The $200,000 nanny: a jackpot for South Africa's carers abroad?

Walk through any leafy London or New York suburb and you'll hear a South African accent pushing the pram. Thousands of South Africans pay their way abroad by caring for other people's children and parents. Most earn modest wages. But The Economist reports a lucrative new tier: rota nannies working week-on, week-off for the super-rich, on as much as $200,000 a year. That's private-equity money. The catch? Twelve-hour days, private jets, ironed underpants and a life on hold. Is this the grown-up version of the gap-year au pair gig? I suspect plenty of ours are already finding out..From The Economist, published under licence. The original article can be found on www.economist.com© 2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved..The Economist.SHE WORKS at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week—but then has a week off. She might earn $200,000 a year, which at an hourly rate is on a par with a private-equity associate. High pay for long hours on a rota is common on oil platforms, in mines and on container ships. It is increasingly so in another exacting field: caring for the children of the super-rich.A decade or so ago, such highly paid gigs were rare. “We used to get a lot of: ‘Oh, I’m not paying that’,” says Anita Rogers, the founder of British American Household Staffing (BAHS), an agency that finds nannies (as well as governesses, butlers and chefs) for wealthy households. “Now it is quite the opposite,” she says. Clients demand nannies who have not only trained at the best academies but also speak several languages, have degrees from elite universities and are willing to travel constantly and put in very long days. And they are willing to pay.This has led to a boom in the top-of-the-market nannying, which is something of a cottage industry. Although some institutions are of long standing—the Norland University of Early Childhood, a posh British training school, has been around for more than a century—many of the agencies to which upper-crust parents are turning are much younger. Ms Rogers set up BAHS in 2012; among her competitors are Adventure Nannies (established in 2007) and Morgan & Mallet (2015). Ms Rogers says she now has 7,000 clients.The basics of nannying for the children of the very rich are the same as for those of the merely affluent: bottle-feeding, preparing meals, trips to the playground. But the surroundings and expectations can make the job almost unrecognisable. Often a nanny is just one of a dozen staff, rather than the sole employee. Travelling with the family is different too. “They want nannies that have experience on yachts and jets,” Ms Rogers says. “It’s just a given.” Not everyone is cut out to thrive in an environment that can be “like ‘Succession’”, she adds. “This extreme wealth can be a lot for somebody that’s never been exposed to it.”The demands can be extreme (or extremely petty). One nanny recalls that an ultra-rich family she once worked for required her to iron their son’s underwear every day. Another parent was furious that she did not immediately fetch a ladder to replace a light bulb in the playroom ceiling, which was 17 feet high, while caring for their small children.The structure of the job has also changed, with the rise of the rota-nanny. Before the covid-19 pandemic Ms Rogers’s richer clients—who could afford as many hours of child care as they could possibly want—would often cobble arrangements together, hiring one nanny for Monday to Friday and another for the weekend, and then hire a babysitter for a night out. If parents had to work late, they would hope their weekday nanny could cover the extra hours at the last minute. Now two nannies, one on and the other off, can cover every daytime hour, every day of the year, if at a price of hundreds of thousands of dollars.This is plainly more convenient for those who can afford it. With separate nannies for weekdays and weekends, if they wanted one to travel with them, she might need to make arrangements for her own family, and be paid for longer hours and perhaps a travel fee too. Alternatively, they might hire a different nanny for the trip, whom their children would not know. With nannies on a full-time rota, there is much less disruption.It can suit many nannies too, says Ms Rogers. They get a full seven days off to do their own thing. When clients request weekday nannies, she now has fewer of them to offer. But the new system can come at a cost. “Before I really dove into child care, if you would have asked me my entire life from the start of four years old, what do you want to be when you grow up? I would have said a stay-at-home mom,” says Lauren Lomascolo, who has nannied for wealthy clients for a decade. Now she worries about ever finding help to cover the demands of her job. “If I stay in this for ever, I can’t have kids. If I get out of this, where is my income?”.Read more:.The Economist: How much would you pay for a smarter baby?.To some, nannying for the super-rich is enjoyably glamorous. Several successful reality-television shows have followed wealthy families, from the Kardashians to “Real Housewives”, around the world. In June Hulu aired “Million Dollar Nannies”, a reality-TV show set in Ibiza, in which six women and two men sought jobs with rich households. One of them had worked as a nanny for Kourtney Kardashian. The show featured more tantrums by adults than by toddlers. But it offered a twist on the usual escapism: the fantasy was not being one of the rich, but being employed by them..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here. Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

The $200,000 nanny: a jackpot for South Africa's carers abroad?

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