<p>The daughter of a friend of mine was an au pair. She did to improve her French and earn enough money for the second half of the year where she planned to work at a school in Tanzania. She had a great experience and was asked if she could stay longer. I think she was able to take some French classes aimed at au pairs while the kids were in school.</p>
<p>Three of our four au pairs were really good, one wasn’t, and chose to go home early. (Her replacement was amazing and elected to leave her current family in Lexington because they treated her and the other au pair like they treated their maids and gardener.) Ours came through Au Pair in America, and while it wasn’t cheap, it was a lovely luxury. There were a dozen or so other au pairs in our community with this program, and a coordinator who organized get-togethers several times a month – social activities ranging from a trip to the rodeo to ice cream socials. </p>
<p>One of our au pairs came down with appendicitis, and we got to see how good the au pair insurance was – there was a $50 deductible, and it then paid 100% of all remaining charges for her hospitalization, testing, doctors fees, and medications.</p>
<p>We are in europe as I type about to visit with one of our au pairs, who took care of DS #1when he was a year old. He’s almost 28. We had good and not so good experiences with au pairs but overall it was a good experience. Also know of friends whose kids went to europe to be au pairs.</p>
<p>Should clarify, we are visiting our au pair in Berlin. Yes she was great. We loved, have visited and keep in touch with the one from Wales. The ones from England were disasters . The Swede wasnt a good fit with our family.</p>
<p>
Friends of ours had a German aupair. She was the oldest of five kids and treated the kids she was watching like she did her siblings. Which wasn’t very well. One of the kids talked back to her and she got slapped. She was extremely rigid in her rules and the kids hated her. She was asked to leave before her time was up and didn’t want to go home so she was transferred to another family. I feel sorry for that family.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Please – let’s not make these generalizations.</p>
<p>Once when I contacted a nanny agency, the woman asked me, “So – how do you like them? Young? Old? Black? White?” I just stammered.</p>
<p>I found that it is like having an adolescent, an adolescent that you did not have the opportunity to raise! The first of of our two au pairs believed that rules were made to be broken. Not just her house rules (no smoking - she did, or pets - she bought a cat), but the children’s (bedtime - what is that?). Regarding waiting outside with a kindergartener for the school bus, she informed me that Americans treated their children like babies. Because she was a night owl, she slept during the day, including when the kindergartener was home in the afternoon!
Although au pairs do provide flexible in home childcare,they create too many additional headaches.</p>
<p>^^^Totally agree with ksm and others. It’s like having an older teenager in the house. Sometimes it’s good and the au pair is is responsible and treats the job seriously–other times it’s bad. I had good ones and bad ones. I worked at home so I was around, which made it harder for the au pairs to slouch on the job. One of my good au pairs was obsessed with the Louise Woodward case (English au pair who went on trial for the murder of an infant in her care in Boston). The trial was televised in Boston and my au pair was glued to the tv. That didn’t make me rest easy.</p>
<p>The best au pair situations i have seen are where families utilize the au pair for evening or week-end babysitting, pick up and drop off from school and housekeeping duties pertaining to the children. </p>
<p>I saw friends use au pairs and god, it just sounded like such a hassle - to “break in” a new one every year, to have to be mindful of the restrictions on their work hours (difficult with one parent - me - who travels and the other who has an unpredictable on-call schedule). We went with a live-in housekeeper / nanny who was like another grandmother to the kids. I have to say, I had none of the hassles and churn that the au-pair users seemed to have. Having a newfound friend in Norway or Germany didn’t seem worth it to me. </p>
<p>We only needed au pair help for the one year I returned to graduate school in 1992. I chose the most mature candidate from a pool of resumes, a 25-y.o. married schoolteacher from Bratislava. She was delighted that her government finally gave the o.k. for teachers to work as Au Pairs abroad in England or Canada, for one year only, to bring back methods. At home, she and her husband lived on her parent’s pullout living room couch in a 1 BR apartment, so having her own bedroom was a big plus for her. She was clever with educational games with our kids, using only a pack of playing cards. Plastic toys mystified her.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, she became lonely and depressed. Her country of Czechoslovakia split that year into Slovakia and Czech Republic. This was hard for her to process from afar, like a college student away from home whose parents divorce. Since this was all before emails, she’d await letters to make sense of things from her homeland, not easy.</p>
<p>She was much better with children than adults, which I chalked up to her understanding us as “employers” more than family. She didn’t want to spend a moment outside of working hours to relax with us, share a meal, etc. I never really saw her smile or laugh once. But, she was professional and took care of the kids just fine. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, we started with an older, stable nanny type. It took us weeks and many interviews to find her, and we thought she was perfect. She wasn’t live-in, but she lived nearby. It was great until the day she vanished off the face of the Earth, leaving our kids at the daycare, and we were out at a charity event (pre-cellphones). Her husband was coming from the Bahamas; they hadn’t seen each other in a number of years; we knew she was nervous about it. One of two things happened, probably – she took off to avoid seeing him, or he killed her and got away with it. We never figured out which it was, but that sent us into au pair world. (Our space wasn’t appropriate for a live-in nanny, but it was great for an au pair.)</p>
<p>One significant advantage of the au pair arrangement was that it was tax-compliant. It had been very hard to find a permanent nanny who was willing to work on the books.</p>
<p>Those of you who hired au pairs; which agency did you use?</p>
<p>JHS, what an awful experience. She never returned? You don’t know what happened to her at all?</p>
<p>I had the same babysitter for my kids for seven years. (Next door neighbor with a kid the same age as my oldest.) Eventually she decided she wanted to go back to her original profession of cooking. Then I had the nightmare experience of seven babysitters in a year. One of them keeled over dead, thankfully over the weekend, but her daughter called to ask if she had seemed ill. (She had not.) One was great, but got a job teaching. The rest were all bad for different reasons. I finally gave up and quit my job - I’d kind of wanted to anyway. I ended up with some small jobs designing decks, a friend asked me to do a small addition and the next thing I knew I actually was working as much as I wanted to. I’d have considered au pairs, but our first house was much too small.</p>
<p>“Our space wasn’t appropriate for a live-in nanny, but it was great for an au pair.”</p>
<p>Out of curiosity, what’s the difference?</p>
<p>We have a pretty typical 4 bedroom house with master bed/bath and then 3 bedrooms and a hall bath. For the first 2 years, our nanny had the room next to ours and our kids shared a room and then moved into their own rooms. Then, we wound up finishing our basement and created a room, bath and little kitchenette down there (it’s plenty light, so it’s not dungeon-y at all). I agree it’s a luxury to have the space - I don’t have a big house, but it is arranged in such a way that I have the space. </p>
<p>My best friend had one for a year.she was good with the kids but kind of hard to understand. I believe she was from Columbia.</p>
<p>If she was from Columbia and she was hard to understand, it was probably because she was using a lot of words like “reification” and “poststructuralist.”</p>
<p>People from Colombia, on the other hand, sometimes don’t know English well.</p>
<p>Just had dinner with our german au pair. What a delight!! She’s now a psychoanalyst!</p>
<p>Jym, she takes after you!!</p>