A Very “Professional” Experiment: The Scientific Method applied to a job that imploded abroad

I’ve always believed that children are tiny scientists.

From the moment they arrive in the world, they begin running experiments. A baby drops a spoon from a high chair and learns gravity. A toddler pushes a boundary and learns reaction. A teenager tries on different versions of themselves and learns identity.

Hypothesis.  

Test.  

Observation.  

Adjustment.

Learning happens through interaction with reality.

That understanding is part of why I have always respected children so deeply. Curiosity is intelligence. Exploration is learning. And the safest environments for children are the ones where experimentation can happen without punishment or humiliation.

Over time I realized something else.

I move through the world in much the same way- very FAFO, if you will.

If something doesn’t make sense, eventually I test it.

Recently, I realized that without fully intending to, I had been running an experiment of my own.

Not with children.

But with labor.

The Hypothesis

For years working in private domestic service, I heard the same explanation repeated in different forms.

If a caregiver is calm enough, professional enough, flexible enough, and emotionally regulated enough, the job will work.

Conflict, we are told, comes from personality. Miscommunication. Difficult people.

In other words, the worker is the variable.

After enough placements, I began to suspect something else.

What if the recurring conflicts weren’t about personality or competence at all?

What if they were structural?

So when I entered my most recent position, I quietly adopted a hypothesis:

If I remove every possible personal variable:

Tone.

Professionalism.

Emotional restraint.

The system should stabilize.

If excellence is the problem, excellence should solve it, right(?)

The Method

To test that idea, I controlled everything I reasonably could.

I maintained a cooperative tone even when expectations shifted.  

I communicated clearly about scheduling and responsibilities.  

I documented duties and hours.  

I avoided escalation wherever possible.

In other words, I behaved exactly as the industry claims it wants caregivers to behave.

But there were variables I could not control.

The job existed inside a private home, and spanned over multiple countries and timezones- as Travel nanny positions often do.

Housing and employment were connected.

Surveillance was present.

And the workplace had no neutral witnesses.

Those were conditions of the environment.

Contract Clarifications

There was another moment early in the timeline that turned out to matter.

Within the first thirty days of employment, I submitted written clarifications to the contract. The intial agreement was vague and had been intentionally left open during that period so that both parties could adjust expectations once the job became real rather than theoretical.

This is normal in private service, or at least it should be.

The clarifications were not dramatic. They were administrative:

Hours (Overtime)

Compensation tracking, 

Role expectations,

Meaningful rest & decompression requirements

The kinds of details that, if left vague, eventually become points of tension.

So I wrote them out and submitted them within the thirty-day window exactly as the contract allowed.

The response was minimal.

The agency acknowledged receipt.

Inside the household, My employer (the Mother) refused to ‘get into this today’ because it was her birthday.

That alone was information.

Because clarity is either welcome or it isn’t.

And when it isn’t, that usually tells you something about the environment you’re in.

Three Consecutive Days

Not long after that, the rhythm of the job shifted.

The change wasn’t dramatic enough to point to directly. Just the kind of subtle shift you feel when a room has cooled a few degrees.

Then came a stretch of three consecutive days of work (nearly 70 hours straight, including multiple overnight feeds, without rest, unsupported).

In childcare, that kind of stretch carries a different weight than it might in other professions. The job requires constant situational awareness: monitoring safety, managing emotional climates, anticipating needs before they arrive, overnight feeding,  and making small judgment calls all day long.

It is quiet work, but it is relentless.

By the end of the week I was exhausted. Not resentful. Not angry. Just physically depleted in the way anyone would be after sustained attention like that.

What struck me wasn’t the exhaustion itself.

It was that everyone (my employers & the placement agency) seemed to pretend not to see it.

Fatigue in caregiving is a safety issue. A tired caregiver is still responsible for children, for judgment calls, for the small decisions that shape a child’s day.

But in that moment it felt as though the system had decided fatigue was not a variable worth acknowledging.

Looking back, that period feels like an important data point in the experiment I didn’t realize I was running.

I had clarified the contract within the agreed window.  

I had maintained professional communication.  

I had worked through exhaustion without escalating anything.

And yet the environment became more strained—hostile even, rather than less.

Which raised an uncomfortable possibility.

Sometimes clarity doesn’t stabilize a system.

Sometimes it reveals how much the system depends on things remaining unclear.

The First Result

That was the moment the hypothesis started to unravel.

The story I had heard for years in this industry was simple:

If a caregiver is professional enough, patient enough, and flexible enough, the job will work.

But by that point I had removed as many personal variables as possible (I jokingly refer to it as the having to be a ‘Passive-agressively Perfect Professional’)

The system did not stabilize.

If anything, the opposite happened.

Which is how the experiment quietly produced its first real result.

The problem was probably never the worker.

It was the structure.

The Institutional Layer

When the situation eventually deteriorated (complete with a cameo from Montreal PD) I contacted the agency that had placed me in the role: Morgan & Mallet International.

This request was not casual.

Morgan & Mallet advertises that its services extend beyond placement. The agency describes providing ongoing support, mediation, and guidance to both employers and employees in order to ensure successful working relationships.

I relied on those representations when I accepted the position.

So when conditions inside the household became unstable, I reached out and asked for assistance. Assistance with contractual issues, assistance with income/tax, and finally assistance facilitating a safe exit.

I explained clearly that I felt unsafe.

The response clarified something important.

During a call with the recruiter responsible for the placement (and later coorespndence with their CEO, Morgan Richez) I asked what support the agency could provide to help me leave safely.

The answer was direct.

Nothing.

The agency would not intervene.

The situation, I was told, was solely between the employee and the employer.

In that moment the experiment produced a second conclusion.

The institutions that frame domestic work as professional may not actually function as protective structures once the worker is inside the home.

The Structural Question

That moment reframed the entire situation.

Agencies place workers inside homes.

Families control the workplace.

But when conflict emerges, the worker may discover that the institutional protection implied during recruitment is largely symbolic.

Which raises a simple question:

Who, exactly, deserves safety in domestic work?

Claudia Jones Asked This Question in 1949

Decades ago, Claudia Jones wrote an essay titled An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!.

In it, she argued that Black women’s labor had long been concentrated in domestic work precisely because it occurred in spaces where structural protections were weakest.

Domestic labor takes place inside private homes.

That intimacy often masks the absence of the safeguards that exist in more visible workplaces.

Workers are expected to maintain professionalism, emotional composure, and discretion even when the conditions around them become unstable.

Jones argued that this arrangement was not accidental.

It was structural.

And structures, once built, tend to reproduce themselves.

A Modern Version of the Same Problem

The domestic labor market today looks different from the one Claudia Jones described.

There are international agencies.  

Contracts.  

Professional language.

But the workplace itself remains the same

A private home.

A private hierarchy.

Often with no witnesses.

When conflict emerges inside that environment, the worker can quickly discover that the institutions surrounding the placement have limited authority—or willingness—to intervene.

The result is a system in which the caregiver is expected to maintain stability even when the conditions around them are unstable.

Excellence becomes a requirement.

Safety remains optional.

Which brings me back to children, (aka The Experiment’s Conclusion)

Children understand something that adults often forget about experiments. When a result comes back different from what you expected, the point isn’t shame.

The point is information.

You adjust the hypothesis.

You learn something about the environment you’re operating in.

You move forward knowing more than you did before.

For years I had been told that professionalism would protect the caregiver.

This experiment suggested something else.

Excellence is not a protective variable.

Structure is.

And when the structure of a job depends on private homes, unclear expectations, surveillance without oversight, and institutions that step back the moment conflict appears, the worker eventually discovers that professionalism alone cannot create safety.

Which leaves us with the same question that Claudia Jones raised generations ago:

Why are the problems of the worker still treated as invisible?