Is your AP bored?
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Anonymous
| I feel badly for our AP. She seems really bored. She has several AP friends, but they all seem to work a lot and for families who are not great about giving them a schedule in advance. We have school aged children so only use about 25 hours per week and very rarely a few hours on a weekend. Her friends work 45 hours and for example never seem to know when they will be finished working on a Friday evening so our AP is always waiting around for everyone to get organized to go do something. She wants to plan weekend trips, but again, her friends never know when they are available. Plus, my kids are older so pretty self-sufficient aside from needing rides, food, etc...they want to be with their friends...they like our AP but it is normal for them to prefer their friends over hanging with AP. Anyway, she seems incredibly bored lately. She exercises, takes classes, etc. I don't know what to tell her... |
Anonymous
| Other APs are more her cohort than her friends. Can she go to the library? Use her education credit towards craft classes? Volunteer? Do any of the million things that I would love to do if I only worked 25 hours a week and had no kids? If she's bored it's her own fault. |
Anonymous
| She doesn't learn anything new by being Au pair. My advise for your Au pair is to change the environment-host family, start performing a job in her profession or start real studies in her home country. |
Anonymous
| Your AP should plan to travel and do things on her own instead of always waiting around for her friends. It is not essential to go with others. It takes a certain personality who is comfortable gong about on her own without the need to always have company. She is a co-dependent type of person and does not want to go anywhere unless she is with someone else? |
Anonymous
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No, I don't think our AP is bored.
She works early mornings (6.30 - 8.30am) and is then off until early afternoon (2.30pm). During her time off she goes to the gym, takes classes, does her homework, goes to the library, goes shopping or plans weekend trips. Our current AP is an avid reader who can spend the day holed up in the family room, reading. The previous AP was into photography and spent a lot of her free time on that (planning trips, taking and editing pictures, doing photobooks and I know she was active on a photography forum). She sometimes joins a friend who works mornings for trips to the zoo, the park or the playground - her friend watches one toddler and I think enjoys the adult interaction. After dinner (7.00pm) AP meets her friends, they go to the movies, have coffee or (second for her) dinner. Our kids are still at an age where they need the AP for more than just driving them around - she supervises homework, plays with them, takes them outside, they bake, go swimming, to the zoo or the playground. She usually does two loads of laundry a week (kids' and hers), usually in the afternoons when they don't plan to go anywhere. She may be bored sometimes, when she doesn't have plans for the evenings. Hanging out with us isn't the funnest thing to do for a young adult (we are amazingly boring as a family) but if she doesn't have evening plans she skypes with family or friends, watches netflix, reads and I think our current AP journals (the old fashioned way, not online). Does your AP only seem bored or did she tell you she is bored? Waiting for others to get organized or to know when they are available stinks but as this is nothing you can do anything about you also shouldn't overly worry about it. The APs she hangs out with are most likely not the only APs she could spend her time with. She chose to spend her time with people whose schedules don't match hers, while it's a bit on an inconvenience, it's nothing for you to worry about. Now, being bored 'on the job' is your problem but very little you can do about it. As soon as your children have grown out of 'needing' an AP but can't yet be left alone or take themselves from A to B all you can do is be open about this at matching. She picked a HF with older children, again this was her choice. She might not have known exactly what she was getting into (they never do) but she could have matched with a family with toddler twins if being bored had been something she worried about. Would your kids rebel if you planned one AP-kids activity per week? There are lots of fun things to do for school-aged kids in DC. Is there anything the kids have always wanted to do that you have been pushing up because you can't fit it in? Buy a family guide to DC or have them look up activities online. It might come at an extra cost but if you are really worried, maybe it's an option. I assume you could also add more chores (kids' laundry, cleaning kids' rooms, changing sheets weekly etc.) to her schedule, ice skating does sound more fun though. She is in a different country with loads of things to do. If she is bored, she is bored by choice. With school-aged kids and 25 hr weeks she has loads of time to find things to do that she enjoys, to pick up new hobbies (she could start photography classes, start a vlog, pick up knitting, learn how to cook...). If she is bored during her time off? It's by choice. All you can do is support her in finding things to do which could possibly help her to meet people with less erratic schedules. |
Anonymous
| One suggestion might be to reach out at school. One of our AP made really good use of her college experience- she had a student ID while taking classes at a local community college, so she would leave early in the morning and use the gym or pool there before her class, then meet class friends (some American) for lunch in the cafeteria. On weekends, she would go back to watch a basketball game. She had a great time living the 'American College' experience, and she was the only one who actually made local friends. |
Anonymous
FROM JEFF: The purpose of this forum is to allow families that host Au Pairs or are considering hosting an Au Pair to exchange information. There are obviously some individuals that do not like the current Au Pair program that exists in the US. While that is a legitimate viewpoint and one worthy of discussion, it is not useful in this forum. Please have discussions of that sort in the "Off-Topic" forum within the Nanny Forums section: |
Anonymous
Mine got an internship at a local company who is happy to have her free labor, even for only a few hours a day. She said she feels like she gets to use her brain again. 
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Anonymous
| She could try to join some Meetup groups |