Rachel Carrell

CEO of Koru Kids | Follow for daily posts on parenting and work life | 🎤 Keynote speaker | ex-McKinsey, Rhodes Scholar, Oxford DPhil | 👶 3x Mum

I am the CEO of Koru Kids, which helps parents have some 'easy days' in their week. 

Modern parenting is so exhausting, and so many parents are doing it without the 'village' we all need.

As a mum of 3 myself, I founded Koru Kids to help.  

Our vetted, trained nannies can pick your children up from school/nursery, look after them at home while you work, give them snacks and meals, and play games.  You arrive home to a calm home and a lovely family evening.
Koru Kids nannies are available throughout the UK, and can work part time, full time, or after school hours.  
It's super easy to get your nanny via Koru Kids, as we help you every step of the way.  
Parents describe the experience as 'easy', 'seamless', and 'life-changing'!

We're multi-award-winning, and have so far provided over 4 million hours of childcare to 15,000 families. 

Previously I was CEO of DrThom, a healthcare company which I grew to 1.3 million paying users in 3 countries.  Before that I spent six years at McKinsey.   I have a DPhil from Oxford, where I was a Rhodes Scholar, am a WEF Young Global Leader, and have been awarded 'Best Business Woman in Technology' and 'Inspirational Mother' awards.   

To find out whether Koru Kids is right for you, sign up and search for free at www.korukids.co.uk

Koru Kids is on a mission to profoundly improve the wellbeing of a million families in the next 5 years. We're doing this by building new childcare infrastructure for the world, underpinned by our software, data and content. We provide innovative services like 'nanny share', in which a single nanny looks after children from 2 families at once. Each family pays less, the nanny gets paid more, and the children get a friend to play with. Brilliant!

Innovation in childcare is desperately needed. Did you know that most families with children spend as much on childcare as they do on their mortgage? Or that the average cost of a full time nanny in Central London is £37,000? (Remember, that comes out of your post-tax income). Did you know that nurseries aren't much cheaper than that, if you have two children? Did you know that many nurseries shut for summer holidays, or only do half days, and that if your child is sick they can't go for the next 48 hours?  

If you're a parent, you probably knew all of that, plus much more about the pain of sorting out your childcare.

Koru Kids was founded to solve these problems. The mission brings together several things I care deeply about: the critical importance of positive early childhood experiences; the need for real choices for women in the workplace; and the potential of great tech to solve market failures. 

We help thousands of families every day in London and we're backed by some of the best investors in Europe. We've won a bunch of awards.  And we are JUST GETTING STARTED.

If your child is under 10, you have a golden opportunity to AVOID the worst of smartphone damage!
Here's how:

I have an 11 year old, which means I'm living through the crest of an anti- smartphone wave.
At my daughter's school, virtually all the kids older than her have smartphones. 
But in HER YEAR, hardly anyone has one.
This is because her school has banned them - starting THIS YEAR. 
They're not even allowed them in their bags.

So in my daughter's year, the kids have dumbphones. 
To stay in touch, they email each other and do Google meets!
 
I can see this wave moving fast across London schools.  
I'm in a huge anti-smartphone group and hearing school after school doing what ours has done. 
The sudden change means that childhoods will be completely different for children older than 10-12, vs. those younger than 10-12.

And what THAT means, is that if you have a child younger than 10, you just need to hold out for a couple more years and your child will start secondary school in a completely different cultural environment.

If you're having these conversations, you need some ammunition. 
Below I've made a carousel with everything I learned from having discussions with my daughter for years as she begged for a smartphone. 

I’d love to know – what’s happening on this in your world?

🔄 Repost to spread the word, and follow Rachel Carrell for more like this. In my day job I run Koru Kids, where you can find fantastic UK nannies for all day or after school. Sign up to my newsletter here https://lnkd.in/espktxSQ, and find my all-time most-shared parenting posts at https://lnkd.in/eDfkiPc6

CEO of Koru Kids | Follow for daily posts on parenting and work life | Ex-McKinsey, Rhodes Scholar, Oxford DPhil | 👶 3x Mum

Smartphones

After 10 years running Koru Kids and parenting 3 kids,
here are the 28 cheat codes I wish someone had given me.

Family life should sustain and restore you, not leave you drained and exhausted.
With the right systems and mindset this is actually possible!

Below is my collection of 28 things I've learned that I find actually helpful.

A few that surprised me early on:
💠  Behaviour changes faster when adults change first. 
This is because children are borrowing our regulation before they build their own.  If you're having a problem, examine yourself first.

💠 Consistency beats intensity. 
One calm, predictable response repeated for weeks does more than a perfect reaction once. As I often repeat: be boring.

💠 Repair carries more weight than getting it right.
No parent is perfect, and that's not what children need anyway. They need parents who come back, name what went wrong, and reconnect. Aim for that.

As you'll see, a lot of them are about small things and repair.
A great system leaves room for you to be *not perfect all the time*.
Together, these things make your family life calmer and more restorative.

To learn more about this sort of thing, join 66,000 others at my newsletter here https://lnkd.in/espktxSQ!  You can also find my all-time most-shared parenting posts at https://lnkd.in/eDfkiPc6

Being easy to work with is such an underrated skill.

And this INSANE chart from the FT this week shows exactly what it's worth!

The chart shows employment and real wages vs. how much jobs rely on mathematical skills vs social skills, indexed to 1980 = 100.

The story is clear:  

💠'Social skills' jobs have boomed since 1980, 'maths’ jobs haven’t.  

💠Roles that combine both maths and social skills do best.

💠AND the social side is doing more of the lifting than most of us were taught to expect.

To put it another way: 

In 1980, being great with numbers and not great with people paid better than the reverse.

That has fully flipped!

Even in tech and quantitative fields, the winners are the people who can coordinate, persuade, collaborate, and solve messy human problems, not just write elegant code.

With AI rapidly flattening the value of purely technical execution, ‘being easy to work with’ is increasingly essential. 

This is something I think about every day at Koru Kids.

We spend a lot of time supporting our nannies to help children:
- recognise what they’re feeling
- calm their own nervous systems
- repair after conflict
- practise turn-taking, negotiation, and empathy 

Partly because it matters for happiness and relationships (that's reason enough!) but also because this is what the future values.

🔄 Repost to share with others, and follow Rachel Carrell for more like this. Sign up to my newsletter here https://lnkd.in/espktxSQ, and find my all-time most-shared parenting posts at https://lnkd.in/eDfkiPc6

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