We haven’t talked in much detail about how to choose an agency — I’ve steered clear of that topic because I haven’t wanted anyone to think that I’m some kind of au pair agency secret agent, sent out to lure unsuspecting host families onto the rosters of agencies for an unspecified but generous kickback.

Also, I’ve wanted to maintain a community here where it’s not about complaining about agencies but is really more focused on relationships. And, frankly, having had experience with just the one agency and been reasonably happy with them, I’ve never done any serious comparison shopping myself.

There is a lot of comparison shopping you can do on your own when you’re choosing an agency.

Much of the decision comes down to very local information–

• Which agencies cover your geographic area?
• Which agencies have well-respected local counselors (LCCs) in your area?
• Which agencies have big enough clusters that your au pair might find some friends?
• Which agencies do your friends recommend?
• Which agencies have kosher/male/piano-playing/Mandarin-speaking/culinarily-talented candidates, etc.?

Other info you can find on your own, by googling, to catch up-to-the-minute data –

• What are the current agency fees?
• Are there any active discounts?

Sometimes, you’ll just get a sense of an agency you like.

• You might get an response to an online inquiry from a counselor/agency rep who really ‘gets it’, and is there to help.

• You might realize that you really prefer a certain kind of candidate selection option — a recommendation just for you, a handful, or full-on full-access — that perhaps only one agency has.

• And, you might discover that some agencies have a terrific online presence with lots of resources, both local and national.

But is there anything else to think about?

A “Potential Host Mom” writes:

I work out of my home 3 days a week. We have two boys ages 2 ¾ and 11 months. Currently, we have a part-time American nanny.   DH and I are feeling pushed to the max and have been considering how to make some changes in our lives in order to reduce stress. After much thought, we’ve come to the conclusion that more flexible childcare would be a big help to us, as DH’s job is very demanding, and I have to travel a fair amount.

We’ve decided to go in the direction of getting an au pair. We like the idea of exposing our children to a second language, the greater flexibility, and are open to participating in cultural exchange. Additionally, we have plenty of space in our home. (Our first nanny lived with us for awhile, so we have a little experience with the live in aspect of things). I’ve been scouring your blog for advice and have found it very helpful.

I’ve searched the blog, but haven’t found extensive information on the following: What are the factors we should consider when choosing which agency to use? In reading the responses, obviously the LCC is going to be important, and we should probably try to speak with those people before making a decision. [YES] Also, it looks like the match system is important-although it is a little unclear to me on which system is best. I’m guessing that is a matter of preference. [YES]

What are the other factors that we should be thinking about?

Potential Host Mom has so many of the right questions that I’d like to offer her some answers to questions that we in this community might be have some scoop on:

1. Are there policy differences between agencies that host parents should be aware of?

2. How can we evaluate customer service prior to working with an agency?

Take it away, experts!

Image: Iron Flower from bitzcelt

See also:
Agency Policies on Withholding Pay: What are they? Calling all LCCs …
Going “Off the Board” to find an Au Pair
Poll: Have you ever switched Au Pair agencies? If so, why?

West Coast Mom suggests that we pool our collective wisdom to generate a packing list for our incoming au pairs.  This list would not include the basics (they’ll all think to pack underwear). Instead, this list would cover wht an au pair needs to bring to support her or his adventure.

What we pack reflects our expectations

What we pack for a trip reflects what we’re expecting will happen, what we’re expecting we’ll do, and what we’re expecting we’ll need– but it’s not just about the “things” we pack, it’s about the meaning of these “things”.

I suspect that if we were to randomly open the luggage of 5 incoming au pairs, we’d get a tour of many of their hopes and dreams for the year ahead.

Since we host parents have seen more than a few adventure years, and seen what kinds of things surprise au pairs, we might have ideas for “what to pack” that could help them out. So, off the top of my head, here are:

5 Things an Au Pair Should Bring

1. A modest bathing suit:  One that covers your whole behind, please. One that you can wear at the town pool.
   
2. Your favorite children’s book, in your own language, to share with your host kids
3. Medications like Birth Control Pills: Many medicines are more expensive here than they are in your home country. If you are on a prescription medication, and/or if you have favorite remedies for ailments common to you, bring them along.
4. Space in your luggage: You can buy a lot of things here (and you probably will).
5. A List of your Goals for the year: Thinking explicitly about what you want to get out of your year, and having this written down, is a way to remind you what it’s all about when you feel homesick, when you feel lost, and when you’re offered opportunities you might not have considered.

On the other hand,

It’s also important to think about what not to bring.

The stuff I have seen come out of au pair luggage has boggled my mind sometimes, when I think of how heavy it was and how much room it took up. You don’t need to bring your own Rollerblades here– we can find you a pair. Really.

5 Things an Au Pair Should Not Bring

1. Towels, sheets and pillows: We have these in the US! And, we have them here in our houses for you to use. Use the extra space in your luggage for something more fun.
2. Hot Wax Melter & Waxing Supplies: There are lots of options for depilatation that aren’t electric, that aren’t heavy and that are effective.
3. A musical instrument larger than a clarinet: It may not be in perfect condition, but we can find you a second hand guitar to use while you’re here. And, there are inexpensive accordions on eBay all the time.
4. More than 3 stuffed animals: Your Host Kids will be happy to share some of theirs with you, I promise.
5. Precious and rare Hello Kitty items: Sanrio has outlets here, and the Hello Kitty stuff you can buy here will be rare back home.
   

   

• Parents, what things would you recommend an au  pair bring, to support his or her adventure?

• What’s best left behind?

• And, (we all want to know) what crazy items have been brought to the States by your au pairs?

See Also:

The “Before You Leave Home” E-mail
Getting her stuff back home: Is there a cheap way to ship things?
Tip: Save those Ice Skates! (about providing seasonal & one-off items for your au pair)

You’ve found her/him, you’ve matched, you’ve sent follow up information, exchanged a few happy emails, and then all of a sudden…

… Your au pair goes quiet.

Time to panic?

Dear Au Pair Mom,

We are excited about our soon-to-arrive au pair. She seems great, but I am starting to worry.

I haven’t heard anything from her in several weeks, and she’s been slow to respond to my emails. She’s a native English speaker, so language isn’t the issue.

We had emailed a lot during matching, and we had lovely long chats by phone. I know that she’s busy working to make extra money to travel, seeing all her friends, etc, but I wonder: Is this a red flag?

Is this a sign that she is too self-centered? Will she slam into a wall when she gets here?

I’m starting to feel concerned because, while we’ve had good experiences with extension au pairs and rematch au pairs, the two I started off with “from scratch” went into rematch.

Advice, anyone?

Image: Anxious child at window by  IronRodArt- Royce Bear

We spend a lot of time on this blog sharing ideas about how to figure out whether an au pair candidate is actually ready to do the job, live in another family, and explore an new culture and country. But, we haven’t spent much time sharing ideas about preparing *ourselves” for becoming host parents.

We focus a bit on ‘them’, but what about ‘us’?

I think it’s pretty clear that some families should never try being host parents.

Host families that can’t clarify their priorities, can’t align around a shared child raising philosophy, families where the parents hate each other, families that are stingy either financially or emotionally — these folks should never be host parents.

But what about the majority of us? We’re good people. We want the best for our kids and our family. We are willing to accommodate to our caregiver choices. We think we’re emotionally and psychologically able to do this.

Plus, we’ve read all the agency materials. We’ve looked at the host parent expectations and think we can meet them. We’re ready to go.

And then, your first au pair arrives. After about three weeks:

• If we are lucky or self-aware*, we notice how much harder it is than we thought. We step back and think: what the heck have we gotten in to? What do we do now? How can we make this work?

• OR, if we are unlucky and/or lacking in self-awareness, we don’t even realize what’s happening. We start feeling annoyed, overburdened and resentful. We start acting prickly; maybe even we’re mean. We treat our au pair as though he or she were the problem, when in fact the problem lies with us.

We realize– we just weren’t ready for this.

If only we had known that we weren’t ready.

That’s where we all come in. Can we put together what we remember from when we were preparing for your first au pair, and when s/he first arrived, and identify some questions that would help families figure out if they were ready to become ‘host’ families?

How can we make sure that we know what it means to welcome a young person from another country into our home, and into our lives?

Imagine that there was a Host Parent Readiness Assessment, and you were administering the assessment.

What questions would you ask to figure out whether a host parent or family was ready?

What questions do you recommend that all potential host parents ask themselves?

[ Once we generate a bunch of ideas, I'll take all these questions and turn them into an actual questionnaire/assessment...
Note Weds 5/12 -- this turns out to be one of the best lists of AuPairParent wisdom ever! wow!  cv]

Image: Room For Everyone, by Cathy Nichols. Go buy it on Etsy. You deserve some pretty art.

Our second au pair had a lot of driving experience back in her Eastern European country. She’d been driving for 3 years, almost every day. Sounded great. This, along with her other great qualities, lead us to match with her.

Zoom ahead three months, as we settle her into the Toyota to go out for a driving evaluation. I didn’t know you could ride the clutch on an automatic, or gnash the gears even. When she turned right, we fishtailed. On dry pavement.

Wow, she did not know how to handle our car.

Honey, what kind of car did you drive back in the old country? I asked.

Oh, I didn’t drive a car, she replied. I drove a tractor.

I kid you not.

We hired a driving instructor from Sears. $300 later, she was good to go, and was one of our best au pairs ever. Thank goodness she was anxious to learn.

MAmom suggested several questions (in the comments on the post about US Driver’s Licenses) for assessing an au pair’s driving experience. I wish I’d thought to ask our au pairs these questions, since we might also have identified the au pair who was so scared to drive that she often pulled over to the shoulder mid-trip just to steady her nerves.  I added to MAmom’s list– what more do you suggest?

Questions for Assessing an Au Pair’s Driving

1. What kind of cars have you driven?
2. What is the furthest distance you have ever driven?
3. What kind of bad weather have you driven in?  (snow? heavy rain?)
4. Have you ever used a GPS?
5. When you need to figure out how to drive to somewhere, how do you get directions?
6. Have you ever gotten lost while driving? If so, what did you do?
7. Have you ever been on a road trip with a friend?
8. What is your best driving habit?
9. What is your worst driving habit?
10. How is driving at nighttime different from driving during the daytime?

What other questions would you ask to assess an Au Pair’s driving skill?

Tractor Girl from merfam

Some families start with au pairs and stay with au pairs until their kids can drive. Many (most?) parents use an array of childcare options over the course of their parenthood. Lots of us will switch back and forth between different childcare options, depending on what we and our kids need at any given time. For most folks, what triggers a switch to au pairs is a change in their own or their kids schedules that makes their childcare needs something other than 5 weekdays days of 8 to 5 childcare.

A soon-to-be host mom emailed with a question about making this switch from nannies to au pairs.

I have a 4 year old and 1 year old. The 1 year old will start attending pre-school in the fall 3 days a week and my older son will go 5 days so my child care needs/hours will be changing. I have had 3 nannies and one that fell thru after 2 weeks so I feel that I have some experience with child care in my home, the interview process for the nannies, surprise issues and happy circumstances with employing someone to care for my kids…   Also, all 4 nannies have been international w/ English as a second language (but all lived in the US for 5 or more years).

I’d like to know how host parents that have employed nannies and also hosted au pairs would compare and contrast the experience?

What kinds of differences should I expect?

Were there any things that surprised you about having an au pair, based on your experience with a nanny?

I’d love to hear any stories and suggestions– I’m excited about getting an au pair and I really want to make this work well for all of us.

The Nanny! from Jason DeRusha

A host mom writes:

Do we need to get a bigger bed for our next au pair?

Our current au pair has a queen-size bed in her room, which used to be our guest room. We are moving to a larger home in a few months. The new house will have a guest room, and so we want to use this queen bed in the guest room once again.

When we move, our au pair would get a twin bed. It is a comfortable, clean, cosy bed.

Our current au pair doesn’t care about downsizing to a twin bed for a short time. She will be completing her year soon. However, our current au pair is concerned about the bed for the new au pair. She suggested that that I should reconsider giving our next au pair a twin bed.

Our current au pair says that most au pairs have large beds. She worried that our new au pair will feel slighted when she sees the larger beds her friends get to sleep on.

So I’d like to know:

• Is a twin bed really that small? (I’d sleep on one.)
  
• Do most families provide a queen bed for their au pairs?
• Have any other host families faced a similar situation?
• Would other families consider buying a bigger bed for the au pair?

If Skype didn’t exist, if email hadn’t been invented, and if we could only communicate with potential au pairs using short, really expensive long distance phone calls (anyone remember those days?), we wouldn’t have the luxury of long conversations to help us assess a good match. And since we do have that luxury– and so do potential au pairs– we may not focus on the most important questions.

Here’s a question for you:

If a potential au pair wanted to learn more about your family in order to assess YOU for a match, what three questions should she ask?

See if you can hone in on the few things that might distinguish you from other families….

Questions Cost Nothing, but mistakes? … by Simon Lieschke on Flickr

• Male Au Pairs: When would you hire one? (Poll)
• Can this relationship be saved? “Uncomfortable” or something else?

If only it were as easy as sticking a green vegetable underneath her mattress and waiting to see if she gets a good night’s sleep…

We all want to avoid “the princess” – the au pair candidate who thinks the job is all about visiting the States, living in an American home, and having an American family revolve its life around her, maybe just like her own parents do at home.

The princess is the au pair who wants you to arrange your work and her on-duty schedule around her social life, to eat whatever she wants even if it’s planned for a meal, to drive your family car into the city or away for the weekend even if you have soccer practices, and to stay out as late as she wants even if it means she falls asleep in the middle of the day while watching your babies.

Princesses make the absolute worst Au Pairs. Even if you hire a princess and hope that she can ‘grow up’ while she’s with your family, it’s going to be a painful process.

So how do we avoid these Au Pair Princesses?

Let me offer 3 important times to pay attention, and then let’s have you all toss in the questions that you think will help sort out the Princesses from the rest.

There are three important stages of the Au Pair-Host family relationship at which you must be alert in order to avoid a princess –

Au Pair Selection
Au Pair Orientation
Au Pair Accommodation

Au Pair Selection

At this stage of the AP-HF relationship, your job is to ask questions about the potential au pair to see if you can get a sense of her attitude. You need to discover whether she knows what the job entails and understands that the demands of the job come before her desire to see the US and/or party. She also needs to understand what it means to be like a family member in your house– that means, chores, habits, values, personal sharing (or not) etc.

Au Pair Orientation

Orientation is when you set the standards for your AP-HF relationship. While many of us are tempted to treat an au pair a bit like a guest when she first arrives, treating her as a guest is a great way to make her think that her role in your family is more like a visitor than a member, more like someone whom you support rather than someone who pitches in.

During orientation, most of us like to start with a general foundation of procedures, expectations and rules, and only relax these or adapt them to the specific au pair as we get further into the relationship.

Au Pair Accommodation

At some point, your au pair is going to ask you to bend a rule. She might want to go out on a Saturday night when you’ve got tickets to a play, or have Tuesday evening off all the time so that she can go to her Praise Dance Troupe rehearsal, and so on. Be very careful when you accommodate your family’s basic needs and schedule so that your au pair can have what she wants. This is a super-slippery slope from privileges to entitlements.

Yes, you do want to be flexible so that she can have a great time. No, you don’t want to concede on something that really matters to your family in order to make her happy.

You can’t make her happy by giving her less work, more car, more candy, or preferred vacation time. You can do this once and a while, but if you find yourself making your second or third accommodation within as many months– Stop. Rethink. Renegotiate.

Or start thinking of yourself as the “lady in waiting” and not the head of the household.

I can say this from experience: We had a lovely au pair who (though in general she was great) nearly had me wrapped around her pinky. She was off on Tues and Thurs nights for Church stuff, was never available on Sundays, resisted any Saturday evening hours, took my kids to the Mall so that she could shop, and generally got things sorted out so that my kids were the sidekicks in her life rather than her being the support in theirs. Because I was working away from home, it took me a while to see what was going on, and it took me even longer to get things back into a better balance. This was also the au pair who left 5 huge boxes of stuff behind that I was supposed to take to goodwill or keep in the hallway until one of her friends picked it up. blech.

What do you do, during Selection, Orientation and Accomodation, to make sure you don’t select or create a Princess? Consider this email from INCE mom….

One Mom’s not so great Princess Story

To rehash my story..I am the one with the AP who has wrecked my car 3 times..very moody and said she was uncomfortable ..
well…the last straw was the past 4 days.

She tells me on Friday that she wanted to take 2 classes…1 on saturdays all day at one particular IVY league college and another 4 nights/week at another local college. Total cost was going to be $1400 ….naturally I asked her how she planned to pay for these classes…she said her dad would send her the $. Sunday…she came home from being gone on the weekend and said she was only going to take the Saturday class…$850…Last night she asks me for the car on Thursday- in case she didnt get in to the Saturday class…could she have the car on Thursday to go take the placement test at the other college..(now…she was scheduled to work on Thursday so naturally I said no-who is gonna watch my kids?)..

This morning…she said she got into the class on Saturday and would register today… but she calls me at work and talks about the other class..I told her it was not feasible for her to take a class 4 nights a week at this point…that would leave me without a car 4 nights a week AND i would have to rearrange MY schedule to accommodate her.

So she calls me an hour later and asks me to pay the $900 class fee online to register and she would pay me back this weekend( I only have $300 left on the educational fee).

Long story short, I come home to a very upset AP, stating she had been crying all day because she didnt really want to take the $900 class on Saturdays but felt pressured because I would not let her take the other class 4 nights/week…so now I am really upset because I dont have $900 to just blow on a whim!…she told me that I was SELFISH by not letting her take the class she really wanted to take ..well..that was the last straw…I just couldnt even believe that came out of her mouth.

So…this brings me to the question for the experienced host parents..can you please tell me how to avoid the princess? what kind of questions should I be asking to determine whether my next AP is spoiled, has had everything handed to her, etc??? I keep hearing that their are girls out their who will be responsible young adults and consider the family’s feelings as well. This one told me she could drive…she cant..this one told me she cooked..she doesn’t know how and hasn’t cooked 1 thing in 5 1/2 months!…This one absolutely takes NO responsibility for her actions…..
I am very discouraged!

Okay Host Parents– Jump in here.  What have you done (or not done) to avoid a Princess?

“Once upon a mattress” image for sale by TheStarvingArtist, along with other pretty princess images.

We got an interesting request for advice from a host mom who just found out that her incoming au pair has gotten a BBH — a Boyfriend-Back-Home. This mom is concerned because her first au pair – host mom experience was marred by her au pair’s devotion to the BBH over her commitment to the host family. The specifics of that situation are interesting, and I’ll post them in a few weeks, but right now this mom wants some advice:
One of our very important interview criteria was “no boyfriend” due to the experiences we had with our previous aupair regarding this issue.

Long story short, below is part of the email I received from our new au pair to be today.

I can completely understand why this mom is spooked– We have always screened au pair candidates carefully around the boyfriend issue.

At the same time though, we’ve had two au pairs with BBH and in neither case did it turn out to be a problem. Both young men were encouraging of their girlfriends’ year of adventure, and encouraged the au pairs to stick it out through the initial homesickness phase. One of the boyfriends stayed with us before and after his vacation trip with our au pair, and he was not only a pleasure to have around but also had lots of fun playing with our little girls when our au pair was on duty for two days. In short, it could not have gone any better.

I think that this host family has the right idea in planning to call their incoming au pair to talk to her about how the boyfriend might influence her year here. Given that it’s a relatively ‘new’ relationship, who knows if it will even be active, much less serious, three weeks from now? (Not to sound jaded, but you remember when you were 19, right?)

Do you think a BBH is bad news? Do you have any good strategies for managing BBH issues as they come up? Please share in the comments…