Terminated on a Lie

     I wanted your thoughts on this. Four years ago, my oldest was 7. We hired a new nanny and fired her within one month. We paid her what we owed her, no severance.

     I'll abbreviate the story, but at the core of him, my son came home and told me that the nanny while driving our car, the nanny vehicle, swerved to hit a squirrel and said "Two points". She continued the conversation by telling him that possums are the best thing to hit because they make a nice squishy sound and that even skunks are great because they won't smell until the next person. Of course, this was concerning, in addition to our son telling us that when they were out in the backyard the day before, the neighbor's cat had come over and she had told him that cats can land on their feet from great distances and threw the cat in the air a number of times to demonstrate that philosophy. Alarming. Right? When we terminated the nanny, we did not want a he said/she said, we simply said it wasn't working out and we were going to try another candidate.

Victor Tkachenko

    Yesterday, I walked in my local bank for the first time in awhile and she was there, working as a teller. I waited in line and fortunately the line worked out that I was directed to another teller. She looked at me with the strangest look. I looked away from her.

    Here's the deal, about two years ago, we started our son in therapy. A lot of behaviors he's had over the years were called in to question. The first alarming behavior was making things up and lying about others. The incident with the nanny was the beginning of a pattern we did not recognize at the time. When we terminated the nanny, I will be honest, I believed my son 100%. I thought she was a vile person. I disliked her for misrepresenting herself and causing this chaos in our house (nanny turnover, loss of work days).  I wasn't unkind when I let her go, but I wasn't nice.

    I feel like I owe her an explanation and apology. What do you think? And how would I go about that? I was thinking if I asked her to call me, she would probably not. But, I don't want a prolonged conversation at her place of business that talks about firing and mental health. Any suggestions?

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The Nanny with the Very Difficult Situation

     I want to leave my current position and get another nanny position. I have been here almost a full year and dealt with all kinds of things. I am very bonded to the daughter and I have tried to work with the family to resolve some things. When I brought these things to the family's attention, they behaved punitively towards me, shutting me out, not talking to me for awhile, being curt, etc. The problem has been the behavior of the five year old boy. The behavior has me in a very difficult position because I am from Ireland and this is my first nanny job and I need a reference. I have references from Ireland for nursey, but you can see why I would need their reference. The problem with getting a reference is not going to be my job performance, but that I will need to make some sort of formal report about the child before I leave because his sister is just not safe so long as the family continues to ignore his behavior problems.

     A handful of examples I will give you, he put sewing pins in the dog's bed in his crate and shut the dog in there to "see what would happen", he poured his sister a glass of orange juice and a glass of purple colored household cleaner in side by side glasses and challenged her to a taste test. Here, he said, he wasn't really going to let her drink, he just wanted to see what she chose. The family has a gas stove and he plays with the knobs, usually only when I am cooking, to shut things off or turn things higher, but as you can imagine, this could be deadly.
     He also takes very dangerous risks with his own behavior, sliding down a banister, hanging over the upstairs banister, tying a rope from a downstairs door to an upstairs door and trying to hand slide down it. Just to be clear, the reason I am leaving is because since coming to work here, I have had so much anxiety and am always on edge. When I go home, I am worried about the younger child. The parents do not take anything I say seriously. I am an outsider in this community and don't know who I would approach for help, so I have been advised that I should make a phone call to Children's Services. I don't have any problem doing this and using my identity, because the parents do not want to deal with their son's issues. They are both extremely detached from both children. My question to you is how do I time this? I am alone in the US and have one roommate. She has become a friend but is a roommate first so she has no friendly loyalties to me to help me should I become short on rent. I want to extricate myself from this situation and know that both children will get the help they need, but that I have my reputation intact and another job to switch to. Has anyone ever been in such a situation?