Reply to Tension between DH & AP

Forum Index » Au Pair Discussion

Reply to "Tension between DH & AP"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]If our au pair like this wasn't currently au pairing in the Netherlands (and left us three years ago) I'd wonder if you were her extension family.

We had one (of seven) au pair that just could not "click" with my husband.  Not helping the situation, he was out of work and therefore spending a lot of time at home not by choice.  Fortunately there was no door slamming but lots of quiet.  They never talked if they could avoid it - I would get texts from one of them while at work asking me something that the other one would know - and they'd be in the same building.  Immensely frustrating.

Unfortunately, we weren't in a place to be signing a new agreement with the agency (necessary to rematch), and - IMPORTANTLY - in our case she took really good care of the kids, so we toughed it out.  She was always in her room or at a friend's house when off duty - we would sometimes check the driveway on weekends to see if the car was there to know if she was home.

You mentioned something really important in retrospect - your au pair didn't have a relationship with her father.  Neither did ours, her father died when she was young.  We now know to screen for au pairs that have good relationships with their dads (I fully realize that there are good au pairs out there that don't, but for our family it's important that our au pairs be able to relate to "adult" males well).

My husband was always on board with the idea of remaining in the au pair program - probably because we had an excellent experience with AP#1 before this one (AP#3) arrived.  AP#2 went into rematch by mutual decision, so we were a little skittish about rematching again immediately, which also helped in our decision to keep her.

My twin infants (at the time) are no worse for wear, but they also didn't necessarily realize what was going on.

I'm not sure that I have advice, other than to offer commiseration.  The big thing we had to do with that au pair was to separate the childcare aspect of having an au pair (which was going well) from the roommate aspect of having an au pair (which wasn't.)  Basically, we put up with a crappy roommate to have good in-home childcare.  Can you try to separate the two in your minds as well?  Or are the childcare aspects also not going well?  We've gone on to have four more au pairs that my husband enjoyed/related well to, so it is possible to have a different experience with your next au pair, but he has to be on board with the idea.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics