Au pairs: cheap childcare or a helping hand?

Shortly before Spanish law student Agueda Palomino finished as an au pair in Co Galway last year, she suggested to the mother of the three children she had been helping to mind that they set up their own agency.

“A lot of my friends are looking for families and you’re always talking about your friends looking for au pairs,” she pointed out to Kathleen Lynskey.

A secondary-school teacher who has had only positive experiences with au pairs, Lynskey thought it was a great idea and they established LinkIrelandSpain. They say they know the importance of preparing and mentoring both the au pair and the host family, and have placed dozens in the past year, primarily in the Galway area.

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Kathleen Lynskey (left) with her children, Liam (four and a half years), Timmy (6) and Simon (7), with Spanish au pair Noelia Herrero Vazquez. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy

From Seville but now working as a lawyer in Madrid, Palomino, who is 24, says she loved being in Galway and that the Lynskeys became “my second family”.

“I wanted to work as an au pair because I love children,” she explains. “I have to learn English and it is a good way.”

According to Lynskey, “When it works, it works really well. When it doesn’t work, it can be a disaster.” It’s a neat summing up of the whole au pair scenario, which is under increasing scrutiny as it becomes a more popular option for families.

On the one hand, you have both au pairs and families who see it as a win-win situation: young adults can live here for up to a year, at no expense and with “pocket money” of at least €100 a week, to immerse themselves in a foreign language and culture, while the families have help with childcare.

On the other hand, you have the term “au pair” used as a seemingly respectable veneer for securing cheap childcare by families whose needs far exceed what was envisaged in the 1969 European agreement – which was never ratified by Ireland – on au pair placements.

There is no official recognition of au pairs in Ireland, which not only leaves young people vulnerable to exploitation but means well-intentioned families may be falling foul of employment law.

“I don’t think some people really understand the concept of au pairing,” says Lynskey. “An au pair is supposed to get something out of this relationship as well. People think au pairs just come and do everything for them and get nothing in return.”

For example, she had to tell a woman who had three children and was expecting a fourth, and who was planning to return to work after three months, that no, she couldn’t find an au pair for her.

Au pairing is not about little babies, she stresses.

She heard another story of an au pair, not one of theirs, who had been in Ireland for a month when the parents went to Italy for nine days, leaving her at home with their four children.

Home visit

Sean Kavanagh

, who runs the much bigger and longer established SKDublin agency, says a staff member always visits a family who is taking their first au pair from them.

“It is really important for us that a family’s expectations are realistic,” he says. “We ‘reality check’ them if necessary.”

His agency, which has placed about 3,000 au pairs since 2001, works only with Europeans: German, Spanish, French and Italian. It is made clear to families that these are young women who may be leaving home for the first time and whose cooking skills “will be basic, at best”.

Kavanagh sees it as the agency’s role to “weed out” unsuitable families. For example, if parents have two children under three, and are leaving the house early to commute to work, and returning late, this is viable only if the au pair is to be used in combination with other childcare arrangements.

SKDublin stipulates that an au pair should not work more than 35 hours a week, along with one night’s babysitting (or 30 hours plus two nights’ babysitting) for a minimum of €100 pocket money and full board and lodging. However, he says families are always encouraged to pay a bit more.

All terms are agreed in advance, “so there are no surprises”, he says. The family has been told the au pair is “not allowed to clean bathrooms and toilets; she doesn’t scrub floors; she’s not the cleaner”.

But the unknown factor is always how the au pair gets on with the children. The most common reason for a placement breakdown is that the au pair finds it difficult to manage the children.

“They may find it hard to be assertive in a foreign language,” he says. However, while the agency recommends parents outline their discipline procedures, “we don’t feel it is the au pair’s job to be disciplining the children all the time. If there is bad behaviour, the au pair reports it to the parent, who takes the disciplinary action.”

Au pair websites

Families are advised to build up a positive relationship with the au pair, pay pocket money on time and set hours weekly in advance.

"A family needs to know that it has to be working well for the family, for the children and the au pair," he says emphatically. "It is one thing getting the au pair, it is another thing keeping her."

If either the au pair or the family feel it’s not working, he adds, “we step in and negotiate the end of the relationship”.

This backup is one of the main advantages – for both sides – of using an agency. However, au pair websites are very popular and much cheaper. Indeed, before setting up her agency, Lynskey used websites to source au pairs, including her current one, Noelia Herrero Vazquez, who is 24.

“I think I had the skillset to decipher the girls very well,” she says. “I also had the time.” After they arrive, she puts a lot of effort into making it a positive experience for both sides. “I can’t describe how I am going to feel when Noelia leaves on June 9th. Hand on my heart, she is going to be forever in our lives. I would say the same about the other three.”

Kavanagh says using an agency gives families a higher chance of getting a more committed person.

“The au pairs who we are offering have gone to a local agency in their own countries and they have been interviewed and told exactly what to expect from the au pair programme, so they are not just going willy-nilly on to a website and registering free.”

First-time au pair Sonja Kühne, who is 23 and studying primary-school teaching in Heidelberg, Germany, used an agency because she felt it was safer than the internet.

“I have people who I can talk to if I have any problems or if I want to change my family.” But, as it turns out, she is very happy in the home outside Arklow, Co Wicklow, where SKDublin placed her.

“I decided to come here because I wanted to improve my English. We have to go abroad for at least six months [during our course] and I didn’t want to study abroad, so I decided to [be an] au pair and I always wanted to go to Ireland.”

She arrived on March 31st and settled in quickly. “The family is really nice and we did a lot of things together the first days.”

She gets up at about 7.30am on weekdays and helps to get the three children, aged 10, eight and six, ready for school. “I do a bit of housework in the mornings and the kids come back in the afternoons.”

Kühne is the family’s sixth au pair and mother, Rebecca Snell, tends to favour Germans. “Their English is that bit better and they have more old-fashioned values and discipline,” she says. “Chaos doesn’t work in our house.”

While she gives her au pairs a list of chores, “I would be pretty flexible about when they do them and how often . . . as long as the place is kept in some order”, says Snell, who is a primary-school teacher.

She had tried a combination of creches and after-school care but, apart from the expense, the logistics were difficult too. She knows some families exploit au pairs, having them work “ridiculous hours” and do loads of housework. “I think it is a pity they would leave our country with this view of us.” Their au pairs have all returned for a visit.

Language school

With a new au pair you have to be very patient and remember that they don’t know the house

or the children, and that it will take them much longer to do things, she advises. “You have to realise that they are away from home: just make sure they are happy and things will run a lot smoother. You have to look out for them.”

The biggest challenge so far, says Kühne, is the youngest child who is six “and a bit bossy” but “I think he likes me, and I like him of course, and it’s okay, we’re going on well”.

She meets plenty of other au pairs through language school twice a week in Arklow, and they meet up at weekends. Most seem to be happy with their families, she says, including those who came through websites, and she hasn’t heard any bad stories, at least “not yet”.

The weekend after we speak she is joining more than 50 other au pairs on a bus tour organised by SKDublin to Galway and the Cliffs of Moher.

Kühne’s parents, and later a friend, are coming over to visit. An SKDublin survey found its au pairs have, on average, six people visiting Ireland during their stay.

The young German adds that she loves the countryside and experiencing “a life that is completely different from my life at home. The landscape here, the life here and meeting many other people: it’s really great.”

swayman @irishtimes.com