Adding to this thread.. we just ended our 9 month aupair with PROPAIR. My key bullets: not worth the money, the company is poorly managed, your coordinator usually does not care when the S hits the fan, and the candidates are not good, period. For parents who need SN au pair- do your self a favor and DO NOT GO THROUGH APEX/PROPAIR

Detail:
(1) they booked our au pair through Paris- she got stuck in the airport for 24 hours because.. she is not smart
(2) then they routed her through Atlanta ... and again.. got stuck for 5 hours until she could get on a flight to Denver
(3) Our Au Pair started dating someone within 48 hours of landing in Denver- which normally would be fine - but she basically did not invest time in our kid or our family
(4) we took her to our mountain house and she basically slept the entire weekend and did not interact with us...
(5) She would disappear for nights and weekends with no notice of her leaving the house, when she was coming back, or where she was going ( we didnt care but early on this new BF was taking her to rural CO)
(6) When we asked her to just tell us when she was going out.. she basically threw a tantrum
(7) We brought her on to do speech therapy with our son... she "was doing speech therapy in the car, while she was driving"... the child needs to see the speech therapists mouth to be able to effecitively mimic whats going on
(8)She literally cant manage our kid.. my husband and I did HOURS of interventions each day for at least 6 months, then it went down to 1-3x a day for the last 3 months
(9) She was rude, entitled, and non emotional - like literally NO EMOTION
(10)I am pretty sure ( like 97%) she LIED about her qualification, her experience with kids, and basically everything ( what she likes, how she spends her time, why she is coming to the us..)

... and the biggest thing... about 3 weeks ago she left burning hot water on in my kids bathtub.. and he was screaming for my husband to come get him out because his feet were burning... AND.. the next day she left a knife on the edge of the counter top in the kitchen 2x!! When I emailed the agency - no response for a week. When I talked to the au pair about it - no acknowledgement that she was in the wrong...

We terminated her contract today and Apex said that (1) they would not let another family - new family talk to me (2) they didnt seem to think it was going to be a problem for our au pair to rematch even though I told them - SHE SHOULD NOT BE AN AU PAIR.. full stop.

Our neighbors went with Cultural Care and their au pair is amazing. We just found someone at Cultural Care who has 2 years experience so we will be her 3rd family.. and the host parents just sang her praises on and on...

We are not with ProAupair, but our APs had friend who were with the agency. On average, I thought they were slightly better: better English, relevant educational background, more experience with children, or ability to handle SN children.

Very few good English speakers and no video on site. So it’s time consuming to sift through a small pool mostly from the same sources.

Ditto on the spoiled child comment. We booked a week in Disney and we became ill as did our children and the au pair was furious that we left and cancelled the trip. She complained to her mother and he mother called to yell at me.......geez......AVOICD the old EASTERN GERMANY Girls....we had no luck.

We have had several Au-pairs (5) over the years and started with Pro Au Pair - we felt that someone with a degree and older would be better and at the end of our experience, they were just average. When they had their Au pair friends over we had the chance to evaluate the Au pairs of the different agencies. We found many of them to be educated as well, and didn't have a chip on their shoulder thinking that they were superior (as we found with the Pro Au Pair). We had some fantastic Au pairs that really made our lives better and they also enjoyed themselves. In fact one of our past Au pairs asked if she could visit after being gone for 2 years, she told us that it was the best year of her life, we traveled with her and also took her on vacations, she was like an older sister and had a good work ethic and was caring with the kids. But the Au pairs that we have had since her have been disasters. We have many low windows in our house and if you don't wipe the kids hands after meals, they touch the windows and dirty them, when I asked her to clean them, she told me I don't do windows??? She was educated in Germany as a school teacher completed 4 years of University, so I was hopeful. Turned out, she hated children. She was nice to my one child, but cold and harsh with the older one, this caused all sorts of problems. My husband didn't see this, and I was furious, as I would come home from work, the kids weren't fed, everything was dirty and she would just sit with them in their playroom and not speak to them. What she did do well, text, respond to multiple Instagram at once, lying, reply to the Au pairs that she connected with on social media and to use the car for road trips (we had a 60 mile radius, and 11:00 pm curfew on our car). Breaking point was when her one contacts from Tinder showed up at our home and final straw when she was showering with this guy she just met a few weeks earlier in our home.....We are now Au Pairless and happy! We went to care.com and are using a series of older 30-40 years old (that aren't glued to their cell phones) babysitters that have experience and take the task seriously. Finding good quality childcare in the US is NOT easy and you can't just throw money at it, that doesn't guarantee anything. you need to watch them, work from home when you can, network, ask others who they know and check references. This is critical, we learned you cant outsource this.

Anonymous wrote:We are also very disappointed in Pro Au Pair, and they are not worth the extra cost at all. While I agree that the initial applicant pool seems a lot better, and it's much easier to weed through than the million APs on the other sites, the benefits stop there. I deserve some blame I suppose for getting sucked into the appeal of a "professional" who had some specialized training, but we interviewed her multiple times and she came highly recommended by the matching specialist so we did everything we could to vet her. But in reality our AP completely oversold her childcare experience and isn't very good with my kids, is very immature, very flaky, and has a terrible work ethic. If you can find someone through one of the other agencies, I would do that.

I feel like we are the same person! You just described our experience exactly. Seemed fantastic during interview process, came highly recommended by Pro Au Pair. In reality - entitled, spoiled, totally immature, completely unhelpful, zero patience, terrible with my kids, horrible work ethic. She stressed me out to no end and made me miserable. It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders the minute she left our house after we went into rematch. The agency is sketchy as hell too, and they do almost zero vetting or training of the APs. I would rather lose the $4k match fee than ever use Pro Au Pair again, they are such a disaster. And so expensive! Run far away from them.

Anonymous wrote:Another unsaturated ProAuPair customer here. We were drawn in by their claims of professionalism. What we got were two completely unprofessional, lazy, and self-centered children. Their experience was greatly overstated, and they lied to us over and over again. The first girl was like having a spoiled teenager in the house. If you asked her to do anything differently, even in the most polite and constructive way, she would run up to her room and slam the door. Then she would demand use of the car and not come home until 2 am. We tried over and over to sit down with her and work on things, but I could only take it for about three months. Right after she left, we realized she ran into the garage door and didn't tell us. She also got a speeding ticket while my infant daughter was in the car.

The second girl failed out of her professional program and came to us on rematch because we were desperate. I was so hopeful we could make it work this time, and we really went out of our way making sure her hours were down to close to 30 per week and taking her with us on vacations. Her English pronunciation was terrible, and we would sit with her over dinner while she told us long, rambling stories that we didn't understand. Again, she had problems following basic rules. We had to go over shoes off in the house and on outside over and over. She also lied about running over our child's pool in the driveway (thank God she had just gone upstairs to take a nap), breaking our Vitamix blender (How? How? They blend all sorts of crazy things on YouTube), and taking my car for a couple hundred mile joyride. I get it--you want the best. You won't find it here.

God I had a similar experience and paid through the nose for an entitled, utterly incompetent au pair who had zero interest in doing anything but socializing and getting as many perks as possible. This service is totally oversold as real professionals and the fees are outrageous.