|
Living in a high cost of living area means that it's between $12 and 20k cheaper per year to do an au pair, as daycare in our area is well north of $2800/mo for a single child. Nannies here start at about $24/hr There are risks on the au pair side, I'm curious if anyone has done this from the host side. On the coin flip, let's just assume that I've traveled before in my 20s, hosted a bunch of couch surfers etc and generally not a terrible human looking to exploit people Curious to hear from anyone who's actually hosted an au pair? Not just randos who read on the internet about how an au pair somewhere got stuck with a raw deal, that's not our plan nor is it related to the host experience
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 05:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 03:36 |
|
|
Hadlock posted:Living in a high cost of living area means that it's between $12 and 20k cheaper per year to do an au pair, as daycare in our area is well north of $2800/mo for a single child. Nannies here start at about $24/hr I’m not a rando who read about it, I’ve met two au pairs here in the United States that described their working and living situation to me. One married a friend of mine and immediately left the program afterwards. To provide some non negative feedback - she did mention that one of her friends in the au pair program worked with a very nice family that followed all of the rules. I guess it’s not related to the host experience but just be aware that the reason au pairs are much cheaper than nannies is due to weird labor laws and international visas, not due to any lack of ability or effort on the part of the au pair. If that sounds like a screaming deal, then go for it. Edit: anecdote is obviously not a substitute for data, if anyone would care to research or describe the legalities of au pairs I would be very interested. I don’t know anything about that, just relating what I was told. space uncle fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Nov 1, 2020 |
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 05:39
|
|
|
marchantia posted:Starting tonight we are pushing bedtime back 15 min. We are lucky we don't have to get up at a certain time so we let her sleep in until whenever, but pushing bedtime around in small chunks seems to have helped the last few time changes when we still had a set wake up time. Oof, we couldn't follow through with this correctly, so today our 6 month old woke up at yelling at "5:05" am. I kept trying to get him to sleep 15 minutes later each night, but he would always fall asleep on me at 7:15pm (15 minutes after his usual bedtime) so I just had to put him in bed, because I just didn't have it in me to wake up a peacefully sleeping baby after having worked so hard to train him for this bedtime already. Stupid Daylight Savings. Guess I just got to suck it up and try harder to implement it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 14:39
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:Curious to hear from anyone who's actually hosted an au pair? We don't really have them around here, but my co-worker had an au pair in NJ and talks about her like part of the family now (her kids are college grads now).
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 15:14
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:daycare in our area is well north of $2800/mo for a single child. Nannies here start at about $24/hr Jesus H Christ that price is shocking. Even the super fancy day program places where I live that charge “tuition” aren’t that expensive. I have a friend who was an au pair to a family with four kids, she ended up staying with them for three years and it was a great experience for her. She was able to get involved with a lot of local goings-on with her time off, got to take a few vacations, and the family was wonderful. She makes FB posts about missing them often. Personally, if my life allowed for it, I would love to have an au pair.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 15:18
|
|
|
Man our daycare when he was an infant cost $190 a week.. $2800 a month :-0
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 15:40
|
|
|
My son woke up at the same time on the clock as he did pre-time change this morning?? But it was an hour later? I wonder if he’s responding to the heat turning on in the morning instead of some other cue.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 15:52
|
|
|
sheri posted:Man our daycare when he was an infant cost $190 a week.. Trying not to post too much of a DnD post about this, but yeah, living in a place with minimal government regulation and funding of daycare just sucks so hard.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 16:11
|
|
|
We put our daughter to bed 30 minutes later than usual last night and she slept 12 straight hours and woke up at “6:45” which is 45 minutes earlier than the usual clock. Daylight savings was a great success. 12 hours straight itself is extremely rare nowadays so wins all around.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 20:03
|
|
|
My 14 month old goes to bed at 7pm and gets up at 5:15am or so. The morning part sucks, my wife and I do shifts (she gets up first, then I get up and she goes back to bed), but having a bunch of time at night is very nice.
|
|
#
?
Nov 1, 2020 20:42
|
|
|
leftist heap posted:My 14 month old goes to bed at 7pm and gets up at 5:15am or so. The morning part sucks, my wife and I do shifts (she gets up first, then I get up and she goes back to bed), but having a bunch of time at night is very nice. This is what we do. My wife gets up when he does, I get up a couple hours later and then she naps for 2-3 hours. Works pretty well so far because that keeps us roughly on track with our work wakeup schedules for the week on the weekend.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 02:57
|
|
|
Cool. So our son is almost 6mo. Our daughter just turned 3, and since #2 came along I've been doing her bedtime every night. He's been sleeping through the night(ish) for a while, and it so happens that their bedtime is at drat near the same time. However since I lack working boobs, I'm still doing our daughter's bedtime. Due to him being easier to put down lately, and our daughter being slow as molasses in getting ready for bed, sometimes Mom will finish before I'm done with her. So one night about a week ago she spots Mom in the hallway, and she asks that Mom finishes bedtime (stories/tuck-in). Fine, I think, Mom hasn't had a chance for a while, and I get to sit on my rear end sooner, so we do it. This was OK for a few nights, worked out that Mom was available. Tonight, however, our daughter was cooperative and actually made good time, so we're done before Mom is. She asks for Mom to do stories, but I dodge and get stories done. Great. Get her night light on, just about to have her hop in to bed for tuck-in and she starts demanding Mom. I tell her that we trade off, sometimes Mommy does it and sometimes Daddy does it, but she just melts the gently caress down. Tears, stuttering breath, the whole 9 yards. Got her to calm down a bit with the promise that Mommy tucks her in tonight, and Daddy does it tomorrow (because that'll work out  ), but it was so bad that when Mom left she melted down again. So not only do we have to hear her hollering, but there's a real risk that she wakes up her brother in the next room.Great. So now this is going to be the battle we have for the foreseeable future.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 03:03
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:
We had an au pair when my sister was 7 and I was 9. Her name was Charlie and she was Scottish and she was very cool. She took us fishing a lot. My folks are Facebook friends with her now. It was just for one summer, though, she was going to college somewhere nearby afterwards and moved into the dorms. I don't really know what boundaries were set, but she didn't cook or clean beyond making us lunch and cleaning up after our messes. She ate dinner with us most nights of the week and on the weekends went out and did her own thing. I think she had a boyfriend, and sometimes stayed at his place. I'd say it was a pretty good experience from the perspective of the kid, but I also think that Charlie and my folks just kind of clicked in a way that made things easy. It also helped that she wasn't ENTIRELY dependent on us, she had local friends and access to student loan money. It seems risky to me, personally. I'm not sure, even with my excellent experience with it, that it would be what I'd go for. Daycare is punishingly expensive, but the risks of inviting a stranger to live in your home who you have a ton of Responsibility toward seems very stressful.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 03:47
|
|
thunderdome winner
|
DaveSauce posted:Cool. Just stay consistent and it will pass. We had something similar with our 2.5 year old a week ago with a giant thunderstorm. Tried to resettle her 4-5 times only to have her wake screaming at the next big thunderclap. Attempt number 6 and with my eyes falling out of my head, worried my 4 month old is going to wake up, I asked her if she wanted to come to our bed. Slept like a dream, and after I got up to feed the baby, I put her back in her room to sleep. Then that night and the next 3 after she wanted to sleep in our bed, and the hysterics that followed when we said no, wow. She hasn’t asked the last couple of days, but I think next time I’ll get my yoga mat out and sleep next to her rather than being her into our bed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 03:52
|
|
|
Man we got a shitload of clothes from my big sister, who has had 3 sons (now ages 13-21, our boys are 7), we're gonna thrawl through them and keep what we like the most, don't got space for all these clothes. Rest will goto charity. These are all around size 160, boys are currently using 122-130 size, so they should fit in a few years. It sure is handy to have siblings with older kids. His Divine Shadow fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Nov 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 10:45
|
|
|
His Divine Shadow posted:Man we got a shitload of clothes from my big sister, who has had 3 sons (now ages 13-21, our boys are 7), we're gonna thrawl through them and keep what we like the most, don't got space for all these clothes. Rest will goto charity. These are all around size 160, boys are currently using 122-130 size, so they should fit in a few years. Yeah really. We haven't bought a single item of clothing for our newborn, and even told people not to buy for us, because we got so many hand-downs. That said, our son is around 95th percentile for length, so we may need to be getting a few onesies that fit better on long skinny babies. Edit: growing up, my parents didn't but us a lot of clothes, because my mom got a much from her older sister. Those went on through me and my brothers, and some went further on to my mom's younger sister and her kids. There are probably items of clothing that went through eight of us in total. Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Nov 2, 2020 |
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 11:30
|
|
|
A ton of people have given us clothes, which is especially nice since we have twins...it’s bad enough buying two of everything. We’re paying it forward for sure, my wife knows someone who has the exact same kid breakdown we do but just two years behind.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 13:04
|
|
|
Nice haul! I don't think we had to buy any clothes for our kid during the first year of life except for a few specific things we thought were cute. My coworker has a child who's about 18 months older and she pounced on me as soon as she learned we had one on the way. Bags and bags of clothes, shoes, toys...I thought she was just being super generous (and she was) until I realized we were doing her a favor too by clearing out her closets. And now two years later we're continuing the cycle with another family.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 16:40
|
|
|
Just found out our second one is going to be another boy-the genetics test just came back and all is well! On one hand I’m a little sad because we wanted a girl since we have a boy right now (wife was originally pregnant with twins-one boy and one girl, but we lost the girl early on), and a father daughter dance would be cool and all the other things that come with having a daughter. On the other hand, this kid is loving set for clothes!
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 17:12
|
|
|
We have two boys. The other benefit is they'll be able to share a room a lot longer.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 17:24
|
|
|
Alterian posted:We have two boys. The other benefit is they'll be able to share a room a lot longer. That’s what my wife mentioned too. They’ll be 2.5 years apart. At what age would you recommend putting them in the same room?
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 18:44
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:Living in a high cost of living area means that it's between $12 and 20k cheaper per year to do an au pair, as daycare in our area is well north of $2800/mo for a single child. Nannies here start at about $24/hr This is unnecessarily combative. If you feel like your personal experience and circumstances make it a good deal for you then go for it but no need to be a prick because people are pointing out the failures of the system. It's not just "randos who read on the internet about how an au pair somewhere got stuck with a raw deal", there's a long and documented history of abuse in the program even by hosts with good intentions and the best of plans. https://www.law360.com/articles/1320093 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/au-pair-program-abuse-state-department-214956 https://whistleblower.org/in-the-ne...o-protect-them/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/30/au-pairs-servants-legal-rights-government Also like others have said, the recent visa policies have made it much harder to get an au pair, and made it so that au pairs who are currently here are in much higher demand - meaning if they don't like their situation, they can shop around. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/business/the-great-au-pair-rush.html Discounting the particulars of the au pair experience so you can focus on the conveniences for you as a host seems like a good way to gently caress up before anyone even shows up at your house. Excelsior though. I'm sure there are some host-centric reddits or facebook groups if you feel like you're not getting the answers you want here. DaveSauce posted:Uh, note that an Au Pair lives with you. Full time. So, I mean, if that's not weird to you, then sure I guess because for 2+ kids that's usually cheaper than day care. This is where things commonly seem to go off the rails from what I've seen and heard - parents get home from work and want to veg out, assuming that their au pair who just loves the kids so much and who is the parent's new best buddy doesn't mind feeding the kids dinner or doing a load of laundry or whatever. And once you're on that slippery slope it's hard to get back into a regimented schedule that adheres to their hour limit. davebo posted:I'm sure abuse is rampant but just to provide another account, I had an ex from 2010 who had been an au pair previously in Seattle. We stay in touch and still to this day that family loves her and she stays in touch with the kids and loves them to pieces. Of course, there are plenty of positive examples and when it's done right it can be a great boon to both the family and the worker, but that's more the exception than the rule.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 19:09
|
|
|
nwin posted:That’s what my wife mentioned too. We moved him into the "boys room" when he was 1. He slept in our room until then. The eldest is 7 and the youngest is 2. The older one was insistent they share a room!
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 20:18
|
|
|
Our girls are 5 and 2.5 and I’m kind of scared of moving them in together because the younger one is a tyrant with a perchance for violence but the eldest is an 8 yo boy and he should probably get his own room now. Right now the youngest has her own room but she’s rapidly outgrowing her crib.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 20:28
|
|
|
I had a friend ask if I needed baby clothes and I had to tell her to not get any 0-3 month clothes since my drawer of that size is overflowing at this point. Baby has a handful of newborn size onesies that we rotate through and that’s been doing us just fine. 0-3 month is still too big for her at only 2 and a half weeks. We didn’t even have a Halloween outfit small enough for her, so we just put her in her adorable bat swaddle for Halloween. My husband hates dressing her in anything with long sleeves, so many of our pajamas and sleepers may go unused. Our house is kept pretty warm and it’s not like we’ll be going out much either. At least most of the baby clothes we got were cheap stuff my mom picked up from the thrift store.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 21:03
|
|
|
Mat Cauthon posted:Of course, there are plenty of positive examples and when it's done right it can be a great boon to both the family and the worker, but that's more the exception than the rule. Looks like there are about 20,000 visas issued annually. This makes it a target of conservative anti immigration (even if temporary) and pro labor groups. Every side can always pull out choice cases I still think you're way off topic, create your own anti immigration thread over in DnD or something
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 21:54
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:Looks like there are about 20,000 visas issued annually. This makes it a target of conservative anti immigration (even if temporary) and pro labor groups. Every side can always pull out choice cases I think it's a reasonable discussion point to bring up here. You wanted pros and cons and this is a big con. If you are seriously pursuing this, it seems like something worth doing research on in order to avoid seemingly common pitfalls. You can disagree, but telling people to shut up and go elsewhere sucks.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
Thanks Mat, this is the data I was looking for. Two really interesting statements here: "During 2017 and 2018, the Government Accountability Project surveyed 125 au pairs, the majority of whom had been working in that capacity in 2016. Of this sample, 83 au pairs said they regularly worked overtime, and many said they had reported it to their companies. Of the au pairs interviewed in 2016, more au pairs from Cultural Care and Au Pair in America alleged reporting working over hour limits to their companies than the companies themselves reported to the government." vs. "Despite evidence that some companies didn’t report allegations of extra work properly, the program’s advocates downplayed complaints. “If you were able to speak with about 125 au pairs who participated in the program, that is only .01% of the total 100,000 au pairs who participated in the last five years,” EurekaFacts, a surveying company hired by the Alliance for International Exchange to produce reports about J-1 programs, said in a statement facilitated by the lobbying group. “That is not a big enough sample to draw conclusions about the program as a whole.” But that's now how statistics works. Let's assume that our 125 au pairs questioned were a representative random sample and that the good and bad experiences of all au pairs fall on a normal distribution, then use some stats to see if 125 is a good #. n = 125 p = 83/125 = .664 = 66.4% au pairs report working overtime z =1.96 (95% confidence interval) Margin of Error = z*sqrt(p*(1-p)/n) MoE = .083 = 8.3% So if the 125 truly were randomly selected, then at a 95% confidence level, the margin of error is less than 10%. So while the official stat is 2/3 of au pairs report regular overtime, at the very last over half of them do, and maybe up to 3/4. This is why you only need to poll like 400 people in the state of New York to get an idea of how they're voting for president. Overtime isn't necessarily always a bad thing, but it is a little crummy if you're taking care of small children for 45 hours a week already and hoping to gain some cultural experience in America. A lot of the good experiences in this thread show that the au pairs really loved the kids and families, I'm sure some of us here were willing to work unpaid overtime for friends/family/jobs that we cared about. The whole discussion is probably pointless anyway because COVID has shut down the au pair exchange. Sorry for nerding out, we're still pregnant so I have nothing valuable to contribute to this thread, just enjoying reading everyone's experiences and picking up the useful advice/tips.
|
|
#
?
Nov 2, 2020 22:31
|
|
|
Our previously great sleeper has very recently turned bedtime into 3 hours of torture. She's 18 months old, and I haven't been this sleep deprived since she was 2 weeks old. We obviously made a mistake in thinking she was just having a couple of rough nights and would return to normal without interference, because once again here come the hours of screaming. Got a plan in place now, at least.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 06:00
|
|
|
Hadlock posted:Looks like there are about 20,000 visas issued annually. This makes it a target of conservative anti immigration (even if temporary) and pro labor groups. Every side can always pull out choice cases Yeah dude, I know you have a newborn and are in sleep deprivation hell, but you're still being overly combatative. The au pair program is an exchange, not an immigration program, and it isn't anti-immigration to point out that the way it's structured right now is exploitative. Anyway, a) the program isn't running right now, so it's kinda moot, and b) didn't you say you were living in a 2BR? That would get real crowded real quick. And no, it would not be ok to ask an au pair to double up with your kid in a room. Nanny share is likely going to be the way to go for you. It'll give your kid some valuable social interaction, and you're only dealing with employing someone, not employing and accommodating them in a high CoL area. But do look up what your local regulations are, as these may vary by state. Over here, a nanny is capped at two kids, so it's a 50/50 split between you and the other family. Do the math on a fair living wage for your area vs the cost of daycare. Also while COVID continues, make sure that you and the other family have compatible levels of caution/risk around that. You are adding each other to your social bubbles. And good luck!
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 07:14
|
|
|
marchantia posted:I think it's a reasonable discussion point to bring up here. You wanted pros and cons and this is a big con. If you are seriously pursuing this, it seems like something worth doing research on in order to avoid seemingly common pitfalls. You can disagree, but telling people to shut up and go elsewhere sucks.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 07:22
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:and b) didn't you say you were living in a 2BR? Nope Lead out in cuffs posted:And no, it would not be ok to ask an au pair to double up with your kid in a room. Yeah that would be insane for a number of reasons, we have a separate full size bedroom with a real door, window, etc on the other end of the house with a queen size murphy wall bed in it already, my mother in law has already spent the night in it and her only complaint was that the pillows are too flat (already fixing this) Lead out in cuffs posted:And good luck! Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 07:46
|
|
|
On a lighter note, why do they call then "receiving blankets"? Can we not get a more descriptive term, like "vomit receptacle" or "pukerag"?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
Everything about childbearing is euphemism, even "unbearable pain"
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 18:04
|
|
|
We were right  kiddo was waking up right when the heat turned on, so by changing when the heat comes on in the morning we are getting hours more sleep a day. If we'd figured this out 2 weeks ago we could have had so much more sleep. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 19:52
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:On a lighter note, why do they call then "receiving blankets"? Can we not get a more descriptive term, like "vomit receptacle" or "pukerag"? I always thought of them as the doctor holds one like a baseball catcher and the babby shoots out into it during delivery 
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 19:56
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:On a lighter note, why do they call then "receiving blankets"? Can we not get a more descriptive term, like "vomit receptacle" or "pukerag"? Well, in Germany they are called “Spucktuch” which literally means “pukerag”, so...
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
Sorry, what the hell is a receiving blanket?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 22:45
|
|
|
A tea towel sort of thing you drape over your shoulder to catch the puke when you burp them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 23:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 8, 2024 03:36 |
|
|
I've always called them burp cloths.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2020 23:10
|
|
