Reply to Ugh...really down on the au pair program. Anyone having a good experience out there?

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Reply to "Ugh...really down on the au pair program. Anyone having a good experience out there?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Agree that you will have a REALLY REALLY hard time find someone to do part time after school care.  Some college students can do it a couple days of week, but that is it.

To find someone to do this 5 days a week month after month is basically not possible unless you get very very lucky.

Honestly, if it were easy, probably 90% of the families that use an AP would not do it.[/quote]

So I just looked for a week and found about ten solid applicants to my part-time afternoon job.  One of which sounds perfect - she's a student with morning classes, I need her in the afternoon.  Is there some reason I'm not seeing that this won't work out?[/quote]

Longtime HM here.  We left the AP program between 2009-2011 when I just ran out of steam with dealing with AP issues.  Both years, we had fabulous part-time babysitters who worked in the afternoons from 2-7.  One was an AU student and the other doing a year after college before grad school.  Both were just amazing careproviders and so wonderful to work with.  One issue with the AU student was that she wasn't available over breaks, but she was very good about letting me know in advance when she couldn't be there, and I had a flexible schedule at the time so was able to adjust.

We ran into two issues with this arrangement: First was that we ALSO needed morning help, from 7:50-8:20 to take my son to school, and that we simply could not find.  We posted everywhere - craigslist, sittercity, AU jobsite, etc - and we had no shortage of takers, but we could not find someone who was RELIABLE and showed up no matter what.  We were offering $25/day for this half hour of work, and still it was an enormous struggle to find someone who didn't flake at the last minute at least once every couple of weeks.

The second major issue was that the second year, we had about 5 snowdays and at least that number delayed openings.  In these cases, we had no one to watch the children.  So that was half our vacation days gone.  On the delayed openings when I was away for work (I travel 2-3 days/week), DH was staying home, driving kids to school and then heading downtown.  On delayed opening days, school started at 10, so that was a good 11am start time for him.  Not possible as a longterm solution.

So back we went to the AP program.  IF you don't need morning help, then this is definitely something you can do.  Many many of us with APs just need a split shift AND need someone to help on the random school closing days or days when children aren't feeling well enough for school but aren't sick enough to need a parent home.  It's those days that keep us in the AP program.  We do enjoy hosting, but it definitely gets exhausting over the years.

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