Computers & Internet

How To Evaluate An Infant-Qualified Au Pair Candidate

by cv harquail December 27, 2015
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For many of us Host Moms and Dads, our first Au Pair arrives shortly after our first baby. Twice in one season you become a new parent– first of your own baby, and then of your Au Pair. I look back on those times now and think how absolutely naive I was about both new […]

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Au Pair’s Host Child Using iPad Improperly– How should she discuss with Host Parents?

by cv harquail December 16, 2015
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Apologies, readers, for the euphemism in the headline — by “improperly”, we’re meaning “hey the Host Kid is looking at websites with the letters  s – e -x in the title”….. Host Parents and Au Pairs are aligned in a main childcare goal– keeping the children safe. “Safe”, of course, has a lot of different meanings…usually […]

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When Your Au Pair Streams Movies – Illegally

by cv harquail December 1, 2015
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Deciding whether or not to pay for the online media (movies, TV shows, music) that you consume seems to be a generational thing.   Young people do it, we “olds” do not. Sure — once upon a time I used Napster (dating myself). Until we got a reminder from the University where I worked that using […]

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Photographing Host Children: What’s appropriate to shoot, and what’s appropriate to share?

by cv harquail April 7, 2014
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All children are beautiful. When we, our au pairs, our families, and our friends see our beautiful child, it’s oh-so-tempting to try to hold that image of beauty still, to want to preserve it as a memory forever. When we adore these children, when we are proud of them, when we love them, we want […]

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Classic Case: Should we keep trying with a Mediocre Au Pair?

by cv harquail March 4, 2014
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Here’s a situation we see time and time again on AuPairMom: The family has an au pair (often, their first one) and the au pair is only okay. The au pair’s relationship with the kids is “fine”, but the au pair doesn’t follow through on her other responsibilities. The host parents have tried a few […]

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Au Pairs and Online Romances: Your role as a Host Parent

by cv harquail June 10, 2011
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As host parents we feel responsible for keeping our au pairs safe, since they are under our roofs and with our families. However, we recognize that what they do on their own time is (largely) their own business. Au pairs deserve social autonomy, privacy, and the chance to experiment with new things and new relationships. […]

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Checking Facebook for Insights About Your Au Pair’s Experience

by cv harquail October 13, 2010
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Who needs to snoop in an au pair’s room or flip through an au pair’s journal, when there is Facebook to tell us our au pair’s inner thoughts? Not that any of us would intentionally snoop.  (As we’ve already discussed, there are very few and very specific times when snooping seems even remotely reasonable.) And, […]

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Who Should Pay When an Au Pair Downloads Movies, Illegally, by Mistake?

by cv harquail October 4, 2010
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We all have a sense of what kinds of issues regularly present host parents & au pairs with relationships challenges — food, cars, late nights being chief among these. I’m becoming aware of a new category of challenges, centering on ‘Who pays for a mistake?’ We’ve had mistakes related to car damage, lost cell phones, […]

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Au Pair Advice: Getting enough sleep & being noisy late at night

by cv harquail March 14, 2010
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If there is anything about having an au pair — or anyone, really — in the bedroom on the third floor that bothers my DH, it’s noise after 10:30 pm. He is a fussy sleeper, and it drives him nuts to be able to hear a tv, or a phone conversation, while he’s trying to […]

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Moms & Au Pairs: Can I hold us to different tv rules?

by cv harquail February 4, 2010
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I’m a believer that different members of a family have different privileges and responsibilities, depending on their roles and their ages. Parents have more privileges than do children, and employers have more privileges than do employees. The rules that we follow can be different, as long as they are fair. Nobody, and I mean nobody, […]

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