to model effective parenting, are actually filled with myths, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations of what it takes to parent in a respectful, nurturing manner. This often leaves parents confused or misinformed about discipline strategies and the "reality" of their effectiveness.

In this article, we attempt to help you create your own "reality" about discipline by revealing the most commonly held discipline myths and ways you can combat them to strengthen your own personal parenting style.

MYTH 1: Consequences need to be severe to be effective.

FACT: It is not the severity of a consequence that has impact. It is the certainty. The certainty that specific, logical consequences follow actions, allows children to trust the discipline process. Your consistency in implementing consequences is the glue that holds a discipline strategy together. If consequences are implemented consistently, children learn over time that if they choose to leave their bike in the middle of the driveway, the bike will be hung up in the garage for a few days. Teenagers come to know that if they choose to visit off limit sites on the computer, they have chosen to lose computer privileges for several days. When the consequence occurs consistently, children can count on it and plan accordingly.

MYTH 2: Children learn more quickly from punishment than they do from consequences.

FACT: While it is true that you sometimes get a more immediate result with punishment, it is the consistent implementation of consequences that produces long-term behavior change in children. With punishment, the child is more like to focus on you, your behavior, your anger, than on themselves and the results of the choices they made. Learning rarely results from punishment because children are too busy activating resentment, resistance, and reluctance. They are more likely to spend their time thinking of revenge fantasies, and how to not get caught next time than they are of the cause and effect relationship between their behavior and the consequences which follow.

MYTH 3: The discipline has to be immediate or the effect will be lost and the child will simply repeat the behavior.

FACT: Discipline can be effective whether it is immediate or delayed. How you discipline is more important that when you do it. You might want to take 15-20 minutes to think through how you want to respond to a particular behavior. It could be important to wait until later to discuss options with your partner. Helping children see the cause and effect relationship that exists between the choices they make and the consequences that are directly related to those choices is more important than whether the consequences occurs immediately or the next day.

MYTH 4: Consequences are a more effective form of discipline than punishment.

FACT: It doesn’t matter whether you call the discipline strategy you are using a punishment or a consequence. It is not the action you take that determines whether or not it’s punishment; it’s HOW you take the action. For example, a “time out” or a toy being put away for a few days could be a punishment if it is administered arbitrarily and capriciously. That same discipline strategy could be a consequence if it is a natural outcome that is more closely related to the behavior and is delivered consistently.

MYTH: 5 Parents need to be in control of their children and discipline strategies are the way to stay in control.

FACT: Effective discipline calls for the parents to arrange consequences so that the child is in control. They set it up so that the child is in control of his choices and thus controls the outcomes which result.

Consequences are not used to control, to manipulate, to demonstrate power, or to get even. Attempting to use consequences for control crosses the line and becomes punishment.

Punishment is force, unrelated to the behavior and comes across as retribution. Disciplining from the power stance places the child in a position of being “done to” by others in a position of authority. The child, feeling powerless, does not see himself as being in control of the outcomes. He sees himself as the victim.

When children see themselves as in control of whether or not they experience consequences or outcomes, they are empowered. They learn to see themselves as the cause of what happens to them. They realize they personally create the results which show up in their lives by the choices they make. It is therefore, the children who need the power and the control for discipline to be effective

MYTH: 6 Discipline strategies are effective only if they get the child to comply.

FACT: Compliance or noncompliance by the child has nothing to do with the effectiveness of a discipline system. When discipline strategies demands compliance such as in the case where the parent keeps increasing the severity of the punishment until the child complies, children learn that adults have power and they don’t.

In the use of consequences, the effort does not concentrate on making the child comply. The goal is to present choices, allows the child to choose, and give them room to learn from the positive or negatives outcomes which occur. With the consequence system, children learn a lesson from either the positive or the negative outcome.

Punishing a child with increasing severity until they pick up their toys might get them to pick up their toys. It will not teach them to take responsibility for their toys or create internal motivation to produce the desired behavior.

With consequences, the choice is presented, “You can choose to pick up your toys or you can choose to leave them here. If you choose to pick them up you will have decided to use them for the next week. If you decide to leave them here, I will pick them up, and you will have decided not to have them available for a week. You decide.” With this style of discipline, the child may choose to pick up his toys and he may choose to leave them there. Either way it’s perfect. If he picks them up, it’s perfect. You don’t have to. If he leaves them there, it’s perfect. It’s the perfect time to help him learn what happens when he chooses not to pick up his toys.

MYTH 7: When you implement a discipline strategy, the child needs to know that you are angry.

FACT: Anger is not helpful in a discipline situation. When you discipline in anger the child’s attention focuses on your strong emotion. He looks outward to the person applying the punishment rather than inward to his own internal reaction to the results of the choice he made.

Sincere empathy is much more effective than anger in a discipline situation. “Bummer, what a shame. I bet that will be a challenge for you now,” is empathy that maintains a positive connection between you and the child, even as you hold them accountable for their actions. When the child hears empathy, instead of anger, he is more likely to look inside and to notice the connection between cause (his choice) and effect (the consequence

MYTH 8: Children have to know they were wrong for discipline to be effective.

FACT: Making children wrong for their behavior is counter-productive to raising responsible children. An effective discipline system does not make children right or wrong for their behavior. It simply holds them accountable for their behavior.

If your child fails to put his bike in the garage as agreed, don’t make him wrong. Don’t make him lazy. Don’t make him forgetful. Don’t make him irresponsible. Don't put him in the naughty room. Just make him someone who doesn’t get to ride his bike for three days as agreed to earlier.

Even if the problem occurs over time, refrain from making your child wrong. Blaming and faultfinding don’t help children learn how to make different choices and behave differently in the future. Fixing the problem is more important than fixing blame. Together, join in the search for solutions and model for your child that you value solving problems more than you do assigning blame and handing out punishments.

MYTH 9: Making children say they are sorry is a consequence that helps kids learn new behaviors.

FACT: Having kids say they are sorry does not teach new behaviors. It teaches children to numb out their real feelings, push them down, and lie to the other child.

Saying you are sorry is a form of cheap forgiveness. It gets you off the hook without having to learn anything. Instead of teaching children to say they are sorry, teach them to articulate what they learned and what they intend to do differently next time. In this way the emphasis will be on learning rather than on begging forgiveness.

Remember, your role as a parent and the "reality" you are attempting to create in your home is to empower your children to be responsible, caring and confident as they move through the development stages of childhood. Designing you own home-based reality show by avoiding these discipline myths will help you play out that role effectively.

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25 Insightful Morsels About Children
By Thomas B. Haller, M.Div., M.S.W., A.C.S.W., D.S.T.
co-author of Couple Talk


1) Children need unconditional love.
It is important for children to know that they are loved for who they are and not for their actions and behaviors. This is placed first because it is the basis of all that you do with your children. Show your child, more than just telling them, that you love them.

2) 75-85% of a young child’s actions are unconscious.
As a child moves through a day, many of their behaviors are not consciously thought through beforehand. You may even ask them, “Why did you do that?” and they usually respond, “I don’t know”. This is because they truly do not know.

3) The unconscious mind processes the word “don’t” as a “do”.
For example: When you say the phrase, “Don’t run!” the unconscious mind actually hears “**** run!” State what you want to have happen. “Don’t run!” can be stated as “Walk your feet.” This process is the same for adults as well as children.

4) Children are concrete thought processors.
If it is not in the hand it is not in the mind. They need to see as well as touch in order to learn. Their minds are not developed to the level of grasping the abstract. (Describe an elephant to a child who has never seen one.)

5) Children learns through play.
Children learn by doing. They are motivated by their own desire to make sense of the world. When you see a child playing they are learning.

6) Children learn through mistakes.
Children learn thought their smart mistakes. They learn to grow and feel encouraged from their new experiences. As a parent be willing to let your child make mistakes.

7) Children are observant, they notice everything.
They observe actions-reactions-interaction, behaviors, and words, from siblings, friends, adults, and the media (T.V./Radio).

8) Children do what the adults around them do.
If you want your child to learn something, get involved in doing it yourself. If you are doing something you don’t want your children to do, STOP.

9) Children act out the feelings of the adults around them.
Children are unconsciously aware of the feelings of the adults around them. When an adult is not effectively handling their own feelings, a child will do it for them through their behavior.

10) Children know more than what the words convey and the faces say.
Emotional tone and body language send a stronger message to children than the actual words.

11) Children need rules and guidelines.
Children need to feel safe and the way they know they are safe is through the protection of the rules. Without rules, a child’s life becomes chaotic; they are not sure what to do or what not to do. This results in the child seeking out a place that is safe (has rules) or they do everything in hope that someone will stop them.

12) Children need stability and consistency.
Routine, routine, routine. The more stable and consistent a child’s life is the more sure they are of their environment. They know what to expect.

13) Children need guidance and direction in making everyday decisions.
Stay away from making the decisions for the children. Talk through possible outcomes of the decisions and various solutions. Let the child make the choice from that point.

14) Children can manipulate.
Know that when children become angry, scared, or sad, they strive to express their feelings and have their needs met through behavioral outbursts, tantrums, crying, etc. Be encouraging.

15) Children ”play” one parent “off” against the other.
It is important for parents to be unified in their approach to parenting. When they are not, children know this and will continually confront the parents with manipulation.

16) It is O.K. for a child to feel angry (sad, scared, happy).
Children have feelings too and they need to be allowed to express their feelings. Feelings are neither good nor bad, they just are.

17) It is comforting for children to see their parents taking care of themselves.
When a child sees their parents exercising, eating a balanced diet, getting rest, and participating in hobbies, they know that their needs will also be met in these areas and others.

18) Children enjoy the company of their parents.
The parent is the most important person in the child’s life and they enjoy spending time with that person. What is important to a child is time spent not money spent.

19) Children need personal/private time.
Children need the time to just BE. Being alone gives them the opportunity to think about their day and evaluate what they have learned and attach meaning to it for themselves.

20) Children are creative and whatever they create is good enough.
Your way may not be their way. It is the process of the doing that is important to them, not the product.

21) Children can problem solve.
Give the child the tools to problem solve. Discuss the problem, the possible consequences, and the various solutions. Together figure out what is needed to solve the problem and allow the child to make the final decision.

22) Children have short attentions spans-approximately 3-5 minutes.
Keep it short and simple. As children age, their attentions span increases, slowly. As an adult your attention span is approximately 10-12 minutes.

23) Children enjoy music and singing.
Children are exposed to a continuous beat all their lives, from the beat of their hearts, to the beat of waling, to the beat of language. Music and singing brings that beat to a more conscious level.

24) Children have headaches too.
75-80% of all children have had some kind of headache. 20% of all 7-year-old children have one or more headaches per month. 30% of all 14-year-old children have one or more headaches per month. 70-90% of all children with migraine has a family history of the disease.

25) Children are not adults.
At times, children act in adult ways. They want to be like “grown-ups”. However, children perceive things differently and they process thoughts different than adults. Stay away from expecting children to be adults or do adult things.

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DINNER
2-3 ounces cooked meat, ground or diced
1/2 cup cooked yellow or orange vegetables
1/2 cup pasta, rice, or potato
1/2 cup whole milk

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One nanny's health care costs

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