The Nanny Diaries

The Rise of the Boutique Babysitting Agency

            It’s 4pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Bronte Sheffield, a tall, blonde 21-year-old from Colorado, adjusts her skirt and checks her makeup in her reversed iPhone camera as she walks through the entrance of the San Remo building on the corner of Central Park West and 76th St. “I’m here for the Vandersloot’s,” she tells the concierge at the front desk. “They’re expecting you,” the older man responds, smiling, and Sheffield takes the elevator up to the 30th floor of the historic apartment building. As she exits the elevator and walks towards apartment #38, two blonde children, screaming “BRONTEEE”, bound down the hallway towards her. “Hi guys!” she says, as Noah and Kyle, ages 4 and 6, wearing matching Ralph Lauren polo shirts, jump into her arms. The three of them enter the apartment, and Sheffield throws her purse and backpack onto the chaise lounge in the entryway. She greets Kim Vandersloot, Noah and Kyle’s mother. The statuesque, lithe brunette smiles, quickly glances approvingly at Sheffield's outfit, and says, “Hi Bronte! How’d your French presentation go this morning?"
            Like many college students in Manhattan, NYU senior Bronte Sheffield is a part-time nanny. When she’s not in school, at her internship, doing homework, or hanging out with her friends, Sheffield can usually be found at the Vandersloot’s $10 million dollar apartment looking after Noah and Kyle. She’s been nannying around Manhattan for three years now, but has been with the Vandersloot family since the beginning of this school year. “I’ve always loved kids and babysitting, and the extra money definitely helps as far as getting by as a college student in the city,” Sheffield says.


            For the upper crust of New York society, many of whom reside on or above Central Park South, status takes on great importance. Behind status? Money. And money plays into all of the typical counterparts of status placement: your family name, your apartment building, your neighborhood, where you dine, where you vacation, what charities you're involved with, which events you attend, which diet you're on to maintain a size 0...and of course, which babysitting agency you found your well-rounded nanny from.
             So how do families like the Vandersloots find educated, experienced nannies like Sheffield? Many of them use boutique babysitting agencies which have sprouted up around Manhattan and in other metropolitan cities across the country over the past decade or so. These concierge-like agencies facilitate the sometimes tedious process of finding a part-time or full-time sitter, coordinating scheduling, and arranging payment. Most importantly, they assist well-to-do families in finding educated, experienced sitters for their children. In light of the Krim family tragedy this past October (in which two children were murdered by nanny Yoselyn Ortega in their luxury Upper West Side apartment), families are even more intent on finding trustworthy, reliable nannies.

            One of the most successful babysitting agencies in Manhattan is Sensible Sitters. Founded in 2005 by Vanessa Wauchope, the once tiny company has grown into a multi-million dollar business with office outposts in the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, and San Francisco—and plans for growth to Boston, Atlanta, and Denver as well. Wauchope, born in affluent Fairfield, Connecticut, had much babysitting experience herself before starting the company--throughout high school, she built up a client base around her hometown, and soon became the go-to babysitter for dozens of families. During the summer, she held live-in babysitting jobs for various families in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. “With all of that babysitting experience throughout high school and college, I knew I wanted to pursue it in some sort of career form, I just wasn’t sure how,” Wauchope says. Wauchope moved to Manhattan after college and began building up a client base. She managed to network with wealthier families, and realized that there weren’t any simple ways or networks for wealthy families to connect with college-aged or just out of college nannies like herself. She also realized that many nannies for the wealthy and powerful were foreign, and at times their cultural and linguistic barriers caused some difficulty with communication and efficient correspondence. “I knew there was an entrepreneurial opportunity and dove right in,” Wauchope says.
             Without any business experience, Wauchope founded Sensible Sitters with the intent of hiring educated, experienced individuals to nanny for well-to-do families in and around Manhattan. She posted fliers around NYU’s and Columbia’s campuses, as well as in private schools around the city. Within a few weeks she had plenty of willing students hoping to become sitters, and plenty of families hoping to use the service. Wauchope personally interviewed, background-checked, and reference-checked each potential sitter, and still does to this day. This personalized service is what makes Sensible Sitters different than major commercial babysitting services like Sitter City, for example, the two-million member nationwide online caregiving service which does not screen its caregivers in person. 

             So how do these private agencies get so financially successful? For most, a hefty cut of sitters’ hourly rates goes straight to the agency. Pair this cut with a steep annual or monthly membership fee for families, and with the right networking and financial backing, many agencies have become million-dollar machines. Most nannies also do not receive health insurance or job protections—adding to the various companies’ financial earnings. Sensible Sitters charges families an annual membership fee of $150, but families are allowed three trial sitting sessions prior to commitment. The company also gets $7 from each hour worked by its sitters, with hourly rates for families ranging from $20 to $24 depending on how many children are being looked after.
            The Nanny Diaries, the 2007 film about just out-of-college Annie Braddock working as a nanny in the Upper East Side, documents the dynamic between nannies and wealthy families from a nanny's perspective. Braddock, played by Scarlett Johansson, frequents the American Museum of Natural History (nearby the aforementioned San Remo building, in fact) when she has any rare downtime, and begins to see similarities between the primitive, exotic, frozen, ritualized cultures in the museum's permanent exhibits and the culture she's exposed to in her life as a nanny. The press poster for the film calls it “a comedy about life at the top, as seen from the bottom”. This exposure to lifestyles in a much higher tax bracket via nannying is experienced by countless young women (and some men too) in Manhattan.

Interestingly, this exposure also allows college-aged sitters a chance to network in a professional way, with many sitters gaining internship or job opportunities from families they babysit for. Taylor Siebenaler, a sitter for Sensible Sitters and an NYU senior, babysat for a family for whom the father was associated with the Tribeca Film Institute, and through this connection Siebenaler landed an internship in the institute’s VIP Services department. “I’m so glad babysitting helped me get the connection and the internship,” Siebenaler says. “I’m hoping it leads to a full-time job down the line”. These networking opportunities are integral to college-aged sitters, for many of whom have limited job prospects with the tough economic environment brought on by the recession. The economy has also caused a spike in sitters looking for more and more jobs to get by financially. “I get emails from new college students every day asking about joining the team as a sitter, and I’ve definitely noticed an increase over the past year or so,” says Wauchope of Sensible Sitters. “I also get emails from sitters within the company asking for a greater number of jobs”.