While the term "nanny" often brings to mind childcare for the bygone upper classes in England and the United States, the profession and its place in society were evolving in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century, there was a vast increase in the number of household workers, including nannies, in the United States and Great Britain. The Center for the Child Care Workforce estimated that at least 1.2 million people worked as child-care workers in the United States in 2005, though the exact number who worked exclusively as nannies was unknown. In 2006, the Daily Telegraph newspaper's website, telegraph.co.uk, reported that in Great Britain alone, at least one hundred thousand people, mostly women, were employed as nannies.

There were several reasons for the rapid growth in the employment of nannies. More women were joining...