Au pair - can they screw up simple tasks
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Anonymous
| We need an au pair to drive kids (8 & 11 y.o.) to school, pick them up, and play with them for 1 hour. That's it. No cleaning, no play dates, no reading. Sounds simple, but I've heard enough horror stories to wonder whether we can assume that any au pair can handle this. |
Anonymous
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I’d get a local college kid before I got an au pair for this. We have had tons of luck finding that with kids similar age.
We had au pairs for many years, but once the kids were in school all day it just wasn’t worth dealing with one. |
Anonymous
| You need like two hours of care a day and want to have a stranger from a foreign country in your home for just THAT? Sort out the morning and hire a college kid for afternoons. |
Anonymous
| It depends on the person, OP. My neighbors have had au-pairs for years and it always seems to go well. My friends tried to hire college students for their tween, but the problem is that they always left on very short notice and then they had to scramble. YMMV. |
Anonymous
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Do not take on the nightmare of an au pair for these simple tasks that you can find someone else to do! We had a neighbors au pair from Austria (so should be a great driver) back up on to the hood of our car and then lie and deny it, even though she knew her boss and our house had rings. It was about $6k in damage bc she backed up hard and then kept going - a Tahoe on a Porsche.
We stupidly decided to get an au pair and before we fired her, some of the issues were not waking up to take the youngest to preschool, so she missed her entire half day program, forgetting to pick up kids multiple times, driving the wrong way on a one way street, etc. I constantly had to ask her to please at least put her own dirty dishes in the sink. She constantly used the cc i have her for things for the kids (entry fee at a weekly lesson, etc) for personal things including Ubers at 4am on work nights. She was incapable of cleaning up any mess she made. Our cleaning person finally asked if she could skip her room bc it was so disgusting, and this was a new room in a new build, so no one had ever used the room or furniture before. It was terrible! Imagine hiring someone and then having it hang over you every day while you were working bc you had zero confidence that your children would actually be dropped off or picked up. Dont even get me started on how hard it was to fire her. The Au Pair company pushed back at every complaint we had and basically led us on until we got past the point where we could have rematched without paying the approx $8k in initial fees. It also turned out that she didn’t actually have any of the childcare experience the au pair company claimed she did. We pushed them on this to try to get some of our placement fee back but there were so many disclaimers and protections for them in the contract that it would have gone nowhere. I wouldn’t get another au pair for anything. |
Anonymous
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The only person I know who had au pairs had an experience with the last one that was so traumatizing she quit her corporate job during a buyout round. She wouldn't say what happened. I hope it wasn't sexual abuse. My guess was the au pair was hitting or threatening her younger kid. Until that last one, there weren't problems.
That plus the fact I took night rec Russian language classes with a Dutch au pair (at the B-CC HS building). She had to quit because her employers couldn't spare her. All the terms of her au pair stay were violated according to the few brief conversations I had with her. I think it's an exploitative program. I would go with locals if possible. |
Anonymous
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If you take on an Au pair and part of her duties are driving, you need to screen really really hard for someone with driving experience. Ours caused thousands of dollars of damage to our car, despite her claiming she had solid driving experience.
Yes a competent Au pair could do the tasks you want. But it sounds like you are underestimating the emotional load that an Au pair can bring. I did it one time, I’d quit by job before I hire another one. And she wasn’t terrible! I just underestimated how much work it would be to manage a clingy 21 year old foreigner in my home for a year. |
Anonymous
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new poster here
I'm actually very surprised that other posters have found it so easy to find reliable college students to take this type of job. Do you live very close to a college? What type of rate do you pay? Does the college use your car, or their own to transport the kids to activities? Have their been issues with schedules-for example if the college student's spring break is a different week than your kid's spring break? Or the fact that a lot of colleges end in early May, but elementary schools go through early-mid June... |
Anonymous
That should have said "Does the college STUDENT use your car..." |
Anonymous
I'm confused about the bolded. Didn't you make sure she was awake to care for your child before leaving for work? Who was caring for her between your departure and when they were supposed to leave for school? |
Anonymous
| I think you could have trouble with driving skills, language skills, health, boyfriends/girlfriends, food, lots of things. But some Au pairs are great. They are expensive for what you need though. |
Anonymous
Agreed. I live in an area that is mostly only accessible by car and not very close to any college. I have never had luck finding college students to babysit. |
Anonymous
Then high school student. Even better. You’ll build up your roster of babysitters. You could hire 3 different ones so there’s always a backup, and you would still save money over an au pair. |
Anonymous
No, reliable college kids are nearly impossible to find. |
Anonymous
High school students rarely babysit these days. They’re busy with competitive activities and studying for their AP courses. The bar to get into decent colleges is very high, and much harder than a generation ago. Some of you guys are delusional!!! |