[shaftway]

Background: We're in the bay area and our kids are 10 and 8.

We were lucky enough to get an au pair right before the lockdowns started in our area (literally picked him up the night before local lockdowns went into effect). We've had really positive experiences with the au pair program in the past, and our current one has been great, so we've treated him really well. Because of that he's agreed to extend until next summer, and that application went through before visas were locked down. This means that there's a dedicated person here for the kids for 45 hours per week, or about 9 hours per weekday.

We have a decent sized house, but it's hard to get any real focus time because even with the au pair and school the kids don't really respect boundaries. So the kids do most of their schoolwork in their rooms or at the dining table. They work in blocks of about 2 hours, and I schedule breaks to coincide with theirs. During the breaks we try to go for a short walk or something to get the wiggles out, and then it's back to work. Tuesdays (and sometimes Thursdays) I go to my spouse's office where I can isolate and get some real work done until late. We trade that time for Fridays, when I stop work a couple hours early so the au pair can leave if he wants to. If I need to be able to really focus I leave the house and go to a park where I can tether and crank out some real work. This is difficult though, as I need 2 laptops and a phone to get work done.

This wasn't a traditional au pair experience, so we plan on some really nice thank you gifts for our au pair at the end of his contract, and hopefully we'll be back in school next fall and can go back to something a little more normal.

[shaftway]

Oh, one additional thing. We're applying for an IEP for our son. He's diagnosed with ADHD and at the end of last year he did not do well. We're asking for a few things that'll help him (and us) stay aware of what he's required to do for independent assignments. Last year he had four TODO lists scattered across email, Google Classroom, verbal assignments, and some other external system.

[actfrench]

Do your students use any digital learning tools like Khan Academy, Math Tango or Prodigy? Is it the same experience having difficulty getting them to focus/respect boundaries as it is when they have to do school work?

[shaftway]

They use Google Classroom for tracking work and Zoom for various video calls (full class, small groups, student 1:1, and teacher 1:1). The work is often assigned on other sites:

- Nearpod

- Classdojo

- Raz Kids

- BetterChinese

- Zearn

Probably others too.

[PenguinCoder]

What is the cost and experience of having an au pair, like ?

[jedberg]

You pay them a small salary and provide them with food, but the biggest expense is that you have give them a place to live, which means you need an extra room in your house.

[shaftway]

This is actually our 10th au pair, so we've had a wide variety of experiences. Some good. Some bad.

The cost and contractual obligations are easy. Agency fees are usually around $9000 for a year for a brand new au pair (it's cheaper if you extend). That covers them overseeing all aspects of the program, like background checks, facilitating contact, and organizing events for the au pairs. You pay the au pair $200 / week. I'd say our total costs are in the area of $21k / year. You also need to provide a private room for them. A real room. They can work up to 45 hours per week, 10 hours per day, no overnights and they need 36 consecutive hours where they are off per week (where "off" means they can walk out the door and be gone for those 36 hours). The contract is usually for a full year, but can be extended for an additional 6 to 12 months.

Usually our au pairs are responsible for getting the kids to school, picking them up, taking them to activities, and making sure homework gets done. This year will be...... different.

You can set up family rules. You should provide these before you match so there are no surprises (surprises are usually bad for both parties). Our rules are pretty simple; no drugs, no drunk driving, ask before you use the car, be well rested and ready to work, when you leave give us a vague idea of where you'll be and when you'll be back so we know when and which ditches to start looking in if you don't return. I'm happy to supply a redacted copy of our rules if you're that interested.

You don't need to supply things like a car or phone, but getting the best au pairs is competitive (I understand right now it's extremely competitive because nobody wants to, or can, come to the US). So we put together a kind of offer packet to make ourselves more appealing. We have a car dedicated for the au pair, but if they want to go more than 100 miles they need to pay for a service appointment. We provide a phone and a service plan. There's a community pool. And we pay for various memberships to amusement parks and museums so they have stuff to do (both with the kids and during their off time).

If things are going really bad you can go into rematch. Either the family or the au pair can trigger it, but once that's triggered the au pair has 2-3 weeks to find a new family or they are sent back. You as the family can take as long as you need, but you'll be without an au pair until you get someone. It usually takes at least 6 weeks to get a new person from out of country. It's hard for au pairs to find a rematch if they cause the rematch, especially given the short timeframe, so often they have to take a less desirable position.

We've gone into rematch twice. The first was with our very first au pair. She was really uninterested in the job because she was preoccupied with boy issues back home. The final straw with her was lying about causing a couple thousand dollars in damage to our car. The second one was at the beginning of this year. We got our first au pair from China and when she got here her English was significantly worse than when we interviewed her. The kids had a lot of trouble connecting with her, but we finally triggered rematch because she took a car she wasn't insured on out for coffee when nobody else was around. It was the third time she had done it, and after each of the first two we had someone who was a native Mandarin speaker explain to her that she couldn't take it. So in both cases the real issue was about trusting them.

We thought about going into rematch a third time. We had an au pair that was really good with the kids, but she was shockingly racist, bigoted, and fascist (she outright said people of certain races and certain religions should be executed, and when we compared it to the Spanish Inquisition she had never heard of it and then claimed that that was fake history and had never happened). It warranted a lot of discussion between us (the parents) and we decided to occasionally ask the kids if they heard her say anything like that to them. As long as she kept those opinions to herself around them it wasn't a problem, and it led to a lot of interesting discussions. Ultimately I think we softened her views.

We also had one au pair who ended our contract early. Our son has ADHD and he was just being diagnosed, so she had a really hard time with him. She decided she just didn't want to work with kids. She gave us a couple months notice which made it easy to get a replacement for her.

All in all it's been a very positive experience for us. The kids have had a wide variety of experiences with other cultures. Most of our au pairs have been European, so they've had Spanish, German, Austrian, French, and Polish influences. Our current one is our first male au pair (most agencies won't accept men), and he's been fantastic. He's from Brazil, so it's been an interesting new experience for the kids. My best friend married one of our au pairs (they were about 2 years apart in age) and moved to Austria with her. We stay in contact with most of them (even the rematches; our last rematch texted me last week asking for a couple of my recipes). We've also set up little vacation "franchises" around the world, and have traveled to Europe with the kids to visit ex-au pairs a couple times.

Happy to answer any more specific questions.

[PenguinCoder]

Great reply, thanks for the detailed information. Quite obviously during this time, having a live in au pair would have been helpful. I would be interested in seeing the specific rules you made, from experience (email is slightly obfuscated in my profile). I wouldn't be able to afford the 21k/yr price tag, even if that is a really good price.

[shaftway]

I separated the cost issue so it wasn't lost in the other wall of text.

I use a DCFSA (https://www.fsafeds.com/explore/dcfsa) to pay for it. Au pair expenses are a valid expense for this. Our marginal income tax rate is around 35%, so this helps a lot.

  Without DCFSA:
    Pre-tax Cost:  ~$32,300
    Post-tax Cost:  $21,000

  With DCFSA:
    Pre-tax Cost:   $21,000
    Post-tax Cost: ~$13,650

This is all an estimate of course (like increased insurance or rent on a larger place can't be paid for using a DCFSA), but it makes the point. So I think of the cost as around $13,650 for 45 hours / week, 50 weeks / year, 2250 hours in total. No matter how many kids you have.

If that big chunk is hard to swallow, the agency fees are ~$8000, and most agencies will let you break that up into a payment plan. The au pair is paid $200 each week, so that ~$10,000 is naturally spread out. The remainder is what we estimated our additional costs to be, like food, insurance, etc. and that gets spread out as well.

[shaftway]

The doc we share is pretty long, but it can be broken down into:

  - Welcome Message
  - Basic Information about the Family
  - Details about the kids
  - Health and Safety
  - Au Pair's Responsibilities
  - Sample Schedule
  - Basic House Rules
  - Pay and Vacation
  - Driving
  - Other Perks
  - Law & Safety
  - Guest Policy
  - Reasons We Would Ask You to Leave

Like I said, our issues have usually revolved around trust, but we have also identified a few things that are hard rules for rematch:

  - Drunk driving (we encourage them to take a cab or call us for pickup)
  - Hard drugs
  - Abuse of anyone, especially the kids and pets.
  - Neglect
  - Repeatedly not caring for the children when it’s their responsibility
  - Outright lying to us.

The other rules that really matter to them are:

  - No taking the car more than ~60 miles without prior approval and you pay for a service appointment. 

When an au pair has free use of a car, other au pairs in the area pressure them to be the driver for weekend road trips. We had one au pair put 30,000 miles on the car in a year because of this.

  - If you're going out for the evening let us know roughly where you'll be and when you'll be back, and keep your phone charged. 

We had one au pair that didn't tell us anything about where she was going, only a rough estimate of when she'd be back. At one point she didn't get home until 36 hours after she told us she'd be back. We had been calling police and hospitals in the area because we were worried about her. It turned out she had gone to a club with friends, met another girl there, the other girl offered to drive her home so the friends left, then on the way home the other girl suddenly deviated and went to a house party on Treasure Island (in the middle of the San Francisco bay) and then proceeded to get completely wasted leaving our au pair without a ride. She hadn't charged her phone and it was dead, so it took her a while to be able to get home. This ended up being a big fight about how she was an adult and could make her own decisions. It abruptly ended when we pointed out we didn't care exactly where she was or what she was doing, we just needed to know which hospitals to call if she didn't ever come home. She actually radically changed her behavior after this and we didn't have any more problems.

  - Don't use the phone for international calls, use Skype or Zoom, or WhatsApp. 

We didn't have a problem, but we knew a family that got hit with a $5000 phone bill because their au pair was spending every minute on the phone with family in Italy.

  - The au pair gets two weeks of vacation, but if we can select one of the weeks then they get an extra week. 

This isn't a hard requirement, but we've never had an au pair turn it down. Our kids stay with grandparents for two weeks each summer, so the au pair gets those two weeks off and it only costs them one week of vacation.

That's the important stuff. It's always easier to make the rules looser, so we start off on what we feel is the strict side and then loosen them up over time, especially as we get to trust them more.

[mke]

Which agencies have you used?

[shaftway]

We've used Au Pair in America (https://www.aupairinamerica.com/), but we are currently using Cultural Care (https://culturalcare.com/). I don't have particularly strong feelings on either in general, but we switched because our local coordinator had gotten pretty flaky.

[chispurger]

I don’t have any kids and don’t plan on having any. Just wanted to thank you for such a detailed explanation of what an au pair is. Also, I’m in the Bay Area too. Oakland. Hi neighbor.