This week’s New York Times Magazine includes a poignant photo essay called “Love, Money and Other People’s Children” about the complications that arise when parents pay someone else to help care for — and often eventually love — their children.
Author Mona Simpson (you might recognize her name from Anywhere But Here or being Steve Jobs’ sister) notes that the portraits are “beautiful and idealized. The women look at the children with love. No one looks frustrated. No one looks bored. No child is having a meltdown. They conjure the dome of tender air that encloses a mother, whose body is coursing with hormones, and a newborn.” But she adds that “these moments of private contentment, with the serenity and depth borrowed from the portraiture legacy of the Madonna and child, do not depict mothers with their infants. The women holding the children are nannies. Part of what’s striking about the pictures is that they position front and center a person who is often left on the editing-room floor when a family’s memories are being assembled.”
Around 55 percent of the mothers of the four million babies born in the U.S. every year stay in the work force, which means that they need help raising all of those children. Men seem to be able to enjoy a certain degree of what Simpson calls “transparency…about their ability to frankly work while also reveling in fatherhood” while women don’t “have it all,” one might say. So they hire women who often already have kids to be nannies, which results in the weirdness of paying someone to love your children: