Nannying Isn't Like Parenting

Some days, it's harder.
Obviously, I'm not saying that parenting is easy. It's not. You are responsible not only for keeping an infant alive, but for guiding them and forming them into a decent, upstanding human being who is a productive member of society.  However, with parenting, as the parent, YOU make the rules. You decide how to discipline and encourage your child. You decide what he can and cannot have to eat. You decide what his daily schedule should be, and if he should even have a schedule at all.
Nannying is all about following those rules and creating a consistent care environment for the child(ren). Even if you find yourself in serious disagreement with how the parents choose to, for example, discipline their child, it's not up to you to change what happens, it's up to you to continue doing it anyway.
Little Guy, like most 17-month-olds, is very curious and very big on pushing boundaries. More and more frequently, I find him sticking his nose (or, to be more accurate, his finger) where it doesn't belong. If I were the one deciding how to enforce boundaries and discipline LG, after the first time he touched something he wasn't supposed to, I would give him a firm "NO" and move his hand off of and away from the object. If he were to try again, it would result in a quick slap on the hand and another firm "NO." Past childcare experiences have taught me that this is a quick and effective way to enforce to a child in the one-word stage of speech development what he can and cannot do. However, because I'm not the one making the rules here, when things like this happen, I'm supposed to tell him "We don't touch [object]" and move him away from whatever it is. If it happens again, I repeat what I said earlier and tell him "time out," at which point I put him in his crib for a minute and a half. When I go to get him out, I tell him, "I know you wanted to [offending action], but we don't do that." In my experience so far, it has been wholly ineffective, especially since putting LG in his crib just results in his holding onto the guardrail and jumping up and down on the mattress. So much for punishment, huh?
I also maintain that nannying can be harder than parenting because it can be tough to make a judgement call when the parents aren't around. Recently, LG has been demanding Cheerios at lunch and refusing to eat his daily meal of veggies, yogurt, and peanut butter on crackers with a banana. When he's finished with a particular portion of his meal, LG is suppose to wave his had at the food and say "All done." Many days, he'll do this when he hasn't eaten anything yet, and then turn his head away from the spoon and yell "CHEEOS" over and over again. The first time this happened, after forty-five minutes, I gave in and gave him a handful of Cheerios because I didn't want K and N to think I was starving their child. When I summarized the day, I mentioned the lunch incident, and said that I wasn't sure what to do there because giving him Cheerios would teach him that if you complain and demand enough, you'll eventually get your way, but I also didn't want him to starve. They agreed, until about a week later when they said they'd thought about what I'd said and decided that it might be better if he doesn't eat anything if he refuses what is offered to him (I suppose this is the one instance so far where the nanny's logic has prevailed).
There are a million more examples I can come up with, but for me, what it boils down to is that nannying is like parenting, but sometimes harder.

It is worth noting that in my case, I am with LG for almost all of his waking hours. He gets up at 6:30am; I arrive (and his parents leave) at 8am. His parents arrive home (and I leave) at 6pm, and he goes to bed at 7pm. Yes, they're with him all weekend, but the 50 hours I'm with him during the week is more than the time they have with him on Saturdays and Sundays. I almost feel like I know their child's needs better than they do.