Who Do You Trust With Your Kids?

Guest bloggers have been traveling the road about children lately. In that spirt I thought it would be interesting to find out what an Au Pair is and why somebody would go that route. Heather has explained it very well. I am certain you will find it interesting.

Au Pair
by: Heather Rhode

Families have so many options when it comes to providing child care for their children. The options include stay at home mom or dad, enlisting the help of another relative or friend willing to watch your children, in-home daycare, center based day care, hiring a nanny, babysitting cooperative, hosting an au pair. I’m sure there are even more options, but those are the major choices parents are faced with when deciding on childcare.

I can’t reasonably speak of any of the options except for hosting an au pair, as my husband and I have hosted an au pair for over four years. I thought it would be helpful to outline some of the common questions my husband and I receive and also a mom’s perspective on what it’s like to host an au pair.

Before I begin, I want to clarify that an au pair can be a young man or a young woman. I will refer to the au pair as “she” throughout the rest of the article as we have never hosted a male au pair and 98% of au pairs are young women.

So what exactly IS an au pair anyway? Isn’t that the French word for nanny?

Many people erroneously confuse an au pair with a nanny. The word "Au Pair" is a French term, which means "on par" or "equal to", denoting living on an equal basis in a reciprocal, caring relationship between the host family and the children. An au pair will typically be a young woman and sometimes a young man from a foreign country who chooses to help look after the children of a host family and provide light housekeeping. The au pair is given room and board and is typically paid a weekly "pocket-money" salary. Au pairs generally stay with their host family for one year. One major difference is that an au pair is a young adult from another country who lives in your home and watches your children for a set number of hours in exchange for a weekly stipend. A nanny typically already lives in the country and works as many hours the family needs. Sometimes the nanny will live with the family, oftentimes not.

Whoa, stop the presses….she lives with you?

Yes, she lives full time with us. We are fortunate that most of our basement is finished and she has her own rooms and her own bathroom, separate from the rest of the family. The only common area is the laundry room and I try to stay out of there at all costs! The au pair agency we work with (as I’m sure is the case with all au pair agencies) requires that the au pair have at the very minimum their own sleeping area. Many host families have finished basement areas where the au pair stays; it allows the host family and the au pair more privacy.
She eats dinner with us most nights but usually when she’s off work she will attend school as per her visa requirements, go out with friends, or relax in her room. As you'd expect from a 20 something young woman, she is not interested in spending THAT much time with us, so most of the time, we hardly know she's around.
Sounds fancy, you must be rich!

Well no. Not hardly. Many host families are quite well off, or so it seems on the surface. We are actually one of the “poorer” host families. But we’ve come to find that as long as we treat our au pair with respect, love, and as a member of our family, the fact that she doesn’t have a two year old luxury SUV to carouse around in or a 52” flat screen TV in her room hardly seems to matter.

The au pair program is pricey. It’s definitely not the most budget friendly option out of the ones I mentioned above. The annual program fee cost is $7,195. The application fee is $350. The au pair’s weekly stipend is $195.75. The flight from Newark (where they first arrive for orientation) to where we live is $430. Also we must pay up to $500 per year for the au pair to complete her educational requirements. So the very minimum cost is $18,654 per year. We give our au pairs some additional perks. Our au pairs have their own car which we maintain and give a $75 per month gas allowance. She also has her own cell phone which costs around $65 per month. If we’re going on a family vacation, we take the au pair along with us and give her the time off and don’t charge it against her two week vacation allowance. This year we are not going on a family vacation, so we are giving our au pair a plane ticket and a couple of days off to fly wherever she wants. Then there’s the extra food, water, heat, electricity that is involved with having another adult live in the home.

That sounds expensive. Why not save some money and just do day care?

We sacrifice a lot to be able to afford this program. We feel that this is the best and only option for our children. They get personalized one on one attention all day, if they have activities or school, the au pair can take them and pick them up. Also we don’t have to rouse the children out of bed at 6:30 and rush through breakfast, get them ready and drop them off at day care, then hope we can get out of work in time to pick them up or else incur outrageous charges.

So you get unlimited child care, you never need to enlist the help of family or hire a babysitter?

Completely untrue. Au pairs are only allowed to work 45 hours per week. You can schedule the au pair’s hours however is amicable for her and your family, but she has to have at least one full weekend off per month.

In our case, since my husband and I both work full time, we use our 45 hours Monday through Friday. If we want to go out after work or on the weekends, we have to find a babysitter or call in favors to friends and family. Lucky for our au pairs, they have every single weekend off to do as they please; a rarity in the au pair world.

Does she clean your house and cook your dinners too you lucky girl?

The au pair is required to do light housekeeping as it pertains to the children and is required to maintain her own living areas. So for example, if the kids do an arts and crafts project, it is her responsibility to pick that up (or better yet, have the kids pick it up and she supervises!). As a member of the household, our au pairs will help clean up common areas, like the kitchen, putting away dishes and occasional vacuuming, but no, she is not a housekeeper or a chef.

As part of the cultural exchange, our au pairs will occasionally cook meals with us that they enjoy in their home country.

How do you pick your au pairs? Do you place an ad in newspapers around the world?

People ask us this all of the time – I can’t make this stuff up – they give us far more credit than we deserve! We actually utilize an agency that does the leg work for us. We pay them $7,195 per year, and in exchange they help us find an au pair, get her paperwork in order, get her here, and provide support along the way. There are dozens of au pair agencies out there; it’s really a growing industry. I suppose one could go out and find an au pair without the support or help of an agency, but that thought kind of scares us. I mean not only is this person living in your home, driving your cars, but more importantly, they are watching your children while you are not home. It is worth the money to us to ensure we are getting a prescreened qualified person. Plus I wouldn’t even begin to know how to get the necessary paperwork processed and filed.

How is it having another woman watch your children while you’re at work?

My husband’s perspective will be far different than mine, but for me, at first it was very very difficult. My daughter was only 2 months old when our first au pair, Camila, arrived from Brazil. How jealous I was to watch this other woman bond with my newborn baby. I cried about the fact that I had to go to work while this other person went to “Mommy and Me” classes with my child and I was inconsolable the first time that my daughter called Camila “mama”. There were many times when my daughter cried and I just would not do. She wanted her au pair.

After a couple of months though, I realized that since I do have to work, it was preferable to have a caregiver that so obviously cares for and loves my daughter, and to see that love and caring reciprocated by my daughter toward the au pair is truly a good situation. I enjoy it now and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Any other advice for someone considering the program?

Do your homework. If possible, talk to other families that either have, or have had au pairs and find out their experience. If you decide the program is for you, take your time interviewing. Ask questions. Ask questions you think aren’t your business or are “too embarrassing”. It matters. This person is going to live in your home for a full year at minimum, and if you aren’t both up front at the beginning, I can promise you at the very least, you’ll have constant problem and its likely things won’t work out and you’ll be without childcare, looking for a replacement au pair. Make sure the expectations are clear from the beginning and if possible, put it in writing so there is no mistake.

Once your au pair arrives, treat her with love and respect. She is NOT AN EMPLOYEE. She is a member of your family. Treat her as such. When she arrives, make a big deal at the airport. Have your children make a sign for her, bring balloons and flowers. Make her feel special. She’s scared and nervous so do everything you can for the first couple of weeks to make her feel at home.

These small gestures of kindness will be reciprocated in spades. I promise. I’ve seen wonderful au pairs treated like dirt by their host families and it’s so sad. There’s really no reason at all for it.

So in conclusion, this program is definitely not for everyone. It’s not even for most people. But the friendships and relationships we’ve formed over the years are priceless. We still keep in regular contact with our former au pairs, and our first au pair that I earlier mentioned, still lives in the U.S. and we see her every couple of months. I truly cannot imagine obtaining any other form of childcare; it’s perfect for us and for our children.