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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In terms of hours -- our APs almost always work 40-45 every week.  I think you can control for this during the matching process by doing two things:

1) I emphasize -- over and over again -- how "hard" our job is.  I find this quickly weeds out potential APs who don't want to work this hard.
2)  I look for maturity in my candidates.  By age, experience, and other factors.

I think APs who get upset over their work hours (or compare them to their friends') either 1) weren't warned ahead of time about what they would be, or 2) are simply immature girls who don't have a healthy dose of "job reality" yet.

This has worked very well for my family.[/quote]

I'm the PP whose first AP did get upset about her hours when she learned her friends were working many fewer, and I completely agree with this post.  In that case, it was nearly 10 years ago, and back then I had never met anyone else who had an AP and had no board like this or listserv like aupairmom to ask questions, so I had no idea about talking to an AP in advance about hours.  We had listed our schedule (45 hours) on our application and just trusted that CCAP would "match" us accordingly (back then they did the matching - and you got serious grief if you challenged their match; we did challenge the first but went with the second, and that turned out to be a mistake).  We talked to the AP once before we matched, and I know we didn't talk about anything substantive.  It's amazing the match lasted as long as it did (four months) and that it was as good as it was at the start, before she became friends with others working much lighter schedules.

Anyway, in the wake of that experience, we have done exactly what PP says she does: We stress how hard our job is, we stress how much we need the AP's help, we ensure that APs know they can find a match with easier children, fewer hours, bigger house, fancier car, and more luxurious vacations.  You know what? We have had mostly great APs since then, and those who haven't been 100% great have not had issues with our hours; in fact, most say our job in reality is MUCH easier than we had advertised.  All have been very happy with us.

Unlike PP, we don't necessarily pick older APs (we did when our children were young, but switched to 19-21 yr olds when our children were school-aged), but we do screen for motivation, for how much an AP *wants* to do a good job in everything she does, and for how seriously she has taken whatever jobs she has done.  An AP who works every summer selling strawberries from 6am-10am (an actual job one of our best APs had held during her HS years) is likely to be a better candidate for us than someone who has babysat 100 times for 100 different families but hasn't ever had to work a job day in and day out, getting up early and doing something monotonous and tiring, but still showed responsibility and tenacity to get the job done.[/quote]

We also use 43-45 of our hours, always during the week (so our au pairs never work evenings or weekends), for preschool age twins.  First, as PP pointed out, I screen candidates to find ones that have worked 10 hour days somewhere, doing something.  Anything.  Waitressing (or strawberry selling) for all I care.  But something that they didn't necessarily enjoy all the time but got back up every day and went back in because that's what you do in the real world.

But we find over the course of the au pair year that our au pairs come to appreciate us over time.  We don't live in a fancy house (something we disclose in advance by sending pictures of it).  They don't get their own suite.  They do get invited on vacations with us, they do get off from work on time every time (something that remarkably doesn't seem to happen in all host families), and we make sure that because our preschoolers require a lot of hands on care, we don't give them "chores" to do (outside of sweeping/wiping up spills and occasionally putting clean kids' laundry away once it's folded by us.  And maybe running the vacuum if one of our girls manages to spill 2 lbs of uncooked rice on the floor.  Again.)

I'm not saying this is the case with every "good looking" situation, but we've had au pair "refugees" spending weekends and evenings at our house because of host parent fighting, host parents turning on au pairs for seemingly no reason (when we know the au pair is a good kid in a bad situation), host kid tension, and other situations that just weren't comfortable for their au pair.  We make it known to our au pair that if any of their friends wind up in situations where they don't feel safe at their house, they are to come to ours.  We'll help them figure out what to do.  Once our au pairs start hearing about how "less than perfect" some of those really "good looking from the outside" situations are, they start appreciating us even more than before.

So if your au pair seems like they may become jealous of someone else's schedule - just give it some time.  They may come to appreciate you after all.  :)[/quote]

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