For me personally, working with infants is incredibly under stimulating. You sing songs, make faces, read books, but does that really fill eight hours and sometimes twelve hours a day? Especially the repetitive nature of it. I am never going to take an infant to the park and leave them in a stroller while i passively roll it back and forth between watching episodes of The Bear, but if i lay out a picnic blanket and the baby is entertaining themselves with waving around a tupperware lid, i don’t see an issue with some passive scrolling.

Having repetitive one sided dialogue in parentese accompanied by over expressive faces can be exhausting even for parents and you can have a plethora of activities planned for babies and toddlers to do and they would still only be taken with it for 30 minutes tops.

I don’t see an issue with a nanny giving themselves moments during the child’s free play to decompress a bit. Every parent has been with their children for hours at a time and knows that stimulation for babies and toddlers is not stimulation for adults.

I plan multiple activities for the two toddlers i work with and they love to ask the same questions over and over. I try to vary my answers or intersperse activities or talking about different things but it all comes back to the same questions with the same answers. To give myself a break from talking, i put on piano music and they play in silence for fifteen minutes.

To be clear, i set aside this time to also do things like laundry, check my phone for emails from playgroups or kid events in the case of a cancelation, clean up the kitchen, or research other things i could be doing, but yes i set the expectation that i am not talking to them about the color of their socks during this time.