The controversy surrounding Rob Lowe and his nanny’s allegations that he abused her during her employment with his family raises eyebrows not only for the lewd allegations coming from both sides, but also for the complicated dynamics of employing caretakers in your household.

Allowing what amounts is a perfect stranger come into your home, take care of your kids is a daunting thought. Having a nanny or babysitter in your house for extended periods of time can certainly be awkward, even if your nanny is like Mary Poppins. I cannot think of another situation where an employee comes to work only to find her boss dressed in pajamas without any makeup. (If you work in such a place, don’t tell me; I’ll be jealous).

Letting someone else take care of your children, only if for defined periods of time, takes a measure of intestinal fortitude. Who else is going to see how much you spent at Target in one day?

Certainly not your husband. But the nanny knows all. I try not to get too personal with my sitter. If I’m all decked out in workout clothes and she asks if I’m going to the gym, I simply skirt the issue. It’s none of her business how I spend my time when she’s with my son. (However, I’m sure the wet nail polish when I arrive home at the end of the day is a dead giveaway.) There are boundaries to any employee/ employer relationship, and the nanny-mother/father one is no exception.

While there’s no way to totally exclude your caregiver from your personal troubles (especially hard if you’re a very private person like myself), there are just some things that don’t need to be shared between my sitters and me. Even if I came home one day from a bad day at work, I wouldn’t divulge just how stressed out I was. I like to keep things to myself, and I think my caregiver should as well. I’m all for sharing productive advice and tips, but there are other things such as this (I cannot bring myself to write about it again), that I think my sitter could have been silent about. That, along with the fact that last week she asked me for a considerable sum of money to help her with a down payment on her condo. Contrary to what she may think, I’m not a bank.

There are times where my sitter crosses the lines of our work relationship, but usually we keep to our cordial selves. Not only am I private, but I’m also a demanding person, and one that has certain expectations of my caregiver. Like any money she asks me for should be for something she’s doing with my kid, not for her livelihood.

The nanny-mommy relationship isn’t exactly like how your relationship might be with your boss in the office which I think makes it easy for such common sense etiquette to get lost. You can get really comfortable really fast with someone who’s washing your kids’ dirty laundry.

And there are times, unfortunately, like the Rob Lowe scandal, where things get really out of hand. It’s hard to really know what went wrong there. Was he “a perv“? Did she lie? Who knows. I can’t fathom a situation where a professional relationship like one with my caregiver would ever be that out of control.

But what’s keeping me up at night is when the little things that I consider socially unnacceptable, but not ethically unnacceptable, happen in my household. If those lines are crossed, is it reflective on such caregiver’s ability to care for your kid? Or do you let it go, because well, at the end of the day (even if you’re a good looking celebrity) we’re all human, and we all have our flaws?