Snowstorms in weird places (like Oregon) and snowstorms in predictable places (like Chicago) have raised the question for many aupair host parents –

Do you allow your au pair to drive in the snow?

Of course, there are a million variables that affect this decision. Here are the ones I came up with off the top of my head:

• Is snow frequent or rare?
  Is the snow deep, light, icy?
  Does your car have 4 wheel drive?
  Is your car a Volvo?
  Is your car already beat up, or rather new?
• Is your au pair a good driver?
  Has s/he got lots of experience driving in snow?
  Is s/he from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Northern Canada?
• Is the specific trip urgent or discretionary?
  Daylight or after dark?
  With children or without?
• Are drivers in your area generally comfortable in snow?
  Do you live on a hill?
  Are your town roads well-plowed?
  Can you avoid hilly or unplowed roads to get to where you want to go?

• Can you afford to lose your (au pair) car to a body shop for a week or two?

As this host parent put it— many many variables! So, how do you decide?

Dear AuPairMom-

Our family has recently moved from a warm weather area to the east coast and we’ve never had to deal with snow before. We just had our first real snowfall of the season and I’ve very hesitant to allow our AP to drive in it. She has experience driving in snow in her home country (probably more than I do!) and says she is not afraid to drive in it.

For those of you living in areas that get snowfall, do you let your au pairs drive in the snow?

I’m in foreign territory here because we’ve never had to think about this before and would love to hear how others handle it.

And does it depend on where she is going or while working or not? What about when it’s not a huge storm, some cars are out on the road, and some roads are likely plowed, but sidestreets and such are icy and temperatures are still below freezing?

I feel that if she doesn’t HAVE to go out, I’d rather not take that risk. But I see it differently depending on the need. Going to the grocery story, taking the kids to school (if  schools were open), or going somewhere a planned important event like a going-away party for another AP, I see as more of a need than her wanting to go to Starbucks or the gym.  

Also, HD and I are doing some minimal driving (nearby errands), but I feel more comfortable with us taking that risk than her. DH has had years more driving experience and frankly, it’s our own car that we’re risking. And I just don’t feel like the headache right now of having to pay for car repairs because our AP felt she needed to drive to Starbucks in the snow. But, I feel like I’m being contradictory or unfair if I say she can’t drive, while DH and I continue to use the cars. Is this at all reasonable?

Some additional background — we love our current AP, who is leaving soon, she’s very responsible & mature and very good natured. Not at all whiny or immature. She rarely asks much of us, but she is pushing a little with this. However, she is very used to having a car at her disposal (we have a very nice 3rd AP car with very few restrictions). I know this is inconveniencing her and she is not thrilled. And, to top it off, my brand new SUV was recently stolen, so we are currently using our AP car and a rental car as our means of transport. We have her on the agreement so she can drive the rental, but again, I just don’t want to take the risks of any more car headaches right now.  

I really want to be reasonable but I am a little confused at the whole situation.

Image: Not Driving Today…. Some rights reserved by subsetsum

As Host Parents, we have an odd role in our Au Pair’s lives. We are responsible for keeping them safe, housed, fed, and supported in their work with our children. And we also often play a role that I call Pseudo In Loco Parentis.

Pseudo In Loco Parentis

Like the fancy Latin?

Years ago, women’s colleges were expected to take the role of “in loco parentis” — being the “local” parent of the student. This meant that the college was expected to protect the student’s health and safety, by forbidding men in the dorms, requiring curfews, limiting date nights, and even screening phone calls. Whatever it took to keep these young women and their reputations “safe” was sensible and expected.

The idea behind this was that the local “adults” would care for the student on behalf of that student’s parents, enacting the same rules and expectations that s/he’d experience at home under her or his own parent’s roof. This expectation — that at some times you’ll act like your au pair’s own parents — is also part of the role of Host Parent.

One easy way that this in loco parentis role plays out is in the promise that I make to my au pair’s parents about how I’ll treat them in an emergency — I will care for our au pair as though she were our own child, in a personal,  natural or political disaster. If the nuclear reactor at Indian Point melts down, that au pair will be in the back seat with my kids and the dog as we speed west on Route 80.

Other situations are less clear. Some of our families’ values and moral codes are pretty common. We can feel comfortable expecting our au pairs to live up to certain expectations for honesty, reliability, self-control and cleanliness. S/he may or may not share our religion, or attend services, and we’re usually fine with this.  But, when au pairs start to socialize (and by this I mean drinking, partying, staying out late, meeting people on-line, and doing all kinds of young adult social behaviors), they can often cross lines we didn’t even know we had.

From “anything goes” to “not under my roof!”

We’ve talked here on AuPairMom about our concerns regarding Au Pairs’ and their social lives.

Many of us simply do not care what our au pairs do socially, as long as they are safe and back to work rested and on-time. Others of us take more of an in loco parentis approach, and seek to guide our au pair’s behavior to stay within (or at least close to) our family’s moral values and moral code(s).

Every host parent-au pair partnership finds a different place on this spectrum,  from “anything goes” to “not under my roof!”

Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, you need to know what your limits are and how you’ll handle it if and when your au pair steps out of your moral and ethical comfort zone.

An active reader emailed with a question about her au pair’s social life… and how she as host parent should respond:

We have a 20 year old au pair. She is terrific and we are extending with her and couldn’t be more happy in general. She is very responsible and puts me to shame sometimes !

My question is that I’ve just learned she’s now telling people she is in a relationship with a gentleman (mid 20’s) who previously was described as “only a friend.” I fully expect she’s going to ask us pretty shortly about things such as spending the night at his house and driving our car over to where he is and that area. That area is not close to mine and not in an area I am familiar with. It’s about 35 minutes away and you need to travel on some four lane highways to get there. My husband did allow her to drive there one time, but made clear it was only a special occasion.

On the one hand, she is mature and responsible, including in her driving (as far as I know, but we trust her). She deserves to be treated as an adult and make adult choices which I personally think she is fully capable of doing and with sense. I’ve met the boyfriend and he strikes me as also very mature and responsible (but who really ever knows?).

On the other hand, I would not let my own daughter stay the night at a boyfriend’s (patriarchal and naïve as that may be, but it’s the truth).   I have no idea if her own parents feel like I do or not. I have met them, am very comfortable with them, and can get a hold of them to ask, but I’m really worried if I do that or require that our relationship will be worse off than if I had just said no, and let her suggest she connect us on this issue.

Also, I really don’t want our car that far from home. It has nothing to do with her or her freedom, but more do with our property and where we want it and what risks we are willing to take with it.

Both the overnight stays and the driving far distances are no’s in our handbook, but of course, that is written more for training a new au pair and for reminding an existing au pair of our house rules if need be. I’m leaning towards allowing the overnight stays on nights when she is not working the next morning, but not the car. He will have to pick her up. That’s the price of connecting with someone far away by choice.

What should I do? What have you done and did it work?

Dear Host Mom,

I really appreciate how carefully you’re thinking through this situation!

I think it’s the right thing to do to have limits on the car’s whereabouts… for the reasons you state. And I’d go with you on being okay with overnights if I knew not to expect her to come home and she wasn’t working the next day.

The hard part is separating those two things when you discuss this with your au pair, so that she doesn’t see the restrictions on the car as a backhanded effort to control her social life. While in truth the expectation that her boyfriend must pick her up and drop her off may cut down on the number of nights she gets to stay over at his house, that’s not the point behind the restriction. You’ll need to find a caring way to make this distinction– maybe even by acknowledging how the car restriction might feel.

I’d anticipate that she might want to stay over on some work nights, and may eventually ask for that. And, since she’s already ‘proven’ she can drive their safely, she may also ask you to loosen this restriction too.

You should think in advance about whether you’re ever going to be willing to loosen up, and what you might do if she broke one or both expectations either behind your back or ‘by accident’. Even the most responsible au pairs can get their heads turned around by romantic dynamics. You don’t have to expect that she’d cross your line, but it’s happened before with even great au pairs.

With regard to talking with her parents… I don’t think I’d do this. My sense is that, once an au pair is in the program, she is an adult who makes her own decisions. I’d only call parents in the case of a health or safety emergency.

• Other parents and au pairs, what do you think about this host mom’s plan? Anything else she should consider before talking with her au pair?

• Have you found yourself in other kinds of situations where you questioned the “parent” part of your host parent role?

See also:
Awkward: It’s not a walk of shame if we know you are safe
A Good Au Pair Relationship Requires Your Emotional Investment
How to Handle Under-Age Drinking
Using Your Car is a Privilege, not an Entitlement: Best practices

Images: a few red chairs late at night from shioshvili Late at night on the bus from wonderferret

The quick answer?

• Only if you’re ready to rematch, and

• Only if you are ready to have your au pair hate you.

And you may well be ready for that, if this situation is what it’s boiled down to:

I actually just found this great blog because I believe my au pair has stolen our car to take a road trip with her friends this weekend.

When I heard she was planning to drive, I told her that another friend would have to drive as her car was for local use and I did not want to absorb the liability or wear and tear on my car.

She has not returned phone calls. I am tempted to report the car stolen.

We had another au pair several years ago whom we found out was taking the car to NYC regularly.

This is so frustrating, and I welcome advice!

This is quite the combo of au pair lying, au pair abusing the car, and au pair experiencing her privileges and entitlements– and this is before we know anything about what you host parents & family have been doing…

[Please note: There are always to sides of the story, We here on AuPairMom almost always give the host parent the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because this blog is for Host Parents! Otherwise, where are you gonna go to get some help?]

That said, let’s all give the host parent the benefit of the doubt and assume (until the parent tells us otherwise) that s/he’s been bending over backwards to accommodate this au pair.

Now, what advice do you have?

We all want to be generous, and we all want to be appreciated. There’s nothing like having a third car for your au pair to use to make you aware of the tension that can exist when you want to be generous and want to be appreciated.

When we bought our first Volvo wagon to give our precious new baby a fancier, safer "ride" than my 8 yr. old Nissan, we decided to hold onto the Nissan and use it as an "Au Pair Car". Like the archetypal "station car" in a John Cheever story, the Nissan was intended only to get you there and back safely. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive, but it ran well, was safe enough, and was in great shape.

Our first au pair drove respectfully and safely, as did our second, third, and fourth au pair. It wasn’t until our fifth au pair made a right turn from the left lane and smashed the front fender into someone else’s that the car started to look kind of junky. And it wasn’t until our sixth au pair that the third car was taken for granted.

Up until that sixth au pair (who was in every other respect a FABulous au pair), I really loved having that third car. It seemed like a nice ‘carrot’ to tempt a desirable au pair, it relieved me of having to coordinate my driving plans with my husband’s or the au pair’s, and I was never blasted out of my seat at ignition by a radio set at high volume and tuned to a heavy metal station. Quite an assortment of benefits!

But, when I discovered that our sixth au pair was driving to another state to follow her boyfriend’s band, explicitly and implicitly ignoring the rules about car use, I realized I had let it go too far. I had traded that sense of "one less hassle for mom" into "just another thing I’m supposed to have. And I can use it as I darn well please, thank-you-very-much."

So, we had to set up few new practices and rules. Here are some of the things we did, and that you can try, to reduce the sense that the "third car" is something your au pair is entitled to.

We changed the way we talked about the car.

1. We stopped calling the third car "the au pair car" or "your car". We started referring to the car as "the silver car". [Also, my husband and I trade off who drives which of the other two cars when we are home, so we don't have a situation where one car is "Mom's" and one car is "Dad's", leaving the third car implicitly to be the "Au Pair's".]

We began to vary who drove the car, so that it wasn’t always and only our au pair who drove it.

2. I started driving "the silver car" occasionally when it was last in the driveway or just more convenient (as long as I wasn’t putting out our au pair. It was and is still critical for her to feel that she is more or less free to come and go when she’s not on duty.)

3. I put a car seat in the back seat, and another spare car seat in the trunk. This was in part to make it possible for the au pair to take the kids somewhere in the silver car in an emergency, in case my husband and I both had taken the other cars with their car seats. Although our au pairs almost never took the girls anywhere in the third car, the car seat was another kind of reminder that this car was for the extended family, not just for the cute single girl and her friends.

4. When Grandma & Grandpa came to visit, they got dibs on the silver car too (never when our au pair was off duty). I paid for their gas. This way, the car was used as an ‘extra car’ for whoever needed it, and the need was negotiated. This helped make it less hers alone, and more like the 3rd car.

We asked our au pair to take a little more responsibility for car.

5. Also, we made it a practice to have our au pair take her car (oops, I meant) the third car out of the driveway in the morning to park it on the street, to continue to re-park it on the street when she went back and forth during the day, and then to pull it into the driveway last thing at night. This helped me and my husband not have to be car jockeys when we needed to get out of the driveway in a station wagon, and it also made the station wagons easy for the au pair to use for the kids when she was on duty.

6. We asked our au pair to take the car to get its oil changed and to check the tire pressure… in her on-duty time.

While this tactic might seem like a way to have the au pair take ownership for the car (and it may have done that) this was intended to encourage her to think of the car as something that cost money. We didn’t ask her to pay for the oil changes (we paid for that and other maintenance) but we did ask her to pay to have the car professionally washed and vacuumed. (Of course, when my parents in law came, I took the car to the carwash myself.)

We treated the car like an expensive and valuable family possession, not like some hand-me-down.

7. We reinforced the rules for using the car. We had always had the car curfew, a weekly mileage guideline and limited travel radius (7 miles around our house… including the nearest two malls but not including New York City). We began to be more consistent about applying these guidelines.

8. Also, we set up some guidelines around car-pooling with other au pairs so that other au pairs didn’t take advantage of either our au pair OR the third car. We didn’t want our third car to into the au pair clusters’ taxi, with our sweet au pair expected to drive everyone else. More on that in a forthcoming post.

9 We made it clear how much the car cost, and discussed it as an ‘on the job benefit’.

We told our incoming au pair how much the silver car was worth and how much extra it cost us to have a third car insured with an under-25 as the main driver. That really helped establish the car as an "extra", that we paid for it, and that it wasn’t something to be taken for granted. (Check the post on the cost of having an au pair to see how much this nets out to.)

Being Generous & Being Appreciated

Despite the fact that having a third car for our au pair is pretty generous, I’m sure that any au pair can find someone else with a nicer material situation. (Be sure to read the post on avoiding the "Amenities Arms Race" and the competition with other host families.)

We live in a town where there are many au pair families wealthier than ours, whose au pairs drive expensive SUVs and never pay for their own gas.  But there are also au pairs driving clunkers, sharing a mini-van, and riding the bus, the train, and the bike. For every au pair with a fancier ride, there’s another au pair who’s glad for a lift to Target and who is happy to chip in for gas.

There is often a tension between wanting to be generous and wanting to be appreciated… for both host parents and au pairs. This tension doesn’t have to be resolved just by managing the use of the spare car(s)— we can be generous in other ways (comfy room, occasional latte, a flowering plant on a rainy day) and ask that the privilege of a car be appreciated.

Ultimately, there are au pairs who will feel entitled and au pairs who will feel privileged. Happily in our family, we’ve had 9 au pairs who appreciated and enjoyed what we have been able to provide for them, and only two that behaved in ways that would have embarrassed their moms if their moms had only known.

It’s important to remind your au pair and yourselves that while there will be host families for whom the cost of a third car is nothing, for some of us that third car is an extra expense that is hard to justify.  We are now in the process of selling that third car, and so things will be changing in our family. With my husband commuting by train and my desire to reduce expenses, having a third car just so that I can avoid the hassle of negotiating who gets a car on Saturday afternoon (with two kids at soccer and an au pair off duty) seems like too much. But I’m ready to work on that.

For starters, I’m trying to make sure that I offer the material things that we can afford, and be even more generous in ways where money is irrelevant.

Are there other ideas that you have for helping your au pair appreciate the privilege of a third car? Do share…

Here is the original query from CT Mom:

How do you deal with use of the car when there is a 3rd car? We have a 3rd car, so obviously there is no need to “share” the car. Our current au pair is new (our last one just ended her year with us) so we’d like some ideas so this doesn’t become an issue this year.  For those with 3rd cars, please share your car rules! Thanks.

Hi Moms-

Recall that last month I invited you all to share pages from your Family Handbook … I’ve just posted the first of those sample handbooks as a page: Sample Handbook 2, from CC Family.

The Sample Handbook is based on the format provided by the Cultural Care Agency, so you may have seen some of these ideas before. Yet, if you read the Sample Handbook, you can see the bits of individuality that communicate this family’s priorities and personalities. It’s funny how we share many concerns and priorities, yet we have some important differences too.

As I was reading this Sample Handbook I chuckled several times, remembering the incidents in my own house that lead to rules like the ones this mom is sharing. Later, though, as I was reading the section on using computers, I was stopped dead in my tracks. I can NOT believe that this mom invites her au pair to …… ( )  …. Go read it, and then in a future post I’ll tell you what this family does differently from mine.

Super thanks to the AuPair Mom who sent this to me for sharing her family book.

If you have some pages to share, please email them to me at CVHarquail at gmail dot com, and I’ll post them.

If you want some more examples of specific guidelines or total sets of rules, be sure to look in the Pages section of the sidebar. Here, I have Guidelines pages for specific areas. Also, look at the page titled AP Handbook Part 1 for more ideas.  Finally, be sure to use the search box (2/3rds of the way down the sidebar). Just type in a term like "driving", and posts that address that topic will all come up.

There is a lot of stuff here!   Happy reading!