First Visit?

As a counselor , I have a couple of thoughts. Before your aupair arrives, your counselor can give ( the arriving aupair ) the names and email addresses of other aupairs who have a similiar schedule. There are only a certain number of plots to the novel and there is not that great a variation in the lives most Americans live. Somebody out there has a similiar life.
Your counselor knows who they are.
Once the aupair arrives, the counselor can put the aupair in touch with other aupairs whose lifestyle is somewhat like hers. Sometimes schedule is a greater bond than age or nationality.
I try to write to my aupairs before they arrive.
Lately, a number of aupairs have told me that they have , thanks to the internet , already made contacts and feel socially secure. The advantage of adult input into the networking process is that the counselor thinks of issues just like this one. She is looking at the process from an adult point of view.
Very few host parents have teenage children. At some point in your lives, you will be confronted with the fact that your own children’s friends have vastly different family cultures in terms of assets and priorities. That’s life. Consider this practice.
Frankly, there are many people who use up all of their permitted hours during the week and those aupairs will always have weekends off. There is nothing that can be done about this.
Respectfully, I disagree with the idea of having an aupair work on a Saturday night whether you “really ” need it or not. Aupairs ( and their friends ) are very astute. Nothing causes more resentment than this approach. I had an aupair once who heard her host mother say to her husband ” we have to go out because Lucille only worked 20 hours this week “. Another host mother told me that once her aupair was in rematch , she felt she had to ” get her money’s worth “. Word of these situations got around and every arriving aupair was ” coached by the local aupairs to be on her guard.
You cannot change your life not should you. What I have observed is that some little things go a very long way. For instance , every aupair I know was in awe of the woman who gave her aupair a present on Mother’s Day.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this blog! I just found it, and I was searching for something like this for months. Maybe you could publicize it more.

Grateful hostmom in VA.

Hi Maya-
Thanks for forwarding this link on to your LCC. I’ve been apprehensive about trying to get LCCs and agencies to promote the blog … probably because I feared that they’d balcklist it due to too many anti-agency/LCC comments– but my concerns about complaints have sure been unfounded… so I should probably rethink this?
thanks-

CV, just to let you know, I send my LCC a link to this site and asked her to forward it to other hostparent if she feels comfortable. She said she will. I do hope that other will join this woderfully informative place.

And to make a shameless selfpromosion, I posted a question on ‘Need an advice’ about car and gas costs with au pair, so I hope that I will get some responses for this soon. I would like to implement something starting in January as I have a new au pair (she has been with us for 3 days now).

Thanks again for creating this blog.

Hi, I am an LCC and I just found this site earlier this week and I must say WOW! I am truly impressed by the information given here and there is both bad AND good. There are so many bad sites out there just complaining… I was an au pair and now am an LCC, because I had a good experience and saw the bad situations too. I love spreading the word about au pairs and helping those who have hard time. There are still so many people that don’t know about this program or think au pairs is just a bunch of illegal immigrants…some bad emails I read… CV, I understand your apprehension about the agencies, but every family considering this needs all the information they can get and I like that here they can learn not only about the bad stuff… And most importantly, hosting an au pair is not suited for everybody. Thank you for this site.

Hi,
I’m getting near to selecting an Au Pair, I have top 3 Au Pairs. This is so difficult. When she is the one do you still have doubts? Each has one little thing I might change if I could and each seems so perfect in many other ways. I’m terrified and I’m not committing. I’m so afraid of making a bad choice. I’ve gone through ALL of your best interview questions. I’ve asked them all. I feel like the agencies are trying to rush me into a decision, and I will not be rushed. But I know also that I have to pull the trigger at some point. Could some experienced moms give me some advice/comfort/etc? How do I know that I’m making the right choice? How do I know which one is the one? I like the one I’ve invested the most time into, but I don’t want to choose her unless I’m sure I wouldn’t like someone else better if I invested more time. But then again, time is so limited. I’m spinning here in case you haven’t noticed. Could someone stop me and give me some comforting words, please!
Thanks,
Jenny

Also, I still feel uncomfortable until about their second week living with us when I can tell if it’s going to work. So maybe you need to re-calibrate your scale! : )

casey, you need to know what values you have, and what makes you special. it is this that will attract a good family to your application.

the fact that your english is already flawless is certainly a plus. do you have a hobby (sports, play instrument etc) that could find a potential match in the kids’ interests? where does your childcare experience stem from (eg tutoring)? that can also be a highlight in your application.

make sure you have a nice picture (one that also appeals to kids), submit a clean application with no typos, and have a set of questions you want to ask the families.

there is never a guarantee that you will have a perfect match. but if you ask enough questions, talk to the former AP if there is one, talk to all family members, and don’t pressure yourself to make a decision, then you should be happy with your decision.

Casey,
I think you’re asking some very relevant questions and you sound like you’d be perfect for many families. Sometimes we’d rather have someone with perfect English who’s enthusiastic and energetic over the cultural aspect (although your country has many wonderful things to share with a US family). You will find that adapting to driving on the opposite side of the road will come quickly, and as Dawn says, the religious aspects will either matter or not to a Host Family and you’ll discover right away if that’s a huge thing to them. Have you decided which agency you’re going possibly going to go with? You might look on this site for the address for a website that compares the different ones (I can’t remember the name just now, possibly AuPair Clearinghouse?- one of the women who works for it has posted comments here. As long as you’re open and receptive to a learning experience, I think you’ll have no problems. I wish you luck, and hope you have a wonderful experience in the US.

Jenny,
everybody has different criteria. I can see you dilemma.

For me, being 21 or over is a big plus, because we had a 19 year old au pair, and she couldn’t go out with a group of au pairs much, because in their regular gathering place ( an irish pub/diner, a student hangout) alcohol was served and she couldn’t get in. So being underage for drinking could limit their social options a lot.

I don’t think J has any advantage over S in watching 3 kids, because 3-4 hours very occasionally is really not much, so I would scratch that from my list of plusses and minuses.

The only minus (for me) that I see in S, is that she is not in college or wants to go that way (or maybe she does?). I like girls who have ambition in life and for them au pairing will open better job and career choices; I don’t want au pairing to be the highlight of their life. That’s why “open to extending” is really not a consideration for me, neither a plus nor a minus. But here I am talking about myself, you might have different priorities.

However, with the information you gave, I would lean towards S. At this age 2 years is a big difference, she might really know better what she wants, and have more realistic expectations of a difficult job ahead. She also has more driving experience and your insurance might be cheaper. Also, not being the youngest kid is a plus. You say both have extensive experience, but helping raise siblings is a more intensive and everyday experience.

Are they from the same country? Because for me, after certain good and bad experiences, some country preferences and “never agains” have formed.

Jenny,

common wisdom is that boyfriend at home is a minus, however I think it depends.

I haven’t had German au pairs so I cannot say anything about it.

You are absolutely right that with very young children education is not as significant as being a hard worker. It matters more for me and my own comfort and communication with the au pair. I speak though from a very unfortunate experience (that influenced me in this matter) – we had a rematch with an au pair who just turned out to be… dumb, I don’t like to say it, but that’s what it was, there was no way I could get through to her on simple things, and I gave it my best effort of 3 months. She couldn’t do her job satisfactorily because of it, she could not do what I asked. She graduated high school, but afterwards we realized she did it a year later than she should’ve.. we suspect a mild learning disability. Of course if spoke to her during matching for so long as you did with your candidates, for sure it would’ve come through a bit, so I think it is totally not a concern for you, but it made me a little prejudiced, at least for the next year’s match, while the memory of that mistake is still fresh.
With your candidate S., I am sure that being in a hospitality field, she had to be very organized, efficient, and able to follow directions, and work quickly – these are the qualities that in my mind being in college somewhat guarantees. So I think you are pretty safe on that matter.

Jenny, the good news is that it seems like you have two great candidates, so you probably can’t go wrong with either one! Like Anna, I think I’d probably lean more toward S, mainly because of the over-21 thing. Our APs have always been over 21, but I’ve seen how difficult it can be for their under-21 friends when they get “left behind” when the older girls go out to bars or clubs. Add to that the fact that J has a boyfriend, and you might have a recipe for some very serious homesickness — if she’s missing her boyfriend and often can’t go out with the other APs in your area, then she’s going to have a lot of “down time” just being lonely and bored. One thing I’d suggest is to ask your LCC (or whatever your agency’s local rep is called) what kinds of things the APs in her group typically do for fun. In my area, the APs will sometimes go to the movies or the mall during the week, and Thursday night seems to be “AP night” at Starbucks, but on the weekends they almost always go out to bars or clubs, so an under-21 AP would be left out every weekend. If it turns out that there are more things for young people to do in your area than there are in mine (or if there are under-21 clubs?), then it wouldn’t be as much of an issue. (Also, you could ask the LCC what the proportion is in her group of over-21 APs to under-21 APs — if there are a ton of under-21 girls in the group, then being “left out” of the over-21 crowd isn’t so much of an issue.)

Our first AP left us in the lurch after only 3 months because she never went out and just stayed home missing her boyfriend, until she became so homesick that she decided to go home. So I speak from experience when I say that your AP *needs* an active social life in order to be happy enough to get through the normal homesickness. She needs to “make a life” here in order to make it worthwhile to be away from the life she misses. Depending on what there is for young people to do in your area, that may be a lot more difficult for someone under 21.

(After our experience with our first AP, I would have said that an AP with a serious boyfriend is a definite no-no. However, our current AP — our best one yet — has a boyfriend, and it hasn’t turned out to be a problem at all. (I did ask about the boyfriend during the interview, but they happened to have broken up for a couple of months, and the interview happened to take place during that time.) Now I think that my advice would be to ask — as you have — whether the boyfriend is supportive of her APing, and also to ask her how she thinks she will manage the long-distance relationship. Our first AP’s boyfriend was very unsupportive — literally every time she’d talk to him, he’d tell her to come home, which certainly didn’t help ease her homesickness. Our current AP’s boyfriend is totally supportive and proud of our AP for going on this “adventure.” It also helps that now, as opposed to when we had our first AP, it’s so much easier to keep in touch via email, Skype, Facebook, etc., so the distance doesn’t seem so far.)