ABSTRACT
Most childcare workers, including the nannies and au pairs, family daycare providers, and daycare center workers, have fewer economic opportunities than the parents of the children they care for. The women most frequently represented in media portrayals of nannies are immigrants, young American women, au pairs. This chapter shows that each faces distinct challenges getting and leaving jobs, as well as different experiences and conditions at work. It explains that nannies' perspectives and actions, like those of their employers, were shaped in important ways by their interpretation of the principles of intensive mothering. Relations between nannies and their employers were complicated by the legal and social status accorded the household worker in fact and in law. Nannies come under the category of "domestic workers" with respect to labor law. It is in the area of setting wage rates that differences between mother-employers' and nannies' invocations of family-based and market-based norms were most apparent.
