The Parisian neighborhood playground has two seasons, as it were. First of all, there is the weekday season, with this everyday scene: groups of black women, side by side on wooden benches, surrounded by a hedge of pushchairs full of children’s toys, looking out at a crowd of white toddlers who take turns in their midst in the sandbox or down slide. The season lasts from Monday to Friday, from roughly 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The weekend season that follows has different customs. The same white toddlers are the centerpiece around that same sandbox. But the adults around them are predominantly white, regular male, and usually positioned within an arm’s length of the accompanying child (sometimes also wearing a helmet).
The weekend is for the parents, on weekdays the playgrounds of Paris are the meeting place for ‘nounous’, as the nanny or babysitter is popularly called in French. Mostly women, often with a migration background, who keep the family life of working dual earners in Paris going for ten hours on average.
Education is a forbidden word
But don’t think that the nounous are there to replace the parents during working hours. Replacement, like education, is a forbidden word. Of course, there is fed, changed, bathed, read to, cuddled, listened to concerns, kissed for wounds, comforted with tears, looked after a fever and gently corrected when a toy is taken from somewhere. Sometimes in the same family for more than ten years. It’s called assisting – a delicate difference that the nounous in the Parisian district of Montmartre make immediately apparent.
‘Educating is a frustrating term for parents,’ explains Yvonne, an energetic woman with Ivorian roots. “In the end they make the rules.” Together with a dozen other women (who, like them, share only their first name), she has settled under the trees at the back of Square Léon Serpollet, a small green oasis with playground equipment on the edge of Montmartre. Every Parisian neighborhood has a square like this – a legacy of the large-scale urban renewal under Napoleon III and his architect Baron Haussmann, said to be inspired by London’s many parks. All the women in the circle, mostly in their forties and fifties, have African roots. ’80 percent of the women who do this work come from the Ivory Coast’, says Yvonne, others come from Togo or Cameroon. ‘The maternal instinct is innate to us. We know how to approach caring for children.’
In addition to instinct, this is also experience, as it turns out. Most women have been in the business for years, sometimes decades. Like Mathilde, who is also Ivorian, who has a toddler of 2 and his sister of 7 months under her care. She started her work in Paris in 2000, she says as she gently cradles her babysitter in her arms. ‘I myself had my oldest son when I was 14, two years later my daughter was born. My children stayed behind in Ivory Coast when I came here. I missed them very much, but thanks to my work I was able to surround myself with children.’
‘Here we are among colleagues’
In Square Léon Serpollet’s playground everyone knows everyone, including the children. Both playing and babysitting are done collectively here, meeting each other comes naturally for those in the profession. ‘Here we are among colleagues’, explains Mathilde. ‘Raising a child is something you do together, that is African culture. As long as the child is in a mother’s womb, it is hers alone. From birth, the care is up to an entire community.’
That solidarity is very important to us, Nathalie joins in from a bench. “Young parents are often stressed and tend to be overprotective. But you transfer that fear to children.’ Sharing experience is reassuring and helps to set children free. And the encounters are good for herself, too, says the Ivorian woman. ‘When I hadn’t been in France that long, I suffered from depressive symptoms. People here keep the doors closed to each other.’
The French sociologist Caroline Ibos has spent years researching the relationships between Parisian mothers and the often African women who look after their children. A phenomenon that grew in the 1990s, when labor migration for women started and families could claim tax benefits and benefits when hiring a nanny at home. In addition, while French women started working outside the home, the demand for babysitting at home grew. Ibos’ work is critical: the social success of wealthy, well-educated women is made possible, she says, by women from a migrant background who do meager paid work, sometimes without legal residency status in France and often face racial prejudice.
Ibos portrays the Parisian household as a place where globalization, class and racial differences come together in a rare intimate atmosphere.
Minimum wage, but great responsibility
The women in Square Léon Serpollet all work under contract, albeit under varying conditions depending on their precise status. The term ‘nounou’ is primarily used for work that is officially called ‘auxiliaire parentale’, which means something like parenting assistant. They come to parents’ homes, often have one or a maximum of two families under their care, and they receive about the minimum wage of around 11 euros per hour. On the other hand, comes a great responsibility. ‘If something happens to the children, we risk a lawsuit,’ says Nathalie. The service is especially attractive to well-paid dual earners with long working days; children do not need to be taken to daycare, are freshly bathed and fed at the end of the day, and are allowed to go to the babysitter even if they have a fever.
Particularly striking in Léon Serpollet’s playground is the tranquility. Dozens of children crawl around, but no one screams. It’s the cliche about French children – always impeccably dressed and well-mannered – but probably also the preponderance of decades of experience.
‘It’s the pride of our work when the children are happy,’ says Nassira, an Algerian woman with bleached curls, who later joins her colleague Chahrezed in the park. It’s the last working day before the holidays. ‘Last week we all had a picnic here in the park to say goodbye,’ says Nassira. ‘That’s the beauty of this job. Here different cultures meet, we learn from each other. That is a wealth – for us, and for the children.’