AU PAIR ODYSSEY

By Daniel Kadlec

I had just moved to a New York City suburb with my wife and the first two of our three children some years ago when a mildly panicked neighbor engaged me with her sudden child-care problem. Her nanny had quit without notice, and she was hitting me up for suggestions. "Have you considered an au pair?" I asked. Her response left me thunderstruck: "Never again. All they do is crack up your car, get homesick and leave."

Those were tough words to absorb. Only weeks earlier, our first au pair had arrived from Switzerland. We spent one restless night wondering, Who was this young lady with the purple spiky hair sleeping down the hall? But we hadn't encountered any real problems, and at that early date we were still confident in the arrangement. Not long after, our au pair odyssey began in earnest. It's no tale of tragedy, like that of Sunil and Deborah Eappen. But it is, I believe, an all too common experience, one that laid bare the flawed nature of au pair programs and underscored the chaotic state of child care in the U.S.

We were a "host family" to four au pairs in less than three years, all of them arranged by EF Au Pair, the same Cambridge, Mass., firm that the Eappens used. The spiky-haired one turned out to be our best, by far. She was warm and nurturing. But she disappointed us way too often. We chuckled at little things, like her sunbathing topless when no one was home (a neighbor reported). But it wasn't funny when we learned that she was handing our phone number and address to strangers at bars. Or when she stayed out until 4 a.m., forcing us to choose between leaving our kids with a tired, testy sitter and missing work. Still, we stuck with her for her one-year tenure.

We clashed with our second au pair, from Denmark, almost immediately. She was offended when I insisted on watching her drive before handing over our car. One day, as my neighbor had presciently warned, she was in a collision--with our kids in the car. The next day my wife started working from home full-time, and doing all the driving. Our third au pair, from Germany, was in way over her head. She spoke almost no English and complained that we hugged our kids too much. She left in a week. The fourth, also from Germany, had no energy. We literally had to wake her in the morning, and by early afternoon she needed a nap. She lasted eight months.

Did we expect too much? Were we unfair? I don't think so. When we finally hired a mature, full-time nanny, all these problems vanished. Why did we stay with EF Au Pair so long? The program costs a fraction of what a nanny charges, and the glitches didn't seem insurmountable. Besides, we really did want it to work. So what went wrong? It's clear to me now that there's a tremendous disconnect between au pairs and host families. Many au pairs are oblivious to the daily rigors that await them in tending to small children. Their main aspiration is to be far away from their own homes; girls just wanna have fun. To them, it's an adventure, not a job. But if it's going to work, it must be a job. Working parents of toddlers have little time or energy to indulge teenage naivete. It's all they can do to stay one step ahead of their own youngsters. Au pair agencies recognize the disconnect but do a woeful job reconciling it. Little wonder. If everyone involved understood one another, the programs might dissolve from lack of interest on both sides.