Son tells me Au Pair in Mean
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Anonymous
| I never bothered to follow AP on her social media site. I was too trusting. After some investigation tonight I see that she has posted videos she filmed in my car while she's driving. I want to make sure this and her other actions are known to her new family. The more I am finding out I do not want this girl alone with my kids again. |
Anonymous
| Why can't you tell the agency to send her home?? |
Anonymous
| You should demand a full refund from your agency. I mean seriously. |
Anonymous
| She will not be coming back. The agency can pick her up in the morning and figure it out. |
Anonymous
| Where can AP stay if I don't want her in my house anymore? Am I responsible for finding a place for her to stay? |
Anonymous
If you don't feel it is safe to have her stay in your home, your LCC will arrange for her to sleep elsewhere until she rematches (or is sent home). You may be charge for that cost. Good luck OP... |
Anonymous
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Op, you can have her stay but not work. At least this is the case with CCAP and APC (I don't know about other agencies). You must be sure to tell the Lcc AND the regional director about both the safety issues and the lack of empathy and check to make sure they get written into the transition document. If you are with CCAP, you can check and see what comes up in the transition document by looking at the rematch list on the website but your Lcc should be able to help and ensure this so you don't have to do that kind of checking. If the Lcc isn't grasping the severity of the situation, call the headquarters of your agency and tell them.
Your AP should not be left with your kids alone at all and make sure the agency knows this. Anyone who doesn't care about a child with a bleeding finger because she is off duty has no place caring for children. |
Anonymous
APIA hostmom who's been through two rematches - some information is provided, but my observation is that it tends to be whitewashed. The agencies have an interest in rematching au pairs into new families, and while the OP is NOT one of these people, there are host families that would try to torpedo their "old" au pair's chances of rematching just because it didn't work out with them. In some cases (not this one) there are bad host families that end up with good au pairs, so the agencies take what the families say and often... soften it. Unless there's a track record of the family working with the LCC to try to fix something, the LCC is often stuck with the family's word against the au pair's - and of course they stories are radically different. Which is why longtime host families will advise when things start going south to document, document, document and put everything in writing cc'ing the LCC. My guess is, in this case agency will at least let her look for a new family, as she didn't directly cause the injury and since she was technically off duty and the parents were home, it wasn't technically her JOB to help him, just the kind of common empathy we generally expect from other human beings. They'll probably write up the reason for rematch as she wasn't meeting host parent expectations, with a heavy dose of implying that the host family may have been expecting too much (again, NOT that I agree). This is why it is vital to contact the former host families of any rematch candidates. For the record, as of three years ago (our last rematch) the contact info of the former host families was available to new host families, but they don't exactly encourage contact with the past host families and may actively discourage it, saying something along the lines of that the relationship has soured to the point that the HM/HD won't be able to give an accurate reference. |
Anonymous
| Very good points. She has also left our house wide open a few times in the past few weeks and I just discovered videos of her driving down the beltway in our car-the car she uses to drive our kids around in. I can let some other issue go, but this one I cannot. I don't want her near my kids if she's dumb enough to film herself doing something illegal and even dumber to post it online. |
Anonymous
| Op - I think you really need to make sure all this is documented in the transition document. AP may be made available for transition but no thinking family would take someone with this poor judgment and complete lack of safety (filming herself driving on the beltway with your kids in the car???!!!). |
Anonymous
7:58 back again. You can try. But there are families out there that would try to get revenge on an au pair that didn't work out with their family by recommending that they get sent home. So the agencies don't automatically do exactly what host families recommend, and given how many bad host families - or at the very least host families with unrealistic expectations - there are, they shouldn't. Again with the documentation thing - if you could show weeks of work to get an au pair to change and they don't, there's a better chance of the agency immediately sending the au pair home. Same with an injury or safety violation that was clearly the au pair's fault - "easy" to send them home. That's not exactly what happened here. Most agencies would rather appear to be the "nice guy", let the au pair try to rematch, and if they just don't find a new family, send them home at the end of their two weeks. We had an au pair that was on duty three and a half days with (admittedly sometimes rambunctious, but generally pretty good) two year old twins. She was sobbing in our kitchen telling me she didn't want Larla (the calmer, sweeter child) to touch her and couldn't stand it when she was spontaneously hugged by the girls. She stated, flat out, that she didn't like little kids. We moved the kids to my parents' in the Midwest (we live outside DC) because not only did I not dare leave them alone with her, I didn't want them in the same house as her. (BTW - the idea that you can just move an au pair to the LCC's house during rematch - easier said than done. OP will really have to push to make that happen, even if she's paying lodging costs. If I'm ever in that situation again and the substitute LCC is as difficult as this one was, I'll move the au pair to a hotel - even at my own expense - rather than tolerate a rematching au pair in my house without the kids.) I recommended that she be sent home (who signs up to be an au pair that doesn't like little kids? Even if you match with bigger kids, you'll run into little ones...), or at the very least, be matched with much older children that could reliably tell their parents what happened during the day. They could not have been less interested in my input regarding where the au pair would go next. They let her rematch. She lasted a few months before going home, according to our LCC (who had been on vacation during our rematch or, having known me for many years and known that I don't exaggerate, stated later that she would have sent the au pair home instead of rematching her.) |
Anonymous
Wait a minute, so you're telling me that you were home and your child got hurt and yet you somehow expect a call to rush to aid? It wasn't like she was just sitting there twiddling her thumbs. She was working past her scheduled hours by putting away your kids food. Did you let him scream with a bloody finger? I'm not disputing if she is or isn't mean however the example you provided isn't a good reflection on you. |
Anonymous
| You are missing the point. I didn't expect her to work, I was right there with him. I'm compliant was that she didn't even look up or bother to insincerely ask if he was ok. She just walked past and out of the room. Strangers show more compassion. |
Anonymous
I think I would have shared in your perspective before hosting an AP, but now that I've had two, I completely understand why OP was disturbed by her au pair's lack of concern. Our APs & all her friends who have visited have a certain warmness towards children generally, and more specifically for the children they care for - when one gets hurts, is sad, or even when one has some excitement to share when the AP is around but off duty, the au pair responds with warmth & kindness, because that's the kind of relationship they've established. It would be a red flag if the au pair doesn't care except for when she has to. It's not the same, but imagine that you're out with coworkers at a happy hour and one falls and gets hurt - do you ignore her & carry on with your evening, because you're now off the clock? Or do you inquire about her well-being and see if you can help out, because this is some one you care about, or simply because you're a decent person? |
Anonymous
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OP here. AP was already matched with a new family at the end of her term with us. We've gone into rematch with her and she's out of the house. Side note: her new family never called us regarding her reference so I had no way of telling them how incompetent she was. I've requested that her new family be notified of her situation and the reasons why we ended things so abruptly. Do agencies really disclose the reasons or is it up to AP? I want more than anything just for AP to be sent back to her country and not to care for anyone else's kids.
On a side note-we shut of AP phone as soon as rematch was complete and she had the nerve to email and tell us her phone wasn't working and she has no way to reach anyone. She actually begged us to turn it back on. No apology for her behavior. Only concern that she didn't have a phone. |