‘Nanny breastfeeds employer’s baby’: Why mums should install nanny cameras

The jury is still out on whether it’s a good idea to install CCTV or nanny cameras in your home when you have an infant. While it is true, that as a friend put it, “You can’t take a chopper to your house to save a situation even if you see your nanny up to no good”, the equipment offers some peace of mind and has a scarecrow effect, making many nannies think twice before doing any monkey business.

Before we go any further, let me say that should you decide to put nanny cameras or CCTV in your house, you should inform your nanny that they are up in keeping with ethics.

When it comes to nannies, they come in all forms. It has been said that a mother’s relationship with her nanny is like a boyfriend-girlfriend one. You can kiss several frogs before you get a prince. And when you get the right one, you want to do as much as is possible to keep the relationship going.

Irreducible minimums for mums hiring nannies vary widely. 

For some, a good nanny is one who is independent and comes up with her own schedule of how to take care of and engage a baby – coming up with age appropriate games and so on. For another mum, a good nanny is one who follows instructions.

In some homes, a nanny is strictly responsible for taking care of a baby and there is either another househelp to do chores, or the owners of the home do them themselves. In other homes, a nanny has to be able to double as a househelp.

In my home, the nanny’s primary responsibility is taking care of my baby. I don’t want to give her an excuse for mishaps like “I was trying to cook before you reached home and the baby was crying so I carried her with me to the stove and hot oil splashed on to her and that’s how she got that burn”. Or a situation where she hurriedly tries to feed the baby so she gets on to other work and in the process the baby chokes. 

It’s the same thing when it comes to nanny cameras. Some mums cannot do without them, while others would rather not see what goes on, lest they lose their minds, watching everything ‘wrong’ the nanny is doing.

For me, nanny cameras are a necessity. They have helped me pick on things – thankfully not ones that are grounds for going to make a report at the police station.

There was once my baby developed a running tummy and I couldn’t understand why, because I clean the baby’s bottles myself.

I then decided to go through the CCTV footage over a period and discovered the nanny would return a bottle with milk the baby hadn’t finished during a feeding to the fridge and then take it out hours later, rewarm and feed the baby.

If you know the rules of handling breast milk, you must have cringed when you read that.

Mums who manage to exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first six months deserve a reward because it’s no mean feat. 

While we’re on the topic of exclusive breastfeeding, I came to realize not everyone knows the definition. It simply means feeding your baby on nothing except breast milk. It is not just feeding a baby directly from your breast. It can be breast milk pumped and put in a bottle and then fed to your baby. Eureka! I thought I should mention that because there are some who think that as long as the baby is not getting milk directly from the breast, it’s not breastfeeding.

Once you freeze breast milk, you thaw it by moving it to the fridge (not leaving it out for hours) and once thawed, it needs to be used within 24 hours. Once you remove the thawed milk from the fridge and warm it (not using the microwave), it should ideally be used within an hour. If it stays out longer, it may give your baby tummy issues. You should also not return warmed milk to the fridge then remove it later, rewarm and give your baby as that is a recipe for a diarrhea fest.

Now back to the nanny. Despite my explaining and demonstrating several times how to handle the baby’s milk, she still returned the warm milk to the fridge and reheated it to give to the baby. That was what was causing the diarrhea. I had to take the nanny through the process of how to handle milk again and the diarrhea stopped.

I wouldn’t have picked this had I not had CCTV footage to go through.

On the issue of breast milk, I’ve heard there are nannies who don’t appreciate dealing with it – apparently it’s demeaning to them, but somehow they expect their employer to provide them with full fat cow’s milk for breakfast every day. I have also heard a horror story of a nanny who had a baby, whom she’d leave her mother to take care of as she went to work and would then breast feed her employer’s child to relieve herself (breast engorgement is real. It’s uncomfortable when milk accumulates in the breasts and there’s no baby to feed and it is not expressed). See why a nanny cam is necessary?

However, nanny cams are not for everyone. You need to consider your personality type.

I know of a mum who quit her job to become a stay at home mum after watching a week’s worth of CCTV footage which didn’t necessarily show the nanny doing anything mischievous, but she wasn’t doing things the way the baby’s mother wanted them done. This mother is a stickler for structure and had sleep trained her baby and developed a schedule of activities to be done throughout the day. She was not amused when she saw the nanny adopting her own schedule. 

Have you installed CCTV and/or nanny cams in your home and what was the motivating factor? Share your experiences on firsttimemumke@gmail.com

Till next week, as always, do the Johnnie Walker – keep walking.

Listen to the First Time Mum Confessions Podcast here.