Birth Control and Your Au Pair

by cv harquail November 5, 2009
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I wasn’t really ready to blog about this particular topic, even though it’s on the list of 378 topics I brainstormed 18 months ago… We got an anonymous comment on a different post that raised the issue… so here we are. It can’t be any harder to blog about than it is to do! You […]

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Choosing an Au Pair for Teens

by cv harquail November 3, 2009
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If you’re choosing an au pair for teens, what are the qualities you’d look for? I’m assuming that teens have different childcare needs, and we’ve thought about these in our earlier post… so how do we find au pair candidates who can do all this? I have no idea. My guess is that you’d want […]

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Beyond the Chauffeur: Benefits of Au Pairs when your kids are teens

by cv harquail November 3, 2009
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Au Pairs can be great companions and caregivers to older children…. and by older, I’m thinking teens. Yeah, yeah, teens think they are old enough to do without childcare — they can be at home by themselves, cook their own meals, get their homework done, and walk around with earbuds blocking out the rest of […]

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Choosing an Au Pair: Language as a Selection Criterion (Poll)

by cv harquail November 2, 2009
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What do you think of the idea of choosing an au pair based on her native language? Note: Choosing on language is not the same as choosing an au pair based on culture. Just think of the range of cultures where French is spoken!  Cameroon, Haiti, Montreal and Tuscany are  very different  cultures. Is there […]

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Her Language or Yours? Balancing different goals

by cv harquail November 1, 2009
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One of the oft-cited opportunities of au pair childcare is the idea that your children can learn another language from your au pair. Sometimes people choose au pairs to help them reinforce a second language that is already spoken in the household (perhaps, by one of the parents or by a child adopted from another […]

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Matching: What should a potential au pair tell you about herself?

by cv harquail October 23, 2009
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Coordinating with the previous posts about questions an Au Pair should ask a potential host family, what would you like an au pair to tell you about herself? There are perhaps 4,387 categories of things that an au pair could tell you about, so challenge yourself to offer maybe the top 2 or 3… This […]

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Bathe the Dog?

by cv harquail October 22, 2009
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“Is it too much to ask your au pair to wash the dog once and a while?” An anonymous person (host parent? au pair?) suggested that we address this question. Here’s my opinion: Yes, it is too much to ask your au pair to bathe your dog. Even a sweet, little, fluffy dog. Unless your […]

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3 Questions an Au Pair should ask YOU to make a good match

by cv harquail October 22, 2009
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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 […]

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How to be an Extreme Encourager: Advice from Christine Kane

by cv harquail October 21, 2009

Host Parents– Ever wonder how to help your Au Pair make her year with you as adventurous as it can be? Here are some ideas about supporting someone, from the (in)famous blogger Christine Kane (shared here in its entirety). Just a little something different for you…. Can you imagine trying some of these suggestions, and […]

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Cultural Exchange and Having an Au Pair

by cv harquail October 20, 2009
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Today I was interviewed by a journalist who is writing an article for a parenting magazine about the au pair hosting experience. One area she was very interested in was the idea of Au Pairs as a cultural exchange experience for the host kids. She wanted to know: How much of the host family experience […]

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