We have had several au pairs before. We pay them really well, they are ancillary to main childcare, form part of our lives, they usu choose to stay with us until end of visa and we have had multiple cards on leaving saying we are best employers, they love us all etc. I was an au pair myself and travelled a lot so really try and understand that this is their big life experience and make it great for them etc.
(Just to make clear we are not horrible or anything!)
New au pair has been with us two months and is super sweet but super homesick. She comes from a culture with huge families that all live on top of one another and go to church a lot etc, very tight community and see childcare as part of doing service etc.
She came to us via an awful job where I have independent evidence that the employer was very exploitative. She’s been with us a couple of months. She is I think really homesick. Because her home life was quite sheltered and particular, I think the ‘real world’ is coming as a hell of a shock. She’s finding it hard to meet friends outside church, and the church congregation she’s found where we are runs a bit older (er - like pensioners!). The religious aspect is so important that it HAS to be this particular version of Christianity iyswim, she’s not very open to just say finding a group of young practising Christians and hanging out.
I have given her A LOT of emotional support (I really like hearing about au pair’s lives normally) but I feel like it’s getting beyond what we can give now. We are actually having one of the most stressful times of our lives right now but she is kind of oblivious as she’s just so engulfed in how down she is, how homesick she feels, what her mom thinks, etc etc, that she doesn’t have that much room left to think ‘now what can I do for them?’ Normally I think that it’s so great that au pairs now can contact home so easily and frequently these days, but she is spending hours on FaceTime feels like she is not turning her face away from home enough to settle in?
She’s in her twenties btw with several years childcare experience.
Also All our previous au pairs saw their room as a refuge from us/kids/whatever. We are 100% respectful of that and I or kids never so much as put our noses in it... but I think she’s the type of person who just sees her room as somewhere to sleep and get dressed, then she’ll be in the tiny sitting room or kitchen all the time. So like, for example, the whole place is an absolute tip from various domestic crises, she will not be officially working which is absolutely fine , but will just sit in the middle of the bomb site sitting room as me and DH run around her trying to clear up and get it tidy, manage kids, sort laundry etc and tell us how down she was yesterday, and how there’s no young people in her church, and what her mom said about that, and what her brother said, etc etc. But she is sort of oblivious to how busy we are and wouldn’t occur to her to help? So I just end up going ‘mm-hmm, mm-hmm, sorry, I just have to do xyz’...
I do have proper separate chats with her about her life, her family, where she’s going with her life, but to the point where I think she feels like I’m always on tap for this kind of talking therapy.
And she is very direct, so can be quite like ‘okay so I’m going out tonight so what time is dinner’ which when I write it down seems fine obviously, but the delivery of it comes across a bit more like ‘when are you serving up my dinner, lady?’ This probably comes from her culture where they all sit down without fail for a big dinner and the women from what I can see donall the cooking serving cleaning up etc, but I just feel a bit like she’s quite a demanding seventeen year old and I’m her mum if you know what I mean? How would you handle this?
Sorry this might be a bit incoherent, it reminds me of the thread on here recently where the au pair followed her boss around... I find myself hiding in my room a lot, I feel so bad!!!!