Some parents tend to hire a babysitter to look after their child. This can be because, babysitters are active, dependable and young. Although every babysitters may not be professional and suit for you. To make sure your child's and family's harmony and safety you need to hire a professional babysitter.

There are certain qualities that make someone a professional babysitter. Obviously her experience is important. The babysitter you hire should be reliable and dependable. Even if the parents are not at the expected time, a professional babysitter will not leave home. She will try to contact you. Professional babysitters attend to work on time, willing to maintain a good communication with family and do not allow the child to do every activity like playing video games, watching TV etc. Instead, they do some meaningful activities with the child. This is why being active, enthusiastic is very important. Also professional babysitters follow your rules, respect your family value. Professional child caregivers wear proper dresses that is not too casual as well as not too official since the children should warm up to her. Character, patience of child caregiver are very important in every aspect. Professional babysitters understand kids, so they will not get angry just because the child will have made a mess in room.

Educational qualification is necessary in order to be a professional babysitter. For a babysitter, having knowledge on first aid/CPR is must. So she should have certificates as proofs for first aid and CPR. Keep in mind that infant CPR is different from adult CPR. Therefore the babysitter should have proofs on right CPR method.  Degrees, classes on Child care would do for the adult babysitters while local Red cross or safe sitter classes are for younger babysitters. Some extra abilities like cooking, singing, playing guitar would be good also. All these qualities and qualifications, specially that deal with safety and health are very important in order to be a professional babysitter.

Are you looking for babysitting Toronto and need help of child caregivers in Toronto, Canada? We strongly recommend to check out WeNeedANanny.ca

 
A nanny is a person who takes care of a child or children when parents are away at work or any other occasion. Many busy parents go for the option of hiring a nanny to look after their child. This is mainly because a nanny can give your child the individual attention and it is much more safer for the child. There are other options like sending a child to a daycare center or find a babysitter. If you send your child to daycare center, your child may not get an individual attention or may be no attention at all. There are plenty of children in daycare centers and it is really difficult to give special care for a certain kid. So the best option for parents is, to hire a nanny for their child. Not like in the past, hiring a nanny in big city like Toronto these days, is much easier. There are nanny agencies in Toronto, who helps busy parents to find professional and well experienced nannies. There are some parents who finds it difficult to find a nanny to look after their child, in that case these nanny agencies can be useful. However you find your nanny, you have to make sure that she is the best nanny for your child and for you. When you hire a nanny, you cannot be worried about your child every time when you are away. Therefor you have to be sure that she is the perfect nanny.
You will be always wondering, what sort of good qualities the nanny you hire should have. The following are few good qualities that you should search in a nanny before hiring. Mainly the child should be comfortable and happy with the new nanny that you hire. If the child is unhappy with the nanny, then there may be problems. A good nanny is active and always should keep up with the child. Young children are always playful, so the nanny should be able to engage in outdoor activities and fun activities with the child. Then only the child will be happy with the nanny. The nanny you hire should be always punctual. The nanny should be punctual when executing her duties.
An important quality that a nanny should have is, she should be dedicated to her work and should be reliable. A  nanny should not think this as just an occupation, she should enjoy the work she does and she should love the kid. A nanny should look after the child, like her own. Many nannies do not think about the hygiene of your child. A good nanny should always check whether the child is clean or not. She should also understand the importance of keeping your child and the room clean. Finally the most important quality is, the nanny should have a good relationship with the parents. She should not be proud and set on her own ways. A nanny should be flexible. She should always listen to parents and if there are any issues, she should communicate and try to solve them. If you find all these qualities in a nanny that you selected, then you should hire her, because she is a professional nanny. All the professional nannies Toronto, Canada, have these qualities. So you should always think about your child when you hire a nanny.
 
Due to complex life that some parents are living, they are forced to hire nannies to look after their children. Many parents are employed, so they do not have time to look after their children. Therefore they look for other options like hiring a nanny to look after their children. Your child is very valuable to you, so it is very important to find a nanny, who is trustworthy and reliable to look after the most valued of person, your child. If you choose the right nanny for your child, your life as well as your child's life will be simple and happy.

Many parents hire local nannies or child caregivers to look after their children and some parents go for the option of hiring foreign nannies. For an example, if you are living in Toronto, Canada and you want to hire a foreign nanny, you have to make sure that she is living in Toronto, Canada. If you plan to bring down a nanny form a different country, you will face so many difficulties. You have to think about the cost. If you are planning to hire a nanny who is residing abroad, you have to pay for the cost of the flight ticket and visa in-order to bring your caregiver to Toronto. As well as there may be legal formalities and restrictions that you may need to follow up on bringing a nanny from abroad. Hiring foreign nannies who lives abroad takes longer time, so it is a time consuming task. Therefore it is better to hire a foreign nanny who already lives in Toronto, Canada. Many parents tend to hire foreign nannies for their excellent child care qualifications. If you are in need of a nanny in Toronto, visit WeNeedANanny.ca.

There are some other benefits as well if you hire a foreign nanny. Most of the foreign nannies are well educated, they have different kinds of qualifications for child care and other educational qualifications. If you hire an educated foreign nanny, she can teach your child an extra language. Mostly all foreign nannies are live-in nannies, so your child will be exposed to their culture and language frequently. By frequent exposure to a different language, your child can learn it easily. So it is better to hire a foreign nanny who lives in Toronto, Canada. First of all, before hiring a foreign nanny, you have to check whether she is a legal resident in Canada and have a legal authorization to work in Canada. Parents should clearly understand that it is a crime to employ a nanny who is not authorized by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Therefore it is wise to check for all the credentials of the nanny and verify them, before hiring her.

 
Hiring nannies might be a tiresome and a lengthy process. Before hiring a nanny, parents should look for a nanny who is perfectly suitable to take care of their child. There are many ways you can search nannies. Parents can search for nannies in websites. There are certain websites which allows parents and nannies to register for a small fee. In these websites nannies can create their own profiles and update their information regarding child care. So parents can log into the website and search for nannies who suits their criteria. In many websites parents can post about the job and nannies can look into it and call the parents. Another way of finding nannies is, posting advertisements in newspapers and in other public areas or parents can go to nanny agencies and get the details of nannies.

After selecting few nannies who you think that are suitable for taking care of your child, you have to question or interview them. Before you interview the selected nannies in-person, you have to do a phone interview first. The main aim of this phone interview is to reduce the number of candidates. You can ask about the availability of the candidate, experience, salary and other details regarding your job. This will help you to select few candidates who made a good first impression through the phone and ask them to attend an in-person interview. There are three types of in-person interviews. They are; in-person interview at your own place, interview at a neutral place and working interviews. You can ask the selected nannies to come to your own place for the interview. By this you can familiarize the candidate with the working place, you can introduce her to your friends and you can check whether the nanny is satisfied with the working place. If the nanny is not satisfied with the working place, she won't do a good job. Parents can have the interview in a neutral place. You can interview the nanny in a public library or in a restaurant. Mainly parents go for this option because some parents do not like a stranger coming in to their home. Working interviews can be done as the last process of hiring. By this you can see how the nanny spends time with the child and how she does her work.

When you are done with the interview process, you have to evaluate the nanny. If she attended the working interview you can come into a conclusion whether the nanny is perfect for the job. You can ask your friends and relatives to come and observe the working interview. Their opinion might be very helpful when evaluating the work of the nanny and in the hiring process
 
There are plenty of child care giving options today. Two of the most important options of child care giving are hiring a nanny or sending child to a daycare center. Almost all the parents are working nowadays, so taking care of their child is a big issue. Many parents send their children to daycare centers when they are away for work and some parents hire nannies too take care of their child. In parents point of view hiring a nanny is the best and the suitable option. Because they feel that the child will not get personal attention when they send their children to a daycare center. By hiring a nanny, you can give your child the best care that they need and the personal attention.

If you want to choose a nanny, there are certain important things that you need to consider. First you have to determine whether you need live-in nanny or a nanny for a short period of time, that is whether the nanny is full time or part time. Parents may need to find a nanny who can do almost all the household work like preparing food for the children, cleaning the house or sometimes taking the children to school. It is really important that you find a non-smoking nanny, because you don't want your child to grow up with people like that and you have to make sure that she is a local, this will help in certain situations like; can come to work on time or in case of an emergency etc. Parents should do some research about the pay rates of a nanny before they hire one, whether you can afford the price of that particular nanny or not.

After figuring out all the above mentioned criteria, parents then should start looking for nannies. There are many ways which you can search for nannies. You can find nannies through nanny agencies. Parents can simply visit some agencies and gather details of the nannies that the offer and find out the best nanny for their child. Another important way is by posting advertisements in newspapers with all the important criteria that the nanny that you are looking for should have. It is important for parents to hire the perfect nanny for their kids, so you should do a thorough research about nannies and then hire the most suitable nanny to take care of your child. It is your child after all, therefore you should give the best care and protection.

 
Source : http://www.peter.com.au/articles/nanny.html

We recently hired a Nanny so that Nikola could go back to work a couple half days a week. The following describes our experience and advice on how to hire a Nanny.

 In Australia, most people use Child Care Centers rather a Nanny because it traditionally it has been cheaper and the government gives rebates for Child Care. However, Child Care is getting more expensive, and the rebates are not always easy to get, and a Nanny has several advantages:

    Children can be cared for even if they are sick.
    A Nanny may provide extra services like cleaning or washing.
    A Nanny often gives more flexibility.
    Cost is not proportional to the number of children.

For us, the first one was the primary motivation. Generally, if a child is sick they cannot attend Child Care, but then what would Nikola do about work (as a Sonographer, her work would have already booked people in to see her, all of whom would have to be cancelled if she had to stay home to look after a contagious child).

Having decided to hire a Nanny, we first tried looking at the various Nanny agencies. We were very disappointed with the results - many wanted up front payments without any guarantee of success, and the one we eventually tried sent two Nanny's both of who took the job and then quit a few days later, before even starting work (so it wasn’t our kids!). They finally managed a Nanny who was leaving the country in six weeks, but at least that managed to tide us over until we could find a replacement as Nikola had committed to going back to work after the first Nanny accepted the job.

So we decided to do it ourselves. We placed an ad in The West Australia newspaper which cost around $30 (all prices in AU dollars, AU$1 is roughly US$0.75 currently). The ad stated that we wanted a Nanny for two specific days a week, to look after our two children, aged 1 and 3 and gave our mobile phone number. From the ad we received well over a dozen responses.

For each person who called, we first ask some basic question which eliminated about a third of the respondents:

    We are in our suburb, is that suitable?
    Do you have a driver’s license?
    I work from home, is that a problem?
    What is your contact details, and when is the best time to call you?

Several people were from too far away and so our location removed them, several people did not have a driver’s license (which we required for various reasons), and (surprising to me) several people would not take the job upon learning I worked from home.

If we were busy at the time of the call, we would then call back later and ask further follow up questions, otherwise we would continue with the questioning at the time:

    Do you have a police clearance?
    Do you have a First Aid certificate?
    Can you provide two references?
    Can you provide a resume?
    What qualifications do you have?
    What experience do you have?
    Do you have experience with small children, eg feeding and changing nappies?
    Do you have children?
    What age are you?
    What activities would you do with the children?
    Would you do any extra duties (cooking, cleaning, washing) if time permitted?

For us, none of these were show-stoppers, but they did give us a range of things to base our estimation of the person on, as well as just time to take about various issues with them to get a better handle on the person (as much as can be done over the phone anyway).

Having narrowed the field, we then called back the ones we thought were best to organise an interview. Unfortunately, due to the itinerant nature of Nannying, several of them had changed their minds or got another job, or even just did not show up for the scheduled interview. In the end, we interviewed about three or four.

The interview gave us a chance to better know the person, as well as their physical abilities (keeping up with two very active children requires a fairly active person), and to go over the above questions in more detail. The interview also gave us a chance to talk about more delicate issues, such as:

    We like to enforce good manners, and would like the Nanny be a possitive influence.
    How would they deal with discipline issues? (always a hard question)
    What were their views on religion? We are Christians, and while we do not expect the Nanny to assist in teaching our children Christian values, we would not accept teaching them other religions at this early age.
    Health issues, such as experience handling sick children.
    Pay.

As far as pay goes, we had previously learned that the going rate for a Nanny is $12-$18 per hour, and so simply offered the middle of the range price as a starting point which seemed acceptable to all the people we ended up talking to. There is also the issue of holiday and/or sick pay if any, as well as specifications on how to handle the inevitable holiday time the Nanny will want (Since Nikola was effectively casual, we could deal with any holiday time as long as we had a couple weeks warning). We also needed to work our both the frequency and method of payment (for example, fortnightly via a bank transfer).

Insurance was another area we needed to look in to. The Nanny could be added on to our car insurance without any costs, but they needed to know that she had a clean driving record, and had not committed any serious offenses such as fraud or arson. We also added Workers Compensation Insurance for Domestic Employees to our home Contents Insurance for a nominal amount ($17/year).

It is possible that if the Nanny is accredited and has an ABN (Australian Business Number) that we might be able to obtain some sort of government rebate for hiring the Nanny. As yet I have not found any evidence to support this, although if we did we would pass on some or all of the benefit to the Nanny anyway.

It is too early to tell whether we made the right decisions and made wise choices, and it certainly has been a more challenging exercise to hire a Nanny than we ever would have expected, but the potential benefits over Child Care Centers (especially in terms of flexibility, consitency/reliability, extra services such as washing and cleaning) make the concept of hiring a Nanny far more attractive.