Good help may be hard to find, but hellparents are everywhere.

When I was just a slip of a thing, I got a live-in job as a nanny for a very rich family with a two-year-old child. I was only eighteen, so I let them get away with all sorts of stuff that I would never put up with now. They expected me to be up and working by seven in the morning, regardless of what time any of them decided to get up; and if I quit for the evening before seven at night, they'd say that I was taking off early. And no, I didn't get any time off during the day.

Only the dad worked, by the way. The mom spent most of her time either out shopping or upstairs in her luxurious room, and expected me to engage in stimulating, enriching activities with her son every minute he was awake, and pack all the cleaning, straightening, dusting, and scrubbing involved in keeping a two-story house spotless into his naptime. Oh, and all the laundry required ironing, including the towels and the dad's boxers.

Anyway. The mother had told me that if her little angel ever did anything wrong, I was to wait until I saw her, tell her what had happened, and let her deal with it. It didn't matter how bad it was, I was not to do any disciplining, not even verbal. Which might have worked out okay, except that I wasn't allowed to go and get her about anything, either. So several hours might go by between his doing something wrong and her hearing about it. And even if she were inclined to take what he'd done seriously, which she usually wasn't, what was the use? He was two years old. Hours after the fact, he'd completely forgotten what had happened. He wasn't going to see any connection between the boring scolding he was getting now and what he'd done this morning. So he wasn't going to feel any need to change his behavior.

The father, apparently, had different ideas about childcare. I didn't see him very often in the first few weeks I worked there, but one morning we were all having breakfast together and while the mother was getting something from the refrigerator, the little boy threw his spoon at me. The father was sitting right there, and he gave me a look.

"Are you going to let him get away with that?" he asked coolly.

I felt trapped. Like a moron, instead of trying to explain that the mother had forbidden me to discipline, I started into some spiel to the kid about how we don't throw things. Right in the middle of it, of course the mother came back to the table. She looked at me as if she'd caught me dropping a spider in her coffee.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" she demanded.

Well, the husband explained what had happened, and then she explained the rules she'd laid down, and they both apologized for the misunderstanding. But they still both blamed me for the whole incident, I think, because I lost my job not much later. At that, I'd lasted longer than most of their household help did. I learned from a woman who did secretarial work for them that the couple had had twenty-one nannies in the past year and a half.