Communication & Culture — Setting Expectations Across the Gap

The candidate forms her model of how this family works in the first 30 days. Habits established in week one become permanent by week four. Course-correcting at month three is 3× harder than addressing the same issue at week two.

Five specific things that get fixed in the first 30 days:

• Daily routine and its boundaries. When the day starts, when it ends, what happens in between, what the candidate does on her own initiative vs what she checks with the family on.
• Communication channels. WeChat vs in-person vs end-of-day debrief. Which channel is used for what kind of message. How quickly each side responds.
• Feedback culture. Whether feedback comes daily, weekly, monthly. Whether it comes in writing, in conversation, or via the agency. Whether the candidate is invited to give feedback to the family.
• Cultural negotiables and non-negotiables. Food, screen time, discipline, religious observance, gift-giving, photography of the children, social-media discretion. Which are flexible, which are not.
• Trust signals. Whether the family trusts the candidate with keys, with cash for groceries, with unsupervised time with the children. The candidate is calibrating these signals constantly in month one.

Most families assume the first 30 days are about logistics. They are about logistics — but they are also about the relationship architecture that makes month four through month twenty-four work or not work. The day 7 and day 30 check-ins covered in the hiring process page are where the relationship architecture gets explicitly designed.

Food is the single most common source of expat-family-and-nanny conflict in Shanghai. Three structural reasons.

First, the candidate's food framework is Chinese-household: stir-fry, soup, rice, vegetables and meat that are cooked through, congee for breakfast, more cooked vegetables and less raw salad. The expat-family food framework is often quite different — yogurt and granola at breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pasta or roasted-protein for dinner, raw vegetables and salads as a side.

Second, the candidate has her own framework of what is healthy for children — generally favoring warm cooked food over cold or raw food, generally favoring more frequent smaller meals, generally favoring traditional remedies (warm water, herbal soups) for minor childhood ailments.

Third, the family and the candidate often have only partial overlap in what they consider "a normal meal," which produces small daily frictions that compound.

How to address it in the first 30 days:

• Walk through the kitchen on day one. Show her the pantry. Explain what the children eat, what they don't, what's a treat, what's an everyday food, what's a meal-of-last-resort. Write down the staple breakfast and the staple lunch in both languages.
• Show her how to make 2–3 family staples. A pasta sauce, a roasted protein, a salad dressing. Be specific. Recipe cards in Chinese help; YouTube/Bilibili videos help more.
• Be honest about whether you want her to cook. Some families want her to handle all meals; some want her to handle child meals only; some want her to not cook at all (the family handles dinner). All three work; the problem is when the family doesn't decide and signals shift week to week.
• Acknowledge her food framework explicitly. "In our family we eat raw vegetables — we know that's different from how you'd cook for your own family." This signals respect and pre-empts the implicit judgment.
• Decide on snacks and treats clearly. This is where most low-grade conflict lives. "The children can have one piece of candy after dinner; otherwise no candy during the day" is a usable rule. "Try not to give too much sugar" is not.
• Don't litigate every meal. If she cooked something the children liked but it wasn't what you would have made, let it go. The placement is not about converging on perfect alignment; it is about staying in the workable middle.

Discipline and screen time are where families have the strongest views and the candidate has the most baked-in habits. Mismatch here produces the most visible conflict.

Discipline:

Western expat families often use time-out, redirection, "using your words," and explicit emotional labeling ("I can see you're frustrated"). Chinese-household discipline tradition leans more toward direct verbal correction, shame as a tool, and sometimes physical correction in older traditions (much less common in 2026 among professional candidates, but the cultural memory exists).

What to say at day one:

• "In our family we don't shame the children. If you need to correct, please do it privately — pull her aside, not in front of others."
• "In our family we don't hit. Not even a small tap. If the children are out of control, please bring them to me or the other parent."
• "In our family we use time-out for serious behavior — five minutes in her bedroom with the door open. Here is how it works..."

Be specific. "Don't be too strict" is not actionable. "Don't hit, don't shame, use time-out for X behavior" is.

Screen time:

The candidate's own framework on screen time is often more permissive than the family's. Children's iPad and phone time is socially normal in Chinese households; the explicit screen-time-rationing framework many expat families bring is less common.

What to say at day one:

• "Children can have 30 minutes of iPad time per day, on the iPad in the living room only, not the bedroom. No iPad before school or after 18:00."
• "No phone for the children. Your phone is your phone — we trust you to manage your own phone use during the day, but please don't let the children play games on your phone."
• "On weekends we may allow more screen time — we'll let you know in the moment."

The candidate's own phone use is its own conversation. Most families set a default: minimal personal phone use during active childcare hours, normal use during the child's nap or independent play. This is reasonable; agency-mediated standards generally align here.

What does not work: setting rules that the candidate is supposed to enforce against the children, when the family does not enforce the same rules on weekends. The candidate will mirror what the family does, not what the family says.

The candidate is in your home. She sees what you eat, what you fight about, what your children do, what you talk about, what your apartment looks like before guests arrive. The privacy norms around this are different from a Western context where most household help is part-time and external.

What to set up in the first 30 days:

• Photographs of the children. Explicit: no photographs of the children on her social media — WeChat moments, Xiaohongshu, Douyin — without written permission from both parents. This is the single most-violated norm in Shanghai nanny employment. Address it directly at signing, again on day one, again at the day 7 check-in.
• WeChat sharing of family information. No sharing of the family's address, schedule, school names, or daily routine in casual WeChat conversations with other ayi or in WeChat groups. Address it directly.
• Visitors to the home. No personal visitors without prior agreement. For live-in, occasional visits to her own room on her rest day are usually fine but should be agreed.
• What she sees of your private life. Some discretion is implicit — your arguments, your finances, your medical conversations are not topics for her to share. But it is worth saying once, gently, on day one.
• What you see of her private life. Reciprocally — her family situation, her financial pressures, her own children's issues — are not topics for you to share with her other employers (in WeChat groups especially) or to ask about beyond what she volunteers.

The candidate's privacy interests are also real and often overlooked by families. She is staying in your home (if live-in); she is on call for many hours; she is a person with her own life that exists outside the placement. Asking about her family briefly is friendly; pressing for details she didn't volunteer is intrusion.

The contract essentials page covers the formal confidentiality clause. The cultural framing here is what makes the clause work in practice.

Face (面子, miànzi) matters in any Chinese workplace relationship, and Shanghai household employment is no exception. Direct criticism of the kind Western workplaces tolerate — "this isn't right, do it this way" — often produces a defensive reaction that ends the relationship rather than fixing the problem.

The framework that works:

• Give feedback in private. Never in front of the children. Never in front of other family members or guests. A 5-minute conversation in the kitchen, with the door closed.
• Open with what's working. "The way you handled X today was really good. I have one thing I want to talk through about Y."
• Frame the problem as a family preference, not a personal failure. "In our family we do X this way. I should have explained it better — let me show you what I mean."
• Be specific about what to do, not just what not to do. "Please put the dishes in the dishwasher within 10 minutes of finishing the meal" is actionable. "Please be tidier in the kitchen" is not.
• Acknowledge the bigger picture. "This is a small thing in the context of how well the rest of the day went."
• End with a forward-looking statement. "Let's try that tomorrow. If it doesn't work for you, please tell me and we'll figure it out together."

What to avoid:

• Public correction. Even mild.
• Comparing her to other candidates or other ayi ("your predecessor did it this way").
• Sarcasm. It does not translate.
• Writing critical feedback in WeChat where she can re-read it. Spoken feedback evaporates; written feedback compounds.
• Letting frustration accumulate to a single big conversation. Small course-corrections every day are far easier than one large one at month three.

The candidate, in turn, will rarely give the family direct critical feedback. She may signal indirectly — a slight delay, a forgotten task, a quiet day after a misalignment. Watch for the signals and pre-empt the conversation. "I noticed yesterday seemed harder than usual — is there anything I should have done differently?" produces information; "is everything OK?" almost never does.

A working set of Mandarin phrases for common moments. These are intentionally simple — the candidate does not need to hear elaborate Mandarin from you; she needs to hear the right phrase delivered with intent.

Welcome on day one:

• 欢迎，很高兴你来到我们家。 (Huānyíng, hěn gāoxìng nǐ lái dào wǒmen jiā.) — "Welcome, we're so glad you're here."

Asking for clarification:

• 麻烦你再说一遍，谢谢。 (Máfán nǐ zài shuō yī biàn, xièxie.) — "Please say that again, thank you."

Giving small corrections (private):

• 我有一件小事想跟你说。 (Wǒ yǒu yī jiàn xiǎo shì xiǎng gēn nǐ shuō.) — "I have one small thing I'd like to discuss with you."

Thanking her for an extra effort:

• 今天真的辛苦你了，谢谢。 (Jīntiān zhēn de xīnkǔ nǐ le, xièxie.) — "You worked hard today, thank you."

Acknowledging that something didn't go well:

• 这是我们家的方式，我应该早点告诉你。 (Zhè shì wǒmen jiā de fāngshì, wǒ yīnggāi zǎo diǎn gàosu nǐ.) — "This is how our family does it; I should have told you earlier."

Asking about the child's day at end-of-day debrief:

• 今天她怎么样？吃饭吃得好吗？ (Jīntiān tā zěnme yàng? Chīfàn chī de hǎo ma?) — "How was she today? Did she eat well?"

Sending her home early:

• 今天不用做晚饭，你早点回去吧。 (Jīntiān bù yòng zuò wǎnfàn, nǐ zǎo diǎn huíqù ba.) — "No need to cook dinner today, you can leave early."

Discussing the Chinese New Year red envelope:

• 春节的红包我们已经准备好了，会在你回家之前给你。 (Chūnjié de hóngbāo wǒmen yǐjīng zhǔnbèi hǎo le, huì zài nǐ huí jiā zhī qián gěi nǐ.) — "We've prepared the Spring Festival red envelope; we'll give it to you before you travel home."

Apologizing for a mistake:

• 对不起，是我没说清楚。 (Duìbuqǐ, shì wǒ méi shuō qīngchu.) — "Sorry, that was on me — I didn't explain it clearly."

The full set of scripts in the interview kit PDF includes phonetic transcription and audio links. For families who do not speak any Mandarin, working from the phonetic transcription is fine; the candidate will recognize the intent even from imperfect delivery.

Most communication issues are best resolved directly between the family and the candidate. A small set of situations are better handled through the placing agency or the family-side advisor.

Escalate to the agency when:

• The candidate has stopped engaging with feedback. If you have addressed an issue directly, calmly, and specifically three times and the behavior has not changed, the agency layer can re-engage her with the agency's authority.
• There is a serious cultural misunderstanding that you cannot resolve in real time. The agency's bilingual point of contact can mediate where direct conversation has stalled.
• The candidate has raised a concern about the family that you want a third party in the loop on. Common one: she feels uncomfortable about how a household task is being framed and wants a neutral channel to surface it.
• A safety question has come up. Anything involving the children's safety, the candidate's safety, or a health emergency.

Escalate to the family-side advisor (us) when:

• You want a candid second opinion before raising something with the agency. Some issues are agency-issues; some are family-and-candidate-issues that the agency would inflame.
• The contract terms are in dispute. Severance, notice, bonus structure, termination cause. The advisor can review the contract and walk through the options before you escalate to the agency.
• You are considering ending the placement. Don't do this without a conversation first. The firing and transition page covers what to do if the placement is genuinely not working.
• The day 30 or day 90 check-in surfaces something you want to think through. This is what the check-in cadence is for.

What not to escalate:

• A single bad day. Most placements have them.
• A small irritation that you have not yet addressed directly with the candidate. The agency cannot fix what you have not yet named.
• A non-issue that is really about your own first-month adjustment to having someone in your home. This is real and worth talking through with another expat family or with us, but it does not require an agency intervention.

For a candid walkthrough of where you are with your specific placement, request a consult — 20 minutes is usually enough to surface what's actually going on.