TECH
In the United States, babysitting used to be more or less like this: a teenager would arrive at the client's home after school, play with the children, put them in bed, and spend the rest of the night texting on the couch. All so that parents could relax by eating and drinking in a crowded restaurant after a long week of work. Now, however, things have changed: the babysitting service takes place through a video call, still during the day, usually for an hour, with the children a few meters from their parents. But instead of drinks and laughter, parents are working by teleconference, updating emails, helping other children with school chores or locking themselves in the bathroom to give a quick whine.
In the last two months, millions of Americans have discovered the impossibility of working, caring for children and still attending their children's classes, all at the same time, at home and full-time. To ease the tension, they had to be creative and free up more screen time of all kinds for the kids to be distracted. Now, though, some parents are going further, paying other people to spend a few hours with their children virtually.
They are asking their nannies to always keep the kids busy through video calls. No Care.com, a platform for caregivers - from nannies to nursing assistants - some professionals are updating their profiles to "virtual only care". Existing nanny services have been training their professionals in techniques to keep children entertained even by the screens, while new companies emerge offering virtual nannies.
“It's not like the child is watching some drawing or anything else that is not in tune with it. It's a living person on the other side, reading the signs of the child, seeing whether she is interested or not, " said Jennika Aronowitz, 44, a mother of three, who has already hired video nannies for the youngest son.
Aronowitz works as a real estate broker in Los Angeles, now fully at home, and devotes part of her mornings to helping her 6-year-old son. But once a week, when she needs to pay more attention to work, she puts the kid in front of a laptop in the middle of the room, so that a professional nanny can play and talk to him by zooming. She said it's good for little ones to interact with someone outside the family and gain 100% of an adult's attention.
Business opportunity
The brokerage uses a high-standard Miami service, called Babysitting Company, which offers its services to “selected " children in major cities. The company still offers babysitting services in person, with new rules and protocols for the new coronavirus, but has transferred many of its assistants to virtual sessions. The company charges $ 36 for a 45-minute video session. To use the services, however, customers must hire packages of at least four hours, which can be scheduled for different days.
“If you told me that one day we would offer such a service, I would never believe it. It's such a profession based on personal contact,” said Rachel Charlupski, founder of the Babysitting Company. It is difficult to maintain the child's attention when the nanny can not be present to move around and participate in physical play. The Babysitting Company hastily trained a few pre-selected assistants, many of whom specialized in topics such as yoga or languages.
Each nanny makes an advance plan of how she will spend the time of the video call, according to the age and interests of the children, proposing art, singing, meditation and dance projects. Often children have their own ideas. A 4-year-old boy spent an entire 45-minute session taking lying food to the camera, pretending to feed the nanny, Charlupski said.
At first the company offered virtual nannies for children over 5 years old, but already held a session with a child of 2 and a half years old, and everything worked out well. Still, Charlupski takes care not to create too many expectations in parents. Sessions can last an hour, but she does not recommend much longer.
Screen time
Families have radically changed their screen time rules during the pandemic and are allowing children to watch a lot more Netflix and YouTube than before. Child development experts agree that it's okay to be less strict about the time children spend in front of screens. But they also point out that not all screen time is the same. A video call can be much better for the child than passively watching television or playing a game.
To do research for this story – and have a little silence to write it – I tested a 'zoom nanny' with my own 3 and 6 year old children at home. With an old MacBook on the floor, nanny Victoria Rodriguez - who is also a nursing student – kept playing with some toys, asking questions they sometimes answered, drawing, singing "Baby Shark" and doing some yoga moves. Although the most demanding activities, such as origami, did not work out very well, Rodriguez managed to keep them entertained for 45 minutes. The hardest part, she said, is to bring them back when they get out of camera range.
When Erin Upton-Cosulich received an email about UrbanSitter's virtual nanny service, she immediately thought about doing something like her ordinary nannies. Her 3-year-old son had already started playing video call to see his parents working from home. The scheme does not always keep him busy for the desired two hours, says Upton-Cosulich, and when he gets tired or anxious, he prefers parental attention. But when it works, it helps her do a lot of things.
“I can do freelance writing and editing jobs at home, usually with the same level of focus and productivity I achieve when I'm alone,” Upton-Cosulich said, by text message, since I couldn't talk on the phone because his son demanded his attention.
One of her nannies is Alycia Bennett, 28, an intelligence and risk consultant in Columbia, Maryland, whose work has been curtailed because of the pandemic. Nanny for more than ten years, she reads digital books with the "customer", through the screen sharing of the Zoom. He tells her what he ate as a snack and from time to time plays a song on his toy piano. She soon realized that catching his attention by the screen is complicated and requires a certain set of skills, such as knowing how to master the conversation and face embarrassing pauses.
“It's a viable option, if you're willing to be a little heterodox and experiment,” Bennett said. "But with all this going on because of covid, you can't keep the expectations too high. Sometimes they just walk out and go eat a cookie."
High in demand
The demand for virtual nannies can increase when the school year, in its virtual mode, comes to an end next month and parents who need to work begin to have even less help during the summer. Stephanie Africk, a mother of four in Boston, sees the situation as a business opportunity.
She launched a website called SitterStream three weeks ago and has a team of 38 virtual nannies that she found through referrals. Their job is to make contact between them and their parents. The company charges $ 15 for half an hour and $ 22 for an hour. Africk says it has already had a few hundred requests for Sessions. The company has created a booklet of activities that nannies can do with children without the need for special supplies, such as writing their own name with putty and dry glue.
"People use this service differently than a nanny”" Africk said. While the nanny's pre-pandemic appointment was a few hours, the virtual nanny can be scheduled for shorter periods throughout the day – just long enough for parents to do housework, work, or even take a shower.
Parents are always around in virtual sessions, which do not replace adult supervision. Aronowitz keeps an eye out when the son is chatting through the video call and the babysitters at the Babysitting Company have their parents ' mobile number in case there is a problem. Upton-Cosulich or her husband are always a few meters from the son and the computer. For nanny Bennett, the virtual service option is a way to make money, but also the best time of day in this difficult period.
“It's very invigorating to talk to a child, because kids obviously aren't going to talk about covid-19,” Bennett said. "He's 3 years old and he just says things like,' look at my dinosaur.' It's a much needed mental slack, it helps a lot."
Heather Kelly/mundophone
No comments:
Post a Comment