Voyeurism is a vice to which I am loath to admit. Although no journalist can pretend ignorance of its attractions, when tempted I prefer to think of it as social research.

It is in this spirit then that I have listened with appalled fascination when young au pairs living with us have explained why yet another friend has decided she can no longer stay with yet another Irish family. Again and again, I have found my sympathies with the au pairs.

There was the family who would not allow their au pair to use the phone. Not at all, not to phone new friends in the locality, not to arrange a night out. She had just arrived in the country, was struggling to find her feet and had apparently been retained as a chauffeur for the children since the couple already employed a child-minder. They expected her to leave their large opulent house in an inner Dublin suburb and walk in the dark and the rain to a phone box if she wanted to call a friend. They explained, as if it justified them, that an earlier au pair had run up their phone bills. I cheered when she left.

There was the girl whose hosts ran a restaurant and expected her to waitress as well as work in their home. There was the house which was so cold while the working couple were absent that their au pair took to her bed for warmth. There was the family who ate dinner at a round table watching a wall-mounted television and who seated their au pair beneath the television, so that her peak daily social intercourse was with a circle of masticating jaws and eyes fixedly staring at a point just above her head.

There was the girl who was alone in her hosts' house when the father returned and bedded a woman other than his wife with contemptuous disregard of the au pair's presence. She was so overwhelmed that she left without a word of explanation. This happened recently if anyone's wondering. . .

Au pairs arrive in our homes as young friendless women struggling with language and culture and with no training as childcare workers or housekeepers. They are intended to help out with babysitting and household tasks, playing the role in the family of a big teenage sister, able to share their woes and triumphs, encouraged to participate in every aspect of life.

We are supposed to offer them immersion in our language and culture and a safe growing-up year away from home in return for their cheerful and, let it be admitted, relatively cheap help. They are not intended to be professional childminders - they have neither the years nor the training to be mother substitutes, although to succeed in their stay they need to be warm, outgoing and sensitive with children. Nor are they intended to be domestic staff, an invisible "below-stairs" presence.

But in increasingly wealthy Ireland, this apparently is what more and more people want - a Victorian domestic army. Since my experience of au pairs started five years ago, the girls' stories have become worse. Each new little group I have come to know has independently reached the same conclusion - avoid rich families, they want you as a servant not a member of their family. These Germans (not exactly impoverished youngsters) have been astounded by the wealth and conspicuous consumption in Dublin.

When families were competing for an au pair who was seeking a change of family last year, I jokingly asked "well, did she find one with a swimming pool?" And was solemnly answered: "No, she decided not to go to that family."

Parents with an inability to see the need for mothering of these teenage school-leavers, frequently seem equally blind to their own children's needs. One couple left for a week's holiday a week after their au pair arrived. They left this youngster who was a stranger to them and to Ireland in sole charge of a number of pre-school children. An aunt would "look in". Had this couple somehow missed the Louise Woodward case? Had they put their imaginations into stasis?

Even seasoned parents and childminders find isolated care of young children physically draining and emotionally challenging. How was this young woman expected to cope with these children's needs? How were they expected to adjust to her? One year an au pair did not fit in with our family. After two months of effort it became apparent that neither linguistic nor cultural barriers explained her silence. She was sadly too withdrawn to relate to young children. However, she wanted to stay in Ireland and, having heard my view that she should only go to a family with older children, the agency decided to place her again.

I agonised over her reference. I wondered how I would balance kindness to her with my responsibility to the children of her new host family. I needn't have bothered. A family accepted her without a reference. I could only conclude that their childcare needs were so desperate that they too had put their imaginations on hold.

In an inversion of the television programme in which hidden cameras observe nannies, au pairs witness our failings, chief among them the failure to live as families. Too selfish or too harassed, a growing number of parents treat their houses as a pitstop or an enterprise, not as a home. When parents carelessly leave their children with strangers, when households never converse and eat in front of the television, there is no family there to welcome a foreigner.

mawren@irish-times.ie