Au Pair and evening visitors, overnight visitors, entertaining in your home on off time

[Anonymous]

What are your thoughts on an Au Pair having evening visitors in your home, asking for overnight visitors, or just entertaining in your home (during off time)?

[Anonymous]

Our handbook - which if you havent done you definitely should consider doing- states that we have to approve all overnight visitors and meet them on a non-overnight occasion before they are allowed to spend the night. We specify no romantic overnight partners but have relaxed this in the case of one of our six APs who became engaged in her second year to a guy we really liked. Re the handbook - Au Pair Mom website is a good place to start.

[Anonymous]

A lot of au pairs will spend the night at each others houses on the weekends. They sleep in the same room so hasn’t been an issue yet.
Ours had a boyfriend from home country come and stay over the holidays and we were ok with that. I wouldn’t be ok with random men staying over though..

[Anonymous]

We allow it. No more than a couple of other girls at a time. And not every weekend although my AP has a BFF who basically sleeps over every weekend.

No boys though. It has never been an issue.

[Anonymous]

We allow it and find it enriching to hear all their stories. Good for my kids to hear and see all kinds of people and experiences. We are ok with the added costed of food, and a little less privacy.

[Anonymous]

We encourage our APs to entertain at home. We like to meet their friends.

For overnight stays, we put in our handbook that we'd consider for family, but need to discuss on a case by case basis. We don't have the space to host a whole big family, but a sibling who wants to visit? Sure they can stay with us.

Other overnight guests are discouraged.

[Anonymous]

Same as above posters

[Anonymous]

No males

[Anonymous]

Our au pair has a sugar daddy so it’s not an issue.

[Anonymous]

Same as above. Ask us before having a sleepover but we always said yes. We actually enjoyed meeting our APs friends.

We also allowed two family stays for each AP, though we asked them to limit one of those to a weekend, the other to a week.

[Anonymous]

We've always treated our au pairs like adults and never had any issues. Other AP's would stay over but I really liked most of them and they would all fawn over the children and make food from their home countries. Our AP's always asked and were very respectful. Most of the time we barely knew they were there. In 5 years no one asked about a romantic overnight guest.. maybe it happened when we were out of town but they were all adults so their choice.

[Anonymous]

I caught my male au pair sneaking a girl out... I'll be honest, it was kind of fun to introduce myself and make a point of saying they should use the front door. (I'm going to be such an obnoxious mom to teenagers!)

I don't have a problem with visitors/overnight guests/or whatever unless I'm suddenly expected to feed three additional people that I didn't plan for, but even then I would probably just grumble to myself rather than say anything unless it became a pattern. I do know that we are often the landing pad for au pairs that live in the far suburbs, and I would rather they do that than make questionable decisions late at night.

The longer I'm a host mom, the less I care about what the au pairs do and where or when. My kids honestly don't pay that much attention to who comes and goes and when, and the kids have always done co-ed sleepovers themselves so they don't think anything of it...

[Anonymous]

As long as you don’t hear her getting plowed.