What to Expect From Event Nanny Staffing: A Shift, Start to Finish

Before the day: the brief

You share the things a caregiver cannot work without: allergies, nap schedules, pickup rules, anything a specific child needs. For an event this is more important than for a household booking, because the caregiver is meeting most of these children for the first time and there is no parent in the room to ask.

The details worth being specific about:

Arrival

Caregivers arrive before your guests, not with them. That window is used to see the room, work out where children will actually be, find the bathrooms and the exits, and set out activities so the space is ready rather than being assembled while a four-year-old watches.

Handover in

Each child is handed over by name, to a caregiver, with the parent present. This takes longer than people expect when there are fourteen children arriving in ten minutes, which is why a drop-in window beats a hard start time.

The middle

Quiet, age-appropriate activities. Not screens, not a performance — the sort of thing that holds attention without needing constant escalation. Younger children rotate through more of them than older ones do.

Bathroom trips, snacks if you have arranged food, and a steady eye on who is where. In a room with a mixed age range, most of the work is keeping the youngest safe while the oldest stay interested.

The difficult hour

Every event with small children has one. It is usually somewhere between 5 and 7 PM, it is a function of tiredness rather than of anything going wrong, and it is the single clearest reason to have staffed the room properly.

What it looks like handled: the children who need to sleep are settled somewhere quiet, the ones who need to move go outside or into a corridor for ten minutes, and the ones who need a parent get one — briefly, deliberately, rather than a parent being pulled out of the room for the rest of the night.

What it looks like unhandled: it becomes the couple's problem, in the outfit they spent a year choosing.

Late in the evening

Younger children sleep. Older ones wind down. This is where a room that is genuinely separate from the music earns its keep, and where a venue's "the side room closes at 10" clause causes real trouble if nobody checked.

Handover out

Each child goes back to a named adult from the list you provided. Nobody is released to "someone who says they are with the family," which occasionally requires a caregiver to be mildly awkward with a guest. That is the correct behaviour and it is what the list is for.

What event nannies do not do

Being clear about this is fairer than being vague:

The staffing behind it

Nanny count comes from the ages of the children attending — infant under 12 months counts 2, toddler 12–35 months counts 1.5, child 3 and over counts 1, one nanny per 4 points, rounded up — and you can override the number in either direction, from 1 up to 10.

Every caregiver is employed by Puffin Services rather than contracted, insured, and CRRP vulnerable-sector cleared before any placement. If one is unwell, replacing them is Puffin's problem rather than yours, which is the practical difference between an agency and an introduction.