With the attentiveness of a mother, Jodi Roderick gently stroked the back of 6-month-old Elizabeth Cross, who lay on a quilt amid the suburban elegance of The Claremont Club.
Roderick's blue smock, displaying an embroidered antique pram, testified to her calling. She is a student at the American Nanny College, in Claremont and Montclair. As part of the college's learning laboratory, she and 10 other students care for the infants of parents who drop off their children before swimming, playing tennis or exercising at the club.
By September, Roderick, a graduate of Redlands High School, will have completed her three-month course. And then, she said, she hopes to become a full-time, live-in nanny.
"All the girls here love children. This is just an opportunity to learn to love them professionally," said Roderick, 19, as she baby-sat in the club's day-care center.
Nanny schools across America are training women, and even a few men, to fill the growing child-care needs of not only the wealthy, but of working professionals.
"It's an anthropological experiment. We're bringing a British idea to America, and it's an idea whose time has come," said Beverly P. Benjamin, who founded the American Nanny College six years ago in Claremont, when only a handful of nanny schools existed in the United States.
Now more than 50 educational institutions offer nanny training.
A company that runs bartender schools last year--in an oddly American twist--bought a Beverly Hills nanny school, which has since relocated to Van Nuys. Furthermore, Benjamin said, the operator of a truck-driving school has expressed interest in getting into the booming business.
"There's a tremendous demand for in-home child care," said Sandra Lewis, director of the Nanny Institute of Beverly Hills. "But it just hasn't been a part of our American culture for people to go to school to learn how to care for children in the home."
But acceptance of nanny training has grown, she said, and the American nanny movement has matured in the process. Now, Lewis said, classes at her school have expanded from 25 students a year to about 500 a year. Claremont's American Nanny College has trained over 200 nannies and two mannies, the male counterpart.
In California, there are also nanny schools in Huntington Beach and Sacramento.
