5 ms·

I grew up in South America, one parent Scandinavian and the other local. We had a housekeeper/nanny the same way in Roma. My Mother was adamant on having the na

by todipa 8y ago

I grew up in South America, one parent Scandinavian and the other local. We had a housekeeper/nanny the same way in Roma. My Mother was adamant on having the nanny sit with us for every meal, all together. I was a kid back then so I didn't understand why my friends would find it weird when they ate dinner with us. It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time.

wslh 8y ago
> It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time. Assuming you are paying a fair salary, other cultures/countries don't have a housekeeper (even as a part-time work) because they cannot afford one not because it is an ethical or moral thing. In general, families with children need a lot of extra help when parents work.
- dguaraglia 8y ago
  While living in Brazil, I found an interesting version of this: Brazil's law allow (or at least used to) people to retire very early, because retirement is based on years of contribution and a lot of people start working at the age of 14 or 16. So you have a lot of people who choose to retire early (as early as 49) and are receiving a decent "aposentaduria" (retirement). Some families choose to take up work as part-time help for others. I used to have a maid come in for about 4 hours once a week. She'd do all of our laundry, clean the house, wash whatever dishes were dirty, etc. She had a number of customers like us, plus one that'd pay her a set amount per month to come every day for a couple hours a day and clean/cook dinner. She was making about R$2,000 a month plus her retirement. It was a pretty decent amount, when a good salary for people my age was around R$3,000.
_red 8y ago
A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help. He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'. Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..." He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning. In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees. I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.
- em-bee 8y ago
  to do that you have to go down to their level. if you spend your free time in the garden working just as hard, then you can sit down and share the refreshments together. same goes for housework. in china, nanny's are generally relatives. the grandparents, an aunt or a cousin. so they are part of the family. they are there because they are genuinely needed to share the work, there is no class difference. only when relatives are not available, someone else is hired, but their status is not much different.

by todipa 8y ago

wslh 8y ago

> It is a cultural thing that is probably left over from the colonization era. Things will change but it takes time. Assuming you are paying a fair salary, other cultures/countries don't have a housekeeper (even as a part-time work) because they cannot afford one not because it is an ethical or moral thing. In general, families with children need a lot of extra help when parents work.

dguaraglia 8y ago
While living in Brazil, I found an interesting version of this: Brazil's law allow (or at least used to) people to retire very early, because retirement is based on years of contribution and a lot of people start working at the age of 14 or 16. So you have a lot of people who choose to retire early (as early as 49) and are receiving a decent "aposentaduria" (retirement). Some families choose to take up work as part-time help for others. I used to have a maid come in for about 4 hours once a week. She'd do all of our laundry, clean the house, wash whatever dishes were dirty, etc. She had a number of customers like us, plus one that'd pay her a set amount per month to come every day for a couple hours a day and clean/cook dinner. She was making about R$2,000 a month plus her retirement. It was a pretty decent amount, when a good salary for people my age was around R$3,000.

_red 8y ago

A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help. He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'. Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..." He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning. In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees. I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.

em-bee 8y ago
to do that you have to go down to their level. if you spend your free time in the garden working just as hard, then you can sit down and share the refreshments together. same goes for housework. in china, nanny's are generally relatives. the grandparents, an aunt or a cousin. so they are part of the family. they are there because they are genuinely needed to share the work, there is no class difference. only when relatives are not available, someone else is hired, but their status is not much different.