Let's talk numbers. In San Francisco, a full-time nanny for a single family can run anywhere from $25 to $40+ per hour depending on experience and duties. That's roughly $4,000 to $7,000 a month before taxes and benefits. A nanny share typically splits costs between two families, bringing per-family costs down to something in the $2,500 to $4,000 range — still painful, but meaningfully less so.

For context, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom in SF hovers around $3,000. So yes, childcare can literally cost more than housing. Welcome to the Bay Area, where even raising a kid requires venture-scale budgeting.

The appeal of nanny shares goes beyond cost savings. Kids get socialization, families build community, and caregivers often earn more in total than they would with a single family. It's a genuinely market-driven solution — no government program, no subsidy, just parents figuring it out.

But it's not without friction. Scheduling conflicts, differing parenting philosophies, and the awkwardness of essentially entering a business partnership with another family can make things complicated. One SF parent exploring the arrangement put it plainly: they're "trying to understand the pros and cons" before diving in.

Here's the bigger picture: childcare in California is absurdly expensive in part because of heavy regulatory burdens and licensing requirements that limit supply. Sacramento loves to talk about "affordable childcare" while piling on rules that make it harder for providers to operate. If lawmakers were serious, they'd focus on reducing barriers to entry rather than creating new programs that inevitably come with more bureaucracy and higher costs.

Until then, nanny shares remain one of the best examples of what happens when government gets out of the way and families solve problems themselves. It's not perfect, but it works — which is more than you can say for most government childcare initiatives.