Nadya “Octomom” Suleman fired her free nannies, said Vicki Hyman in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Suleman told TV therapist Dr. Phil McGraw—who arranged to have the non-profit Angels in Waiting service care for Suleman’s kids—that she let the nannies go because she thought they were “just waiting for me to make a mistake.” And according to the nannies, she did.
The Angels in Waiting wasted no time filing complaints with California’s Child Protective Services, said Elizabeth Snead in the Los Angeles Times. Three complaints, to be precise, about security problems in the home where Suleman plans to raise her octuplets and her other kids. But Suleman says it was the nannies who were the problem, “accusing them of unprofessional and unethical behavior, of frightening her about child abduction, setting her up to fail and not empowering her.”
“Clearly there was some ongoing tension,” said Jennifer Wolf in About.com. But the dispute doesn’t reflect well on Suleman, even though she is replacing the fired caregivers with a new team. “The bottom line is that unless the children were somehow in danger (which I doubt), Child Protective Services will expect her to have been able to put those issues aside for the sake of her kids.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.