July 8, 2025
Selecting the Perfect Nanny: Podcast Episode #298
Kristin Revere and Shenandoah Davis, CEO of Adventure Nannies, discuss the importance of asking intentional questions when interviewing nanny candidates. They also chatted about her new book, “Adventure Nannies: Tales of Wonder, Wildness and Wisdom” and the important work Adventure Nannies is doing to support families in the latest episode of Ask the Doulas.
Hello, hello! This is Kristin Revere with Ask the Doulas, and I am so excited to chat with my dear friend Shenandoah Davis. She is the CEO and co-founder of Adventure Nannies, and our topic today is all about finding the perfect nanny for your family and when to begin that process. Welcome, Shenandoah!
Hi! I’m so excited to be here, Kristin! Thanks for having me!
It’s been a bit since we’ve connected in person, but you’ve always been such a huge mentor and inspiration for me, so I would love for you to share a bit about your story professionally and how it led you to running Adventure Nannies.
Oh, my goodness. Even the word, “professional,” I’m like, does that apply to me? So I grew up in Colorado. I have a bachelor’s degree in opera performance, like any nanny agency owner would. It has served me well in my professional career. I finished school. I started music. I was in a few bands. I put out three records of my own music. I toured all over the world. I got to go to New Zealand and Australia a bunch of times and Europe and I was just having so much fun. And being broke always, as I think everyone has heard from every musician or artist ever. You get a little bit of money, and you’re like, okay, am I going to use this to pay my rent, or am I going to use it to get more T-shirts printed to sell at my next show?
As any musician, I had a fair number of odd jobs in between tours and shows and other things, and my favorite one always was nannying, although I was certainly never working to the caliber that Adventure Nannies worked to. I didn’t know a ton about the industry. I didn’t know that nanny agencies existed. I would just meet families through friends or through Craigs’ List and help them take care of their kids, and they all thought it was so cool that I could teach their kids music lessons in between my little trips all over the world.
And I guess it was 2015, I randomly got called in to Adventure Nannies to do some marketing and business consulting for them because the founder in 2012 had decided to start a nanny agency after a few years of working as a travel nanny who was also a wilderness first responder. So she was getting invited on these travel nanny trips from families who were like, yeah, we need a nanny for our spring break trip backpacking the Canadian wilderness with a toddler. We just need a fun nanny who will go camping with us, snap a toddler’s shoulder back into place if they slip off the side of a cliff, and she was like, totally. That’s exactly what I’m trained to do. So she was dating a musician. She saw an opportunity for herself to start a business, to support another struggling musician, and she did that for about two years. But her boyfriend, now her husband and the father of their two beautiful kids, is the lead singer of The Lumineers, right as Adventure Nannies was kind of taking off in a business sense, The Lumineers majorly took off.
And at that point, I had been really pushing the pavement hard with my musical career for almost ten years, and I had watched a number of folks that I knew kind of achieve some level of fame or some level of popularity, and The Lumineers were definitely among them. We were watching people achieve this thing that we all thought we were trying to achieve, and the more folks who I watched who got major label record deals or went from playing in art galleries to then playing at music festivals in front of thousands of people with backwards baseball caps – I was kind of having this identity crisis of, I don’t really think that this is what I wanted to do. If this is what making it looks like, I don’t think that I’m really interested. I don’t think that I will enjoy it. And then I was kind of left with, then why am I doing it? I’m not making a living. I’m very financially stressed out all of the time. I like my songs. I like playing them in front of people.
I had been working as a marketing director for a restaurant group in Seattle. Because of the success The Lumineers had, A, I was having an identity crisis, and B, Brandy the founder of Adventure Nannies, reached out because she no longer sort of needed to own a nanny agency for the same reasons that she had needed one a few years ago. And I really just threw myself into it. I love playing piano and singing and doing music stuff still, but trying to do the thing that you love on that level for money in that industry is really draining and impossible. A gift from a divine power to be given a lifeline out of it, even though it was something I knew almost nothing about. I hate not knowing anything about things, and so I dove deep into the industry right away and learned as much as I could and started going to conferences and read every book that was out there.
What a way to do it!
Yeah, it has become maybe even a bigger part of my life than music was when I was in my 20s at this point.
So beautiful, and now you’re speaking on stages and organizing conferences and events. I feel like you are the go-to expert in the nanny space. But you already had that background in understanding marketing and business and even marketing yourself as a musician, and that’s really the biggest thing is getting the word out and helping connect to your audience, which is both nannies and families.
Absolutely. It has been so interesting for me. When I started with Adventure Nannies, I had just turned 30. Now I have just turned 40. My cohort and my peers have really shifted in the last ten years from being the same age and same demographic as a lot of the nannies that our agency is working with. Now when I’m talking to parents on the phone, a lot of times those parents are younger than me. Everything has shifted, and the need to kind of stay informed and stay relevant and be able to communicate with folks on both sides of that relationship and really have a deep level of empathy to understand where everyone is coming from is something that has taken, honestly, ten years to really come to fruition.
That makes sense. Yes, and I find that communication has changed a lot with the younger generation. I don’t get many clients that want to talk on the phone with me. It’s a lot of texting. Screening calls, leaving voicemails that may or may not get heard – it’s changed a lot in my 12 years as a doula.
I can’t even imagine.
As far as connecting, I have a lot of clients – we are still in a childcare shortage – that are looking to transition from a postpartum doula or newborn care specialist to a nanny, whether it’s hiring a full-time nanny or finding a nanny share. So what are your tips in selecting the perfect nanny? I know that you’re obviously interviewing not only families but also nannies, so I figured you’d be the best one to ask about different questions to ask, how to select the nanny based on your needs. I know you’re focused on that adventuring niche, but for families who may not be as adventurous but also have unique requirements for their nanny?
I know that this is something that you talk about in your book a little bit, too, of kind of the importance of pre-planning and starting to design your care team before the baby is on this side of earth. The main hesitation or complication that I see families facing when their newborn is hitting that three or four month period is really putting a focus on hiring a nanny who is infant savvy, and I feel like the way that doula contracts or newborn care specialists contracts typically work is that that person is generally with your family until typically three or four months, sometimes a little bit longer. But families are placing a lot of importance on the age range that is right in front of them. This person needs to be experienced with infants and they need to have all this infant experience, when realistically, someone who has a proven track record of stamina and staying with families for a long time is not going to have a ton of infant experience the same way that they see on a doula resume because they often are getting brought into the family around that three to four month mark. A lot of families that we hear from at Adventure Nannies are dealing with what to them is a really heartbreaking transition when their first child is between one and two years old because they have a nanny who they hired exactly for that three to six month age range, but now that their child is mobile and now that their kid is talking, they start to need really different characteristics and qualities from the nanny and someone who is not a doula but is really an infant nanny does not really have the staying power to make it through those toddler years.
It takes a lot of stamina, as you said. You’re chasing a moving child around versus holding a baby and working on sleep shaping and supporting feeding, so it is much different, especially if there are other children, so navigating multiple ages.
Yeah. We’ve just spoken to so many families over the last ten years who the nanny that they hired when their child was born or coming in after a doula or an NCS contract was amazing during that first year because they were laying on the ground with the baby, and they were doing the right amount of tummy time, and they were engaging in all of those floor activities and very present. But then when things change, they’re suddenly like, I really enjoyed laying on the floor with the baby and watching them figure out how to roll over, but now this new level of activity and exertion is not really something that I’m interested in. And at the same time, at Adventure Nannies, we call it camp counselor vibes, but the nanny who is going to be going out to the park and finding the swings and picking flowers and taking a kid to the grocery store with them and helping them shop – that is a completely different personality archetype than someone who is going to be happy and calm being totally present and engaged on the floor with an infant all day long. It’s really hard to find people who can bridge both of those ages.
I’ve also talked to so many families where one of the parents feels more comfortable with one of those age ranges than the other. So many of my friends who are moms were so excited about that newborn baby phase and the breastfeeding and the cuddling and the bond, and even though their partners, who were usually male, were so excited also, it’s really hard for the non-breastfeeding parent. They have to be a lot more intentional with the way that they engage. And when there starts to be more mobility – that and a lot of heteronormative relationships – is when the dad is like, heck, yeah, I’ve got a kid now, and I can go take my kid to do fun stuff. Now I’m super into it. The birthing parent is kind of grieving, oh, I don’t just to get snuggle all day long anymore. Now things are changing.
It’s the same with nannies. Everyone is going to feel more confident or competent or just more naturally drawn to a different phase. Parents who pick out someone who is going to be an awesome nanny at that three- to six-month phase often end up needing to have a hard conversation or to find someone else within the next 12 months, which is so hard on families, and just the level of guilt and anxiety that I hear parents going through because this nanny has been there for all of these important milestones, and they’ve become such a part of your family. And then it’s really a challenge to decide to make that transition out of the best interests of your kid, especially knowing how hard it is to find an amazing nanny and how hard it is to part with one who you’ve trusted and let into your home, who’s spent all this time with your kid.
Wow, that’s got to be devastating to have that connection and trust built up. I’m sure the interview process for nannies takes quite some time. Even working with an agency like Adventure Nannies, there’s still the screening process and interviews, and so to go through that again and with other children involved, potentially older – if that is the case, then they get connected, and you’re having to make sure the transition works for them, as well.
There’s no worst first call with new parents for us than when we’re talking to families who are like, we have the most amazing nanny. We love them so much. Here are all the things our family has been through together. That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you. Why are we talking right now? Even being able to name it or think about the possibility of that person not being in their life anymore is so challenging, especially for first-time parents. You’re mentioning families with older kids, and those families have kind of been through all those infancy stages and developmental stages and growing up and becoming toddlers and walking and talking and eventually heading off to preschool. But for the families who have never experienced those later stages before, the idea of hiring someone who might really not be hitting their stride and kind of their developmental sweet spot for two to three months or three to six months is pretty terrifying because that’s not even a developmental stage that they’ve witnessed yet. It makes sense to families when they are hiring a postpartum doula because they’re kind of hiring an expert to guide them through those first tender and beautiful and anxious and scary first few months. The idea that we kind of challenge and encourage parents to think about when they’re bringing in their first long-term nanny is essentially doing that again, of hiring that nanny who is going to be there for walking and talking and learning and not as much of the kind of quieter, gentler time, which is what the parents have really been used to a lot. But you’re really – you’re bringing in the next developmental expert, in a lot of ways.
So true. So as far as questions that families should be asking, do you have a couple favorite questions, even if it’s – let’s say Adventure Nannies connected a family to one of your nannies, and they’re making sure that the fit is where it needs to be, not only in experience, but also personality. As you said, it’s so intimate. I would love to know what you would recommend a family ask of a nanny.
I mean, in general, one of my favorite interview tips that I have ever been given is instead of asking hypothetical questions, so ask for situational questions based on past experiences. Because if you are leading an interview just asking hypothetical questions, you really are just kind of finding out how good someone is at talking or communicating or BSing. You’re judging someone’s interview skills, not their childcare skills. So instead of saying, “What would you do in this example situation that I’ve just made up?” The person you’re talking to is just going to make something up, too, and then if you like the thing they made up, then good for you; you’re off to the races. And if they’re not great at making things up, then you’re not moving forward.
I always try to rephrase those types of questions around, “Describe a situation where this happened. Tell me about a time where you were in a situation like this and how you handled it. Tell me about a time that you made a mistake. Tell me about a time that you were nannying for a kid and you were doing risky play and that kid got hurt. How did you handle it? How did you handle the situation with the parents?”
Great questions.
You’ll get people kind of comfortable and into their own type of story telling and recounting their own experiences. Then, not only are you hearing about a story that actually happened; you’re learning about their self-awareness. You’re learning how they handle conflict and working relationships because there’s always going to be some level of conflict. If there’s not, it just means that everyone is burying it. And you can just learn if this person is going to be comfortable communication with you and sharing weaknesses with you. Because to me, one of the worst things that can happen is hiring someone in your home who doesn’t have the level of trust to be honest with you as the parent, which in turn completely erodes your trust. If your nanny comes home with your toddler and they have a scratch on their face, you want to be able to say, “Hey, what happened?” And hopefully you don’t even need to say it, but to hear the story and not have a nanny who’s afraid to communicate with you who’s like, I don’t know, I didn’t notice it. Yeah, we were going down the slide and they got bumped, and we’re okay and I put Neosporin on it. We’re all good. Some level of understanding and confidence that situations sometimes happen, no matter what, no matter how close attention you’re paying. And it’s part of the experience, not like, I’m going to hide things that go wrong or I lost a shoe and I need to go find the extra shoe to buy because I could never tell my employers that the shoe got lost. You know as a parent, stuff gets lost.
Oh, it does. Absolutely. Especially, again, with all the adventures and playgrounds and hikes. Things can pop out of a diaper bag or a backpack.
The other thing, I think especially for parents who brought a doula in at the beginning, is being really clear when you’re hiring a nanny and when you’re interviewing people what type of relationship you want to have with them. A lot of families want to bring in postpartum support kind of for a confidence boost, first-time parents, and some families, once they get out of that initial stage, they want to repeat the relationship. Like, they want to hire someone who they feel like is more of an expert or has more experience than they have so that they can continue to learn and collaborate with someone. But some families are like, okay, that was really the part that I was the most concerned about. That was the stage I wanted the most help with. And I have a really clear vision of the path I want to take moving forward and the parenting approach and how I want to introduce different foods and how I want to handle this and how I want to handle a certain language immersion or I want to do Love & Logic or I want to do XYZ – and they’re really focused a lot of times on finding a nanny who has less experience so that the parents can really kind of take full charge and run the ship and they have a nanny who is a little bit more of the beta in the relationship. They read the books the parent tells them to read, do what the parent says, let the parent be the boss a little bit more – I think that’s where I see a lot of friction happen, when parents aren’t clear about which one of those two options or kind of where in the middle they want to meet, not to make it super black and white. But oftentimes I see parents thinking about it in a black and white way. They want to hire a nanny who’s going to be the boss and take control and teach them everything and show them how to do every single thing, and then it doesn’t take very long before the parent is like, well, hang on, I thought we wanted to do RIE, but actually, I’m super annoyed that my kitchen is now childproof and it takes me three minutes to figure out how to open this drawer to get the spatula out. Can just the living room be RIE? They paid extra money to hire a nanny who’s gone through every RIE certification course. No, you’re still going to have a childproof kitchen, and the family is like, well, you’re fired, because I don’t like having a childproof kitchen.
Having clarity around those expectations and just what you want the dynamics of that relationship to be is something that is really the difference between hiring a long-term nanny for six months or hiring a long-term nanny for six years.
That makes sense. And when should families begin that process of interviewing and planning to hire, whether they have a newborn care specialist or a postpartum doula or they have family support and they know there’s a transition time? Should they start looking right when they find out they’re pregnant, like they do for a doula, for example?
I mean, at Adventure Nannies, we really like to have about three months’ notice. Three to four months is kind of the magic hour for us. Part of that for us is that we work nationwide, and there are a few cities that we offer local placements in. But for the most part, families who come to us are meeting nannies from all over the US, and they’re relocating, having a little bit of extra buffer time to fly out a candidate and do a trial and then figure out the logistics around the nanny they choose to hire relocating to their city. It just takes a little bit of extra time. I would say in general, even if you’re working with a local agency or looking for help on your own, I think that three months is a good window because it gives you time for something to go wrong without it kind of decimating your childcare options because I know a lot of times, that three-month mark is also when parents are really expected to go back to work full force in this country.
Yes, unfortunately.
Which is horrifying in and of itself, much less to be facing going back without having childcare lined up.
Right, and not being able to get into a daycare and all of the other stressors. A lot of grandparents are being forced into caregiving. It is challenging. So that is very helpful. Now, you have some exciting news to share. You’ve just released a book? Tell us about it!
Yes! Our agency put out a book that actually – it’s funny, it came out a little while ago, and I have gotten so many congratulatory texts and emails, people coming out of the woodwork. “You’re an author now! I can’t believe you wrote a book!” I truly can’t take the credit for it. I had the idea for the book, but it actually was written by Adventure Nannies and caregivers who have worked for our agency in a number of settings as well as the original founder, who kind of tells her story, much better than I have abridged it for this podcast.
But you even touched on it before, Kristin, like the name of the company is confusing to people. I have talked to hundreds of families over the last ten years, and the first thing out of their mouth when we got onto the phone is, “Okay, so I don’t know if this is quite right, because we’re not that adventurous. We’re not black diamond skiers. We’re not world travelers. We’re not doing any of this crazy stuff. We just live in California and we have these kids and we want them to be cool when they grow up and good people and we both work, but I don’t know if that’s adventurey enough.” The number of times that people have said, “Oh, Adventure Nannies – what is that? So they’re like babysitters who plan adventures, or skydiving with kids?”
As a business owner and someone who’s operating in a lot of spaces, how you answer that question kind of feels like a fumble for the first few hundred times you do it, depending on who you’re talking to. So in my own effort to kind of answer and label that question better, I thought, what better way to do it than to just ask the people who have literally been adventure nannies and been out in the field. We have a beautiful chapter that is written by my friend Kim that is truly her life story of immigrating to the US from St. Vincent 30 years ago and walking into the social security office, being like, “I guess there’s like some kind of number I need to get a job – can you give that to me here?” and pursuing her path to citizenship and being a nanny and becoming an NCS and being a single mom and just kind of this here’s journey through and through.
We talked to Jess Dickerson, who is queer and kind of came out in all other areas of their life except for with their nanny families until a few years ago and has kind of found their own village and their own niche now that they have fully kind of embraced who they are and aren’t afraid to talk about that with nanny families, of working almost exclusively with queer families now as a travel nanny. And so many other stories. I wish we could have put a hundred of them in the book because – I wasn’t fully aware of how deep people would choose to go in their stories until we got to the editing phase of the book, but they all were so incredibly unique and personal that I think at this point, we are sending a copy of the book to every family who signs on, and I think that when families are starting a nanny search and they’re looking for someone who’s going to stay with them for years and years, it’s really easy to kind of get lost in this laundry list of, they need a bachelor’s degree because I have a bachelor’s degree, and everyone I know has one, and they need to speak Spanish and they need this, and they need to be this way. And families who – like, we are here for some amount of that. We’re kind of known for finding these unicorn candidates all over the country and finding the oboe-playing, black diamond skiing, karate, AMI certified Montessori instructor. Like, really love doing it – at the same time, if you’re not really intentional about all those checklist items, you really miss out on meeting people and getting to understand what their background is and where they’re coming from and what has kind of led to them becoming the person who they are. And all of those people in their own rights are incredible. Like, I’m not saying every person is so incredible that they’re going to fit in wonderfully to your home, but – I hate making matchmaking comparisons, but it is similar to a dating profile. You have to be over 6’3”, have to be under 40, have to make XYZ. You really limit the pool of what the possibilities are. And for a long-term nanny relationship to really work out, you need to build a relationship with that person, and you need to as a parent sort of be able to grow with the caregivers in your home.
Exactly.
And people design boxes and they think it’s going to work for them, and a lot of times, it doesn’t.
Well, you might have to have a second or a third volume to Adventure Nannies.
We are already planning on it because I really kind of put it together in secret. I felt so lucky that I got ten people who were like, yes, I will write a chapter of a book. That sounds great. But since it came out, we now have heard from a couple hundred folks who are like, hello, I also have a story to tell.
Sure.
We’re working on it right now, whether it’s more volumes of the book, whether we just come out with a jumbo anthology, whether it’s a blog series. The stories that have been coming out of the woodwork are really incredible.
I’m sure. So your book, Adventure Nannies – Tales of Wonder, Wilderness, and Wisdom – is available in multiple versions. Tell us how we can purchase it.
Yes! So it is available at Barnes & Noble. It’s available on Amazon and Kindle. For folks who are less excited about supporting either of those businesses, we do plan on having it for sale directly through us up on our website in the next few weeks. So hopefully at the time of this episode airing, you can go buy it right at Adventure Nannies.
Exciting! And then as you mentioned earlier, the families that work with you get a copy, so that’s another bonus.
It sure is! Yeah, it is. It has been a very legitimizing proof of concept. I was homeschooled until high school, and I am secretly old-fashioned in a lot of ways. As someone who has built an agency for ten years and now has over 20 employees, I actually really enjoy the time each week that I get to sit and just write a little note to every family who’s signed on in the last week and send them a copy of the book. It feels old-fashioned, but it gives me some heart back in the business to just sit through and look at some notes and actually get to know every single family who’s working with us on that level and just send them a little love note in the mail.
Yes, something that will be remembered forever, and those handwritten notes are rare. I always appreciate them when I receive them. Thank you, Shenandoah! We can connect with you in multiple ways – I know you’re on social media. Adventure Nannies has a website, and you have a podcast of your own?
I sure do, and you are going to be a future guest on it!
So how can we connect with you?
The website is Adventure Nannies. We are @adventurenannies on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Blue Sky. I think those are the main ones that we are using right now. I’m at shenandoah@adventurenannies.com. We are very responsive on all platforms, so feel free to reach out if you’d like to!
Amazing! Thank you for sharing your wisdom! It was great to chat with you!
Thank you so much for having me on Ask the Doulas, Kristin!
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