35 nanny interview questions every parent should ask (especially abroad)

You would not hand over the keys to an apartment you own without checking who was moving in. You would want proof of income, a reference from the last landlord, a signed contract, a deposit, and a clear understanding of what happens if something goes wrong. Nobody would call that excessive. It is a property.

And yet the person who will be alone in your home with your two year old for forty hours a week is very often hired on a recommendation from a mother in a WhatsApp group and the general sense that she is trustworthy. No contract. No background check. References requested and never called. Less verification than you would run on a tenant.

Good interview questions test preparation and judgement: what this person actually knows, and what she does when a toddler bites, when a fever climbs at two in the afternoon, when your instructions and her instincts point in different directions.

I am Montserrat Armesto, a pedagogue and specialist in child neuropsychology, and I created Totters for parents who want to be deeply present and deeply ambitious. I founded it on a simple belief: children deserve exceptional care, and parents deserve the support to be fully present in their children's lives without having to compromise their own.

We interview caregivers for a living, and this is the process behind our in-home nanny program, written out so you can run it yourself.

How do you prepare for a nanny interview?

With the two lists in hand, decide what the role actually is. Write down the week you need covered, the tasks that genuinely belong to the role, and where you are flexible. If you skip that step you interview for a vague idea of help, and then feel disappointed by candidates who answered perfectly well.

It also helps to know what the rest of the process looks like before you are inside it, because the interview is only one stage of hiring a nanny in Mexico and the stages around it shape what you should be asking.

Split it into two conversations. A short first call for availability, experience and basic fit, then a longer in person interview for the two or three worth your time. Doing both at once is how strong candidates get rushed and charming ones sail through, and it is also how you burn a whole afternoon on someone a six minute call would have filtered out.

Have your child present for part of the second conversation, not all of it. You want to see how a candidate greets a child who is shy or uninterested, and you also want twenty uninterrupted minutes for the harder questions without an audience.

Experience and background

1. How did you start working with children, and what kept you in it?
2. What ages have you cared for, and which age do you enjoy most?
3. How long were you with your most recent family, and why did the position end?
4. What did a normal week look like in that role?
5. Have you worked with a family whose home language was different from yours? How did that go?
6. How many families have you worked with in the last three years?
7. Tell me about a family you found difficult and what you took from it.

Training and certification

8. What formal training do you have in childcare or early childhood education?
9. Do you hold current pediatric first aid and CPR certification? May I see it?
10. When did you last take a course or training of any kind?
11. Have you had training specific to infants, or to children with additional needs?
12. Would you be comfortable with a background check and with me contacting your references directly?

Caregiving style and daily routine

13. Describe your ideal day with a child my child's age, hour by hour.
14. What do you do when a child has a full tantrum in public?
15. How do you set a limit with a child who is testing you constantly?
16. What is your view on screens at this age, and what would you do if ours differs?
17. How do you handle transitions, like ending play to start lunch?
18. What would you do if my child refused to eat what you prepared?
19. How do you respond to a child who is upset and does not want comfort?
20. What does play look like to you when nothing is planned?

Health, safety and emergencies?

21. Walk me through exactly what you would do if my child were choking.
22. What would you do if my child had a fever of 39 degrees and you could not reach me?
23. Have you ever had a real emergency with a child in your care? What happened?
24. Which hospital or clinic would you go to, and how would you get there?
25. How comfortable are you around water, and can you swim?
26. What are your rules about photographs of the children you care for?

Schedule, logistics and duties

27. What schedule are you looking for, and what is your real limit on flexibility?
28. How do you feel about occasional evenings or travel with the family?
29. Which child related tasks are you comfortable with: meals, laundry, tidying play spaces?
30. Are there tasks you would not take on? I would rather know now.
31. How do you prefer to update parents about the day?
32. What would make you stay with a family for several years?

That final question is worth sitting with. Caregivers who have thought about longevity describe conditions: being treated professionally, clear expectations, feeling that their view of the child is taken seriously, knowing someone has their back when something goes wrong. Those are things you can actually provide, and providing them is how you avoid running this entire search again next year.

Nanny's references

33. What did your child love most about her, and what did they clash over?
34. Was there anything you had to correct or ask her to change?
35. What kind of family would she not be right for?

The last question is the most useful thing you can ask a former employer. Nobody wants to criticise a person they liked, but almost everyone will happily describe a poor fit. And call the number you found yourself where you can, rather than only the one you were given.

What are red flags when hiring a nanny?

The obvious ones are easy. Refusing a background check, gaps in the timeline she will not explain, references that turn out to be friends, documents she will show but not let you verify.

The subtle ones cost a year. A candidate who agrees with everything you say, including two things you said that contradicted each other. A candidate who speaks about a previous child with irritation. A candidate who has left four positions in two years and describes every family as impossible. A candidate who asks nothing about your child.

These are worth studying in advance rather than recognising in hindsight, and there are several more nanny red flags international families tend to miss because they do not match what hiring looks like back home.

What ten years in this work has convinced me of

I have been doing this for ten years. In that time I have seen things that genuinely surprised me. Not constantly, but often enough that I stopped believing good intentions were a system.

What I have come to believe is that nothing matters more than the process standing behind a person. Not the interview. Not the warmth of a first meeting. Not who recommended her. A serious selection process, real management of the relationship once it begins, continuous training, and somebody genuinely supervising the work.

And I think there is a severe oversight in this part of the industry. In-home childcare is one of the very few settings where an adult is given complete access to a child, for whole days, with no institution behind them, nobody supervising, and no obligation to have been trained or verified at all. Every other place your child spends that many hours with adults has structure around it. This one, almost nowhere, does.

That gap is one of the biggest reasons I founded Totters.

Your child's safety and wellbeing sit above everything else. Above convenience, above how much you liked someone, above how quickly you need the problem solved. And if you are in a position to choose the best available for your child, I have never once found that a difficult decision.

What our own screening looks like

Everything above is what we do before a caregiver ever meets a family, and one piece of it is the part I am proudest of.

Alongside the in depth interviews, background checks, verified references and skills assessment, every Totter completes a reliability assessment validated for the Mexican population. It gives us measurable readings on the indicators that matter most in a private home and that no conversation will surface: tendency toward theft, toward violence, toward manipulation, susceptibility to bribery, general honesty, and risk indicators related to abuse, including sexual abuse.

We treat the result as one input read by someone qualified to interpret it, alongside everything else we know about a candidate. It is not a verdict on anyone. It is a layer of objective information in a decision that most households make on impression alone, and it is the layer almost nobody in this market has.

Current first aid certification is a requirement rather than a bonus, and documents are confirmed at the source rather than accepted on sight. Then we match rather than present, so you meet one or two people who genuinely fit your household. If you need specialised support, like experienced infant care, candidates are filtered for exactly that.

What if your next nanny interview were the last one you had to run?

Picture the version where you meet two candidates instead of ten, both already screened to a standard you would have set yourself, and the hardest part of your week is choosing between two good options rather than deciding whether the only one who turned up is good enough.

Once someone starts, the work continues on our side: professional supervision of her profile, ongoing training, a developmental plan built for your child, substitute coverage when she cannot come, and our team handling schedule changes and the concerns that are genuinely hard to raise directly.

We work with families all over the country, whether you are settling into a neighbourhood in Mexico City, starting a quieter chapter in Mérida, Yucatán, or landing somewhere in between like Querétaro, and the standard of the process does not change with the address.

Book your private consultation today.