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That's debatable. More than one person has lost their job where I work due to mistakes made due to lack of sleep, often caused by young children. It's a big problem in tech actually, and I suspect is a reason why many companies don't like to hire people with children - people without young children are able to focus better. Few people could survive in my department on less than 5 hours of sleep, consistently. For me, I need a good 7 at least.
If that's the case and the couple can afford $600 a week, then by all means hire the nanny and get eight hours of sleep per night. Both the parents can wear ear plugs to bed The nanny can feed the baby a bottle if it wakes. The rest of the time she can sit beside the crib and read. There are likely sitters out there who would be able to do night shifts.
The parents (or at least the mother) will probably still have rocky sleep at first as they learn to trust the nanny. But once that kicks in it would probably work fine. It certainly wouldn't hurt the baby. If the job means that much to the parents then it's money well spent. Hire through a service so there's a back-up sitter available of the nanny has to call off for some reason. I'm sure there are plenty of nanny agencies in areas with high tech businesses.
Location: In a little house on the prairie - literally
10,202 posts, read 7,919,895 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BongoBungo
He has a wife, but she is going to be a stay at home mom for a few years until the child is school aged. He is upper middle class, so he certainly could afford $15/hour 40 hours a week.
I know when my kids were younger, my wife was able to let me get sleep so I could function at my job, but it seems like there's more pressure on husbands these days to be an active participant in the parenting process, even when the children are infants. Most new parents I know seem to just be exhausted all the time, even the men. I was never that exhausted, because my wife let me sleep.
His wife is stay at home?
Then her job IS at home. My ex was a stay at home, my daughter was a stay at home, and my daughter in law is a stay at home.
All of them looked after the kids/babies at night. If the wife is pretty selfish if she doesn't. The husband can help during waking hours, but his job is at work, hers at home. It would be different if both were working.
"Getting a nanny at nights so you can sleep with an infant?"
I don't think that's necessary when there's a stay at home mom involved. He would have to sleep in a separate bedroom of course. I had a friend with a high pressure lab job, he slept in the guest bedroom for three months. It worked out great for them. With our first, one of us had to immediately leave for an out of town assignment. At the hospital, we asked the nurses desk. They gave us a list of their nurses and we hired one. She stayed with our baby from 11pm - 7am for five nights. It was expensive, but it was worth every penny. Thank goodness, with our other births there were no more business trips. Anyway, hiring someone is always an option, just get references and be ready to cough up big bucks.
Since his wife is a stay at home mom and he is at risk of losing his high paying job if he screws up due to lack of sleep then the burden of waking up in the middle of the night will have to fall to the wife. He can be active in the parenting when he's home from work, just not in the middle of the night. I say this as stay at home mom. It just makes sense for her to handle the nighttime parenting due to their situation.
This is the logical thing to do instead of paying someone. Since I was staying at home with our baby I did about 80% of the nighttime feedings during the week and on the weekend he would give me at least one one to sleep the entire night so I wasn't a complete zombie.
When you have a new baby you need to expect to lose some sleep in the beginning but thankfully it doesn't last forever.
I'm not sure how restful sleep I would get with the Nanny up all night walking around, watching TV, making 3am snack etc.
Plus the Kid is still going to cry, where is the kids room?
Unless we are talking a HUGE house where all this activity would take place in the West Wing, and I sleep in the East Wing ..
I knew a night nanny. She just slept in a bad in the baby's room. But yeah, you would need a pretty big house not to hear the baby. Or ear plugs. I had a intense drive to go to my baby if they were crying.
He job was to sleep train the baby, not hold it all night. She would get a contract with a pay out clause so she bragged about how young she could get babies to sleep through the night (she didn't offer any tips) and how most parents would do the pay out after the baby was sleeping all night.
She also told me she had one mom who was breast feeding and her job was to bring the baby to her, and then back to bed. I thought that was funny. The mom could have saved a ton of money by just having the crib in her room like I did.
She told me she charged 20-30 per hour (she charged me $15 to babysit 2 toddlers which seems much harder).
I thought night times were tough, but also I felt a lot of bonding at night. I wouldn't have traded it for a night nanny and a giant house.
Last edited by HighFlyingBird; 04-21-2016 at 08:13 AM..
Again, as a Software Engineer myself, this makes me laugh. Software Engineering is one of the least stressful professions there is. That's one of the reasons it's so desirable and everyone's trying to learn how to code. Because if you can code well, (or do any of the other myriad things that come with software engineering well), then you have it made. Your profession is in high demand, is not very stressful, and pays well. Jackpot.
Are you a millennial or something?
Yeah, as a software engineer I had to laugh, too. Mentally challenging at times, sure, but extremely mentally strenuous, not so much. Bomb squad, definitely.
I did this job once as an on call nanny. They "stole" me from the service I worked for. I didn't sleep, did watch tv and read. It was for a rich couples twins in the 90's. I loved that job, and if I remember right, I made about $600 a week for about 7 months. I worked a ton of hours, as they'd also use me for date nights etc.
It was a huge home, and the parents slept upstairs while I had the babies in the downstairs family room. The mom didn't work. They said they never heard the babies or the tv.
I think he and his wife can come to an arrangement, where wife takes care of baby during the night in exchange for perhaps a mental health break for a couple of hours at night after dinner a few nights a week, and he participates more during the weekends. Mom is going to need to learn to nap when baby naps and perhaps go to bed when the baby goes to bed for a while -- instead of a night nurse, perhaps they could just hire a housekeeper a couple of days a week to keep things cleaned up, so she doesn't feel like she has to be cleaning, doing laundry, etc. during nap times.
It really depends on the person. I am one of those who is very slow to wake up, and very slow to get back to sleep. My husband, on the other hand, wakes easily and falls asleep quickly. Most times, he'd hear the baby before I ever did, would get up, change him, and bring him to me to nurse, and fall asleep quickly while I was nursing. Eventually, I ended up pumping, and my husband would give the baby the 2-3 am feeding, and pop right back to sleep. Heaven. :-) Didn't really bother him, he was still up at 5:30 am for his 2 mile morning swim each day.
And babies are different, too. My son took several months before sleeping through the night, "night" being defined as more than 6 hours! My daughter was sleeping through the night when she was 8 days old, from 11 pm to 7 am -- for a while, we had to wake her up to feed her, because she wasn't gaining weight properly.
The important thing to remember is that this period does NOT last forever -- although, when you're in the middle of it, it probably seems like it. :-) One day, he'll wake up in the morning and realize that the baby didn't wake him up, and then he'll go streaking to the bedroom to make sure the baby is still breathing . . . it takes a few days to believe that they are actually sleeping through the night!
This is probably the best post I've read about the situation and closely mirrored my own situation. My husband falls asleep pretty easily whereas I didn't. We scheduled our bedtimes and feeds so that we each managed to get decent sleep. Sorry, with an infant, no one got 7 straight hours of sleep. Just because I was on leave for three months and "stayed home" didn't mean that I didn't need some sleep. The better rested I was, the more patient I was, and I feel I was a better mother as a result. I didn't eat bonbons - if I wasn't nursing, then I was pumping, changing, playing with the baby. That was to be expected, but I still thank God I had a husband who, despite being the working parent for twelve weeks, was involved as much as I was. We both worked together and as a result things worked out.
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