Nanny Connect

At Half the Sky, we often get messages from adoptive families telling us how wonderfully their child is adapting to their new home and thanking us for the excellent care received from our caregivers in China.

We also often hear from our caregivers about how much they love seeing updates about the children.

And that got us thinking… was there a way that we could facilitate the sharing of child updates to caregivers in our 53 institutions and China Care Home?

What we came up with was Nanny Connect, a trial service that we are making available for a year. Via Nanny Connect, parents can submit a short update on their child and up to three photos twice per year. Our staff will translate the updates and post them on 1jiaren, our closed online community for caregivers all over China.

Here is one of our first Nanny Connect entries:

 Dear Caregivers,

ShaSha has been home since May 2012. We named her Lia but we still call her ShaSha at home. She doesn’t remember any Chinese language any more, or many details about her time there but she knows that her nannies gave her good care.

Lia is very, very funny and smart and makes us laugh every day. She has such a good imagination and is always telling us stories and funny ideas. She has gotten very strong since she has been home and likes to play and climb on the playground and she really, really loves to swim. She likes to draw and do art work. She makes funny hats from paper. She also loves her Mama and Baba and big sister very much. She will start kindergarten this fall. We love her so much and are so grateful for all the care she received in China. One day we will bring her back to visit!

From Lia’s mom, Christina

Responses to letters from families are not guaranteed due to staff turnover, heavy workload or other reasons. But in this case, one of our nannies saw the update and responded with this message that we translated and passed on to Lia’s family:

“From Shasha’s lovely smile, you can see that her parents and sister are very much in love with her, and I feel so happy that Shasha will grow up in this environment. I am not at ShaSha’s institution anymore but I will let her nanny know to view this post and photos. She will be very happy.”