How are host parents handling travel requests to “touristy” places from their AP during Covid? 

We live in southern CA where the numbers are very high. Our AP recently submitted some time off for trips to San Francisco, Las Vegas and Dallas during January, February and March. We are not traveling or hosting anyone traveling (even grandparents, etc.)

Our AP doesn’t watch the news or seem to understand the severity of the Pandemic. Our response that we’re not comfortable with her traveling or having her boyfriend travel from a different state to our home was met with tears and anger. According to our au pair, we are the “only host family that isn’t allowing their AP to travel”…

Our son has bad asthma so our house rules will stay our house rules, but I’m just wondering how other families are handling this. I don’t want an unhappy/miserable au pair, but I also am not going to compromise my beliefs. — CovidConcerned Host Mom

I imagine that many host families and au pairs are struggling with travel-related concerns during the pandemic. Most au pairs sign on for this gig with the explicit expectation of travelling around the USofA.

Yet, right now, traveling to and from anywhere is exactly is how we infect each other. You wouldn’t know this by the number of people who are traveling though, because too many people are in self-centered denial.

Even for folks who are aware of how bad the situation is, the truth about how transmissible and dangerous Covid actually is seems too much for some folks to grok. If they haven’t had a bad case of Covid themselves, or know a grandparent who has died from Covid, or a teen who’s experienced myocarditis after a supposedly symptom-free bout of Covid, too many folks think they are immune. It won’t happen to them, it isn’t real, they can still travel, etc. etc. etc.

The ability of the human mind to create its own reality is astounding.

In my own city of Chicago, you can’t travel back from pretty much anywhere without a quarantine of some kind. I wonder what would happen if you asked your au pair to propose a plan for her travel, where she would take the necessary time to quarantine, how she’d do it, how she’d get tested before she came back into your household, and how she’d manage the vacation time. I bet if she did this, she’d discover that there is no medically ‘safe’ way to travel within her own time and budget constraints… at least not if she plans to come back to your home.

Imho, the only option is to save all her travel for her 13th month, when she would no longer expect to come back to your home, thereby relieving her of any need to care about your family’s safety. And, by her 13th month she might have gotten a vaccine herself.

Nobody’s happy about the constraints on our ability to go out and have fun…but almost all of us would rather constrain ourselves than cause illness, suffering and even death to someone else.

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