Six recommendations for third-party childcare

1. Agree on the standards that you will use to select childcare providers for your children so that you are focused on your children’s wellbeing and not manipulating the other parent. Horace and Katarina were unmarried partners with a 3-year-old child. After Katarina initiated mediation, she thought of every reason in the book that she could not show up. Her last excuse was that she did not have childcare for her son, Dakota. Horace volunteered to arrange a care provider for Dakota. The person was a work colleague of Horace’s new wife, who was a social worker.

2. We will afford our children increasing freedom as they become older. Who provides childcare for the kids and whether they can take care of themselves can also be a heated aspect of inter-parental relations. The teenage children of Nancy and Kevin were too old to need babysitters, obviously, but Nancy and Kevin disagreed about how much supervision the kids needed.

3. Agree on the age at which your children will be allowed to stay home without adults for certain lengths of time—alone, with their siblings, or caring for other children. Ken irritated Sharon one afternoon when he left their fifth-grade son home for three hours without telling Sharon.

4. Agree on the level of independence to afford your children at each age, and do not contrive a concern about independence to manipulate some other aspect of your children’s lives. Daniel and Cheryl had a difference of opinion about whether their two children, ages 14 and 11, could ride Portland’s MAX light-rail train to my office.

5. Regardless of how, in moments of frustration, you may try to quantify your contribution to your children’s lives as greater than each other’s, always remember that your children are both of your children, not the personal possession of only one of you. Elizabeth had to understand that the son she was raising with her former boyfriend Charles was not just “her” toddler.

6. If your financial circumstances are or become such that you can hire a live-in or live-out childcare provider, do not lose sight of that person’s limited role in your household and your overarching obligation to be your children’s parents. For families fortunate enough to be able to afford domestic help, a nanny should be a supplement to the parents, not a replacement. However, in Lori and Brian’s case, the kids had a better relationship with their nanny than they had with their own parents.