How This Company is Elevating Child Care Throughout the Pandemic
Suzie Zeldin is a mother, Co-Owner, and the Director of Operations for SmartSitting, an NYC-based agency with over ten years of experience in providing families with unique childcare support. She is smart, articulate, well-versed in her field, and will also be the first one to tell you she got her start as the company’s first employee in 2011 by “working 10 hours a week, from a van, while on tour with my indie-pop band, at the time.”
Suzie and her business partner Dara have worked tirelessly to identify gaps within their market, elevate the profession of child care, and support people in their industry. Whether advocating on behalf of their employees for hourly rates and benefits, fostering the growth of positive emotional, social, and intellectual health through child care, or upholding a mission to include anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion throughout their brand, SmartSitting is unapologetic about where they stand. Their approach reflects a company committed to growth and has landed them right where they want to be – leading with empathy while valuing and supporting the whole community.
WM: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Can you tell me more about the origins and inspiration behind SmartSitting?
Suzie Zeldin: SmartSitting started back in 2009 as a hybrid nannying, babysitting, and tutoring company. At the time, Dara (my business partner) was working with a family as an after-school nanny and connecting her friends with other after-school nanny jobs via a Facebook group. She ended up combining forces with a student from Brown that had a tutoring background, and that's how the earliest iteration of SmartSitting was born. At the time, the focus was transforming “sitting” from this passive enterprise into something active, engaging, and educational.
We also wanted to elevate the profession, as it has a tendency to be treated like "women's work" that doesn't have to be adequately or legally compensated. Considering our entire economy relies on child care, it's similar to the plight of teachers who are so undervalued and yet take on this great responsibility of literally raising and educating children. We often saw a pattern of nannies and sitters not being treated with the same professionalism as someone you might hire to work in an office. Yet, they play a significant role in raising a child and in the lives of the family.
WM: And when did you come onto the SmartSitting scene?
Zeldin: I came in about a year into the company’s existence while it was still very new, and was the first employee. I was working “10 hours a week” from a van while on tour with my indie-pop band at the time and eventually ended up buying out an existing partner and becoming an even co-owner with my new partner.
WM: I love that story! As someone who’s grown with the company from its very beginning, how have your services developed for parents?
Zeldin: Currently, if you’re a parent looking to hire a nanny full-time, part-time, or somewhere in between, you’ll work with a family specialist on our team who will help you nail down a job description, hours, and expectations. We'll talk through your ideal person, your kids, and their interests, and what matters most to you in the relationship you're looking to create. We'll also guide parents through rates in their market, what kind of candidates they can expect to see based on their job specifics and help them make the best decisions for their families. Then we'll send through qualified candidates, coordinate interviews, trial dates, and educate parents on the hiring process, helping them with employment logistics.
WM: As a company that connects child care experts with families, how has the last year affected these services, and what was it like for you and your team in March of 2020, as the pandemic hit?
Zeldin: Back in pre-COVID times, we did a lot of occasional, one-off babysitting type requests and lots of child care staffing for companies on-site and at corporate events too. We were hearing of COVID for the first time in March and waiting for some guidance from the city or state on how to handle it. About two weeks before New York City officially shut down, we decided to suspend our temporary services and limit child care to one family and one nanny. This was a tough decision! It’s very difficult to voluntarily shut down a part of your business, even if you know you're doing the right thing. Especially when you have employees, you need to let go as a result.
WM: I can only imagine the agony in making those decisions. What kind of policy changes followed your decision to suspend temporary services, and how were your employees affected?
Zeldin: One major shift was our realization that fill-in sitters who had been paid directly by lots of different families weren’t on anyone's payroll (many parents don’t put an occasional babysitter on payroll - it's just not common). This meant we had a few people who couldn't show income and gain access to the benefits they now needed. This was heartbreaking for us because here we are, this company that prides itself on supporting people in our industry and realizing that we missed this big piece of helping people build employment history in the temporary division of our company.
We decided that we would employ all of our fill-in nannies and temporary babysitters from that point forward. This new policy ensured that if someone got exposed or got sick, we'd have a clear path to getting them paid time off and access to whatever pandemic related benefits were available. We became the company that employed all of our babysitters so that parents wouldn’t have to worry about it and babysitters could professionalize their position so that when they needed to have something on record to get an apartment, buy a car, or access unemployment or pandemic insurance, they had a company that gave them that security.
WM: Wow, that's a huge undertaking to support your workforce! How did you implement this policy, and was there any backlash?
Zeldin: It was a pretty significant shift getting everyone to sign up for payroll, redoing all the math and changing our rates completely, and then explaining to families why our hourly rates and scheduling fees changed so drastically. We've had to say no to many long-time clients looking to use our occasional sitting service.
However, we equally wanted to support the safety of our families. Before matching a family with any sitting service, we ask them to self-assess where they are on a risk tolerance scale, including questions about comfort with public transit, masks, planned travel, and much more. We've also established a minimum number of weekly hours to be sure we were balancing our families' needs with the safety of our entire community. Ultimately, we want to provide everyone with help that feels safe and where people aren't nervous and uncomfortable – on both sides. There will always be risks involved, but for us, it's all about how much risk we can mitigate, then we get to work trying to match nannies and families as best we can.
WM: In addition to safety, your website and social platforms also take a firm stance on anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion. How is SmartSitting holding themselves accountable to these values and working toward a better future for everyone within their community?
Zeldin: Back in June, we hosted a roundtable discussion to make space for BIPOC members of our SmartSitting community to share their experiences regarding discrimination in the child care industry. That was a really enlightening, difficult, and emotional conversation, and it gave us a much better understanding of what we could do to protect our nannies and sitters of color.
We launched the SmartSitting Diversity and Inclusion Council, composed of two co-chairs and a gender and sexuality advocate, a BIPOC advocate, a mental health advocate, and an education and resource advocate. We want to be held accountable for our commitment to anti-racism and the inclusion of all identities in the SmartSitting community by making certain that company protocols to support marginalized community members are successfully implemented. We've prioritized ensuring that our nannies and babysitters are entering environments in which they feel safe, accepted, and able to care for a family's needs to the best of their abilities. The council's goal is to support and amplify the needs and voices of caregivers in the SmartSitting network and provide SmartSitting families with helpful and age-appropriate resources to educate their children about race, gender, sexuality, religion, relevant social issues, and more. We continually looking for ways to do better in this space.
WM: We couldn't agree more! In a year of unrelenting challenges, what's been your biggest accomplishment with the brand?
Zeldin: I feel like we really connected with who we are this year. I think we worried for so long about what we should say, but once we stopped caring about pleasing everybody and just followed our authentic selves, we landed exactly where we want to be. And we're not shy about where we stand. If that means that someone doesn’t want to work with us, that’s OK. We want to work with families, nannies, and sitters who share our beliefs, and we’re hoping that our commitment to accountability will encourage other companies not to be shy either. If you lose a handful of clients because they don’t like your beliefs about human rights, it doesn’t mean your business will fold.
WM: As SmartSitting continues to grow, what big plans do the future hold?
Zeldin: Right now, our largest network of nannies is based in the greater New York area. We always have our eye on expansion, and our goal has been ten years, ten cities. Since so much has gone virtual and our families have traveled to new destinations, we have been able to place in major cities all over the country. We were hoping to have at least one new location launched by the end of 2021, so we’ll see if we can stay on track with all of the other changes we’ve experienced this year.
WM: Your enthusiasm for the work you do is contagious! Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. We can't wait to see what the future holds for SmartSitting!
