Au pairs - what EXACTLY do they do????!

[oneplusone]

Hi, am thinking of 'trying out' and au pair in the next few months. I have 2 DC's aged 4 and 2. The 4 year old is at school full time, the 2 year old goes to nursery 2 days a week, the rest of the time he's at home with me.

The reason i think i need an au pair is i basically feel i need some more help at home with the kids and the house. I have a cleaner who comes once a week which i don't think is enough. My DH works full time in a very pressurised job so i can't expect much from him. I do bits of work from home when i can and i also want to start a part time course at the local college in september.

Recently i seem to have caught endless colds/infections and feel i am burnt out and completely run down with trying to do everything myself pretty much singlehandedly. I have also had a huge amount of emotional turmoil in my life recently with various family problems (have another thread to deal with that!) and it has taken it's toll on my health i think.

So what can i expect from an au pair? What sort of hours do they do? What are the rates of pay? (I live in Surrey) What are the pros and cons? Where's the best place to start looking for one?

We are having a loft conversion done soon and will have 2 extra bedrooms and a shower room. The au pair will have one of the loft rooms.

I would very much appreciate the benefit of your experience. TIA

I would think anything that involves the DC. So, preparing breakfasts, helping to dress, taking to school/playgroup, ironing childrens clothes. possible time off during the day. Pickups from playgroup/school, playing/creating/doing with DC. supervising dinner and washing up. Cleaning up after the DC.
I have never had an au pair. Although I did work as one when I was much younger. Above is pretty much the day i worked so 7-10.30am then 4-8pm. with one day off a week.

Oh and I had to speak in English only. All the time to the DC. Therefore raising the DC as bi-lingual. (I worked in Madrid)
I must admit, i thought it was a brilliant idea and thought 'When i grow up and have DC and extra money, i would like a spanish au pair'. heee hee still no sign if one.

Sorry, not got an answer but another question for anyone who's had an au pair - which agency did you use (especially useful if you had a good experience with the agency)? I've found "Childcare International" and "abc Au Pairs" - what's the normal sort of fee they charge (Childcare International says £380 for a three-month+ placing) and is there any umbrella organisation? Or who regulates au pairs?

PS oneplusone, this seems like a comprehensive list (from Childcare International web page): An au pair will know that he/she will be required to help in the home with light housework and childcare. The acceptable duties of an au pair can include washing dishes, preparing simple meals for the children, keeping the kitchen tidy and clean, loading and unloading laundry into the washing machine, ironing for the children, vacuuming, dusting, making and changing children's beds, cleaning the children's bathroom, everything to do with keeping their own room clean and tidy, light shopping, walking and feeding pets, emptying bins.
We do not expect au pairs to be asked to do gardening, spring cleaning, window cleaning, cleaning the oven other than simply wiping it out, washing carpets, washing the car, the weekly household shopping, pet training.

(I like the bit about no pet training!)

Thanks sixer and doubledaisy, sounds perfect tbh! Just what i need, another pair of hands around the house, but not all day. The morning and evening chaos are the worst times usually (and sometimes during the day as DS is a bit of handful!).

Any idea of rates of pay? At this point in time i don't really care how much she costs, i think my health and sanity must be worth a fair bit surely?......

Seems about £60 to £80 per week is normal, plus you pay a one-off fee to the agency that found you the au pair. For a happy au pair I guess £70 would do it.

Any comments from the more experienced posters eagerly awaited...

I pay my au pair £60 for 20 hours a week spread over 5 days. Occasionally dh and I go out in the evening for half an hour or an hour but it has been about 4 times in total in 2 1/2 months, so I haven't asked her to childmind in the evenings much as yet but that's due to change. For one thing, having someone in your house so much of the time can take away time when you and your dh are alone, too. Our au pair has 2 full days off each week. I take her out for lunch now and again - about once a fortnight and some other small (low cost) treats.

My au pair works 8 - 9 am and then 12 - 4 pm (25 hours a week) for £60.

She helps get the children ready for school in the morning and then takes them to school. The later bit is picking up from nursrey and giving the youngest some lunch. She then plays with him until she picks the older 2 up from school.

Hi again and thanks to ruby and phraed for your replies. It sounds just what i need, wish i'd done it sooner but we just don't have the space til the loft is done.

What about things like meals? Does she cook her own or do you all eat together? Does she by any chance cook your evening meal??!!

And what nationalities do you have? I have found with my bulgarian cleaner, having come from a country where 'stuff' is not as readily available as here she seems to be completely taken in by all the marketing gimmicks that i just ignore. That's not really a problem but i also find she just 'loves' all the cleaning products we have here and uses them all very liberally everywhere. It's a bit ironic really as i am trying to be more eco friendly and make less use of harmful chemicals and i want to start using vinegar and bicarb etc to clean. I suspect she will think i've gone mad when i try and explain this to her as i think those are the sorts of things they use in bulgaria which is why she thinks all the stuff we have here is so amazing!

I guess what i'm trying to guage is how much of a difference in culture and habits there is between you and your au pair? When you are under the same roof i can see that minor differences may become very irritating.

my au pair is German.

She sometimes cooks an evening meal but usually I cook for everyone as that is technically her time off.

She is my first au pair and is a really nice girl. The children have really taken to her

We have au pairs. They get £60 + board for 25 hours per week (over 5 days) and 1 night babysitting. She helps doing:

Helping with childcare for my 21 month old - specifically carrying/lifting/chasing - all things I can't do due to disability. But mostly I am there. Sometimes she might have sole care whilst I have an appointment. She also takes him to his swimming class but this was above and beyond what I expected.

Cleaning - hoovering twice a week, bathroom once a week, keeping highchair and dining table clean, emptying the upstairs bins in to the main bins. Mopping the floor once a week.

help with meal preparation when I ask (and she cooks about once a fortnight)

All the family laundry

She has her own room with TV and hi-fi but she spends the evenings down with the family. Eats all meals with us. She goes to college 2 half days per week - we pay for her course.

We currently have a German and our next will be German too. Both have come from Aupairworld. No major clangers in culture clashes that we've become aware of.

My au pair is German. She's our first au pair. She does some food prep but can't cook beyond very basic foods i.e. baked beans and toast. She does some hoovering, ironing, no bathroom cleaning, no emptying of bins (my children put notes from school in their bins - cue "Oh, didn't I show you that, Mum?!" ) She does her own laundry but not ours apart from putting it on the line or bringing off the line occasionally. She does some childcare but not much as my two are teenagers and she helps dd with her German language learning. She does some pet care especially on days I work.

As for culture clashes, I find the criticism of the children and of myself hard to take sometimes and I have to be assertive without letting myself get cross which is hard for me. Also, the lack of please and thankyou i.e. when we go out to eat or take her to or fetch her from the train station or airport at some unearthly hour. Also, the assumption that she can invite family members here to stay in our house without needing to ask or say please when we twig what she has in mind! I have to work hard so that I'm not being taken advantage of and I find that difficult. She eats all meals with us but doesn't like a number of foods and yet complains that we don't have enough variety in our meals. We eat very well and cook most stuff from scratch btw. It's not always a smooth ride is what I'm trying to say. Overall it's fine but I'd put a 3 month tops limit on our future au pairs as it can get a bit much if the mix isn't great. Having said that, I've been writing to a couple of potential au pairs and I think they'd be a much better match but you can't perhaps really tell until they are here. I'd even recommend a weekend trial (at your expense) though we did that with ours and found out later that there was some selectiveness over what we got told and not told by her. This might sound a little harsh but I can't put more to really justify my comments here on the www. I'll just say that after hearing how she looked after her previous family's small children I would never give her a reference that could be used to have sole care of young children and that any idea I had of her babysitting for local families vanished in an instant.

I think some things can be addressed in the intial interview questions e.g. we ask 3 meal related questions:

1. what is your favourite meal, and what sort of food do you like?
2. what are your least favourite foods
3. are there any foods you do not eat?

Seem trivial on paper but we don't want a veggie, and if they list something that we eat often then it won't work. If they turn up and then announce they don't eat something - tough luck, I asked!

I also get mildly irritated by P's & Q's but I just make light of it saying "it's part of your cultural education to know we say please and thank you far more often". So for e.g. if my parent's take us all out for a meal and she doesn't say thank you, I will prompt her too in the same way I would a teenage child of mine. Now, nearing the end of her stay the current AP says all her pleases and thank yous without prompting!

Weegle and Ruby - just out of interest, which agency did/do you use to find your au pairs? Phraedd mentioned aupairworld - do you use them, or are there any other agencies you know that are reliable?

I've got a DH who leaves before I'm awake and is back just half an hour before the (very sleepy) baby goes to bed - plus the emotional turmoil thing, plus the colds/infections thing. A decent au pair would make such a difference to me.

A crap one, on the other hand, and I think I'd shoot myself. Or, more likely, the au pair. Which wouldn't help anyone, really...

I use aupairworld, not an agency. It's much much cheaper and doing the leg work yourself means you actually get a much better feel for the applicants than trusting an agency. It means you can ask them exactly the questions you want to without it being filtered by an agency and if you take up references yourself then that also helps reassure you.

doubledaisy I've looked at a number of agencies and websites but joined, left (thinking I'd be bound to find better elsewhere - nope!) and re-joined the new blah blah au blah blah pair blah blah website. Sorry about the extra words. As our PC is shared, I really don't want others living in the house to find and read my posts. I asked our au pair to write of her experiences as an au pair both generally and with us recently and was shocked when she wrote it and saved it (without being asked but using her initiative) in an appropriate folder in my name on the PC. Just goes to show that all the letters I have on here in that folder are accessible by others living here. Sigh. Must ask dh if he can password protect things.

By the by, I regularly read the au pair threads as they are a very valuable source of info even if you just lurk. A poster on another thread can recommend a good agency apparently. Look at ingles2's thread in this topic. Hth.

The poster on the other thread was me. If you want contact details of the agency CAT me.

I would really recommend getting one who can do some very basic cooking and can knock together some supper for the children from scratch if need be - just something like sausages and mash with frozen peas or spag bol. Our DDs became rather hooked on our fab Slovak au pair's stuffed cabbage!

I had one au pair who used to love cleaning all of my silver earrings!

I'm glad to see your post cloudberry. I didn't want to name you without your permission iykwim.

I second your post re: cooking MrsS.

I've had a few aps, mostly good experiences. But what I would say is that you must tell them in great detail what it is you want them to do, and then keep telling them over and over. Our current ap is basically nice, but rather immature, and clearly feels that her time here is all about her amazing experience abroad, and that she herself is of central importance. To the extent that I don't think she has yet understood that my children are the important thing to me, and that the reason I want her to live with me is to improve mine and dh's life and my children's life, not because I want to be her friend .

What she does is to dress kids, take them to school, pick up from school and take to after-school activities or bring them home and play with them. She makes their supper once per week and babysits once per week. I say that I expect her to be available every other weekend to come out with us, but she doesn't always have to. Our cleaner does all her cleaning and laundry and she doesn't have to do any housework at all apart from tidying toys away and putting kids plates in the dishwasher, that kind of thing. We eat together at the weekends but not in the week (our children go to bed before dh gets home in the week, so there was no way I was going to share him with an ap for that brief time I see him in the evening).

All this was agreed over and over before she got here. She's supposed to be up and dressed by 7.30, to get dcs dressed, but on day 2 I found her wandering in pjs at 7.50. On week 2 she told me she couldn't take dcs to school after all because she might get to her language class late. I said that was her problem and to take them to school immediately. I don't think she was meaning to be lazy or difficult, it's just taking ages to sink in that these tasks are not set for her to make her day more interesting, but because they are agreed tasks that are a compulsory part of her role.

That said we get on fine for the most part and she's nice, but I find being treated as surrogate mum rather annoying. Do others? Or do you like having an extra 19-yr old daughter? She asked to borrow one of my bags to go out with her mates this evening and I said no. Was that mean? The thought of getting into wardrobe sharing fills me with horror. She stomped out without saying goodbye, so I guess was p**sed off.

It all depends on the au pair. I worked as an au pair for a year when I was about 21/22. i did lots of things for the family including grocery shopping, taking pets to vets that I wouldn't have expected to do. Did the kids laundry and often cooked meals for the whole family. As a parent now I don't think I'd like the intrusion of someone always being there, but the family I worked for loved having au pairs and had 2 more after me. It felt like being part of someone's family, bit like an older sister to the kids and a younger one to the mom. The dad was out a lot with work/golf and I think the mom appreciated company cos we got on well ... I know other au pairs who's experiences weren't so good. I also know one who deliberately set out to split up a couple she worked for, and succeeded. Only heard of that once though (feel like the tabloid press now, sorry)

I came on this thread to find out what the going rate was for au pairs, so thanks for those who've cleared that up for me. We've had loads of au pairs and I think some of you are saints for putting up with what you've put up with: Rubyandgonumberonefan, I'm afraid yours sounds like a cow and is taking you for granted. Why are you taking her out for meals once a fortnight???

I have been using the Greataupairs website recently, after a recommendation on here. It's good value at c.£31 for a month's registration fee. The only problem is that you always have to keep several irons in the fire. For instance, I've found a great ap who can start in the summer, but now need someone to fill in till July, when she's free. Also, in the same way as you're looking at 3 or 4 profiles, they're looking at several families at a time.

I wouldn't recommend Smart Au Pairs as, having charged us about £450 (£80 for a drivers' premium) we got a Turkish au pair with a Turkish driving licence, but who couldn't actually drive. She left by mutual consent (part of the reason she needed to drive was to get herself out & about as we are quite remote). Would the agency return the drivers' premium? Not a chance. They have also only sent us 1 new profile to view in 1 month and that's a bloke, when our preference is for a young woman.

For all of you who have wondered about the agency I was using,
it's the one cheapskatemum is not recommending!

hello, I'm new to the forum and have found the thread interesting. I have had a few aupairs myself through agencies - my last summer ap was brilliant, but I have also had not-so-good experience with a smoker and one who couldn't take care of herself.
I am thinking of making direct contact via Aupairworld but have been told you mostly get 'wordly' and somewhat 'rude' girls from those sites. What do you think?

hello, I'm new to the forum and have found the thread interesting. I have had a few aupairs myself through agencies - my last summer ap was brilliant, but I have also had not-so-good experience with a smoker and one who couldn't take care of herself.
I am thinking of making direct contact via Aupairworld but have been told you mostly get 'wordly' and somewhat 'rude' girls from those sites. What do you think?

hello mama,
I have used au pair world a lot, but my experience was that while it is great for summer au pairs, if you want an au pair who will stay for a year, you would be pretty lucky to get one off aupairworld.