The Times: A Zoom-ful of sugar from virtual babysitters helps kids learn and parents get on

She might be singing nursery rhymes or helping a child to learn the alphabet. While it sounds like an average day for a nanny, there is a difference. Danielle Manton-Kelly is not in the room with the children: she is a Zoomsitter, an online nanny, and she is one of a growing breed.

Elliott learning from online nanny Danielle Manton-Kelly

Her charges live all round the world. From her home in Dorchester, Dorset, she looks after up to 12 children each week, as far afield as France, India and Australia. Their parents, exhausted by the combination of working from home and looking after young children, have gone online for childcare rescue.

The children are placed in front of a computer, and the Zoomsitter interacts with them directly, whether by reading a story, painting a picture or teaching the alphabet.

Demand has boomed during the lockdown. Childcare.co.uk, the UK’s largest online community for parents and childcare providers, said that it had received more than 20,000 messages asking about virtual nannying since Covid-19 had hit. About 1,400 nannies are now working online through the site, down from 3,500 at the peak of the pandemic.

Richard Conway, 46, the company’s founder, said he had been struck by how many parents were complaining of being pestered by their children and finding it impossible to work — or even get an hour’s break.

“A lot of the children that were at home were from three to eight and so didn’t have a lot of work from schools to do. That younger age group find it hard to entertain themselves and are always pestering their parents,” he said.

“You wouldn’t use a virtual nanny on a night out — that would be dangerous. But I thought if the parents are home working, even if they are in a different room, perhaps a virtual nanny could work quite well — for games and reading stories.”

Full article: A Zoom-ful of sugar from virtual babysitters helps kids learn and parents get on