An au pair costs less than most forms of childcare, but making your home a workplace can be difficult. Catherine Cleary meets the parents.
You can see them in playgrounds and shopping centres in every corner of the country. They are usually a little less ragged and milk-stained than at-home mammies. They are the fresh-faced army of au pairs, young students and workers who come to Ireland every year.
With creche costs high, they are the cheapest form of paid childcare available to working parents. The hands pushing those expensive buggies are usually being paid between €3 and €4 an hour, plus bed and board. They fall outside the rules of the minimum wage, because their pay comes in the form of pocket money of €80 to €100 a week. Throw three children into the equation, and a €400-a-month au pair can cost a fifth of the creche fees for the same number of children.
But, like any great deal, it comes at a price, with families having to open their lives and their homes to someone they may only have spoken to on the phone or seen on a website. When the relationship works, an au pair can become an invaluable asset and friend to the family. When it doesn't, an au pair can feel exploited or parents can find themselves taking on a hapless, homesick young person who needs almost as much minding as their children.
Renate Kurzmann came to Ireland from Austria when she was 18, in 1993. Her first three experiences with Irish families were not good. The problems ranged from personality clashes to finding out that the children were at a creche all day and she was really required as a live-in cleaner.
Finally, she settled with her fourth family. Just before it was time to return home she met James Kinsella. Four years later she came back to Ireland, and they married. Now they have two daughters, six-year-old Ariana and two-year-old Vita, and they employ au pairs from Austria and other countries to look after them.
Having experienced both sides of the relationship, she can spot the best indicators of an au pair who will work out. "Some au pairs with boyfriends are not a problem, but if they are attached then they are usually not as willing to embrace living abroad. Spending three or four hours a day on Skype to your boyfriend is not really immersing yourself in a new country."
Kurzmann, who is a research fellow and lecturer at University College Dublin, says her au pairs have been like second mothers to her children. "I'm not a great believer in creches and prefer the idea of one-to-one care for smaller children. It's not good that the au pairs change all the time. The ideal situation would be a nanny, but we couldn't afford it."
She has never taken an au pair for less than 12 months, and they have become firm friends with some of the young women. "People don't just disappear out of our lives." Her advice is to ask a potential au pair about her experience of children, her ideas about discipline and what she expects to get from the experience, as well as to look for two references. "If the first question is 'Can my boyfriend come over?' or 'Do I get computer access?' or 'What's in my room?' instead of asking about the kids, then that's usually not a good sign."
The ideal house is one where the au pair can have her own space, including a bathroom and other facilities. If Fionnuala Brennan and her husband go ahead with building an extension at their home, in Tramore, Co Waterford, they will factor an "au pair room" into the plans. Brennan's Polish au pair, Agata Surgot, has spent three summers with the family and is returning to their home next month, having finished her degree, to live in their four-bedroom semi and work with them for up to a year.
"We've been very lucky with Agata. It's all very personality-based, and her personality matched with ours. We've been very informal with her, but that worked out all right. Certainly, if we were getting another au pair I would recommend that you write out what you expect, so that everybody knows where they stand."
Surgot will work a 30-hour week with the couple's three children and do one night's babysitting, as well as an hour's minding one evening a week, to allow Brennan and her husband to go for a walk. During the summer Surgot ran a "back-garden cup" for their six-year-old son, dreaming up competitions to keep him entertained on long sunny days. "She has an incredible work ethic and also takes a no-nonsense approach to the children, with a similar attitude to child-rearing as ourselves."
In the three summers she has been with them she has never sat down in the evening with Brennan and her husband to watch television. When she clocks off she is gone. She has her own key to the house, shares a bathroom with the children and has her own room with a computer and broadband access. Boundaries are important, says Brennan.
By contratst, another family with five small children, including two sets of twins, found their Canadian au pair friendly to the point that she was buying beer to drink with the parents in the evening. "The lines got blurred, and it was difficult."
There are worse stories. Another mother, Janet sat down at her 10-year-old daughter's computer one afternoon and clicked on the History button to find the sources her daughter had used for a scrapbook. There, she found a pornography site that had been visited twice. She took a deep breath and picked up the phone to her husband at work.
"I said to him: 'I really don't care what you were doing, but you have to tell me if it was you who looked up this stuff.' " Her husband laughed and asked what time it had happened. At 9pm that Monday evening he had been putting their three children to bed. Their young au pair had been on the computer.
The au pair was horrified at being discovered. Janet told her she could look at whatever she liked on a computer but would have to go to an internet cafe to do it. The au pair apologised profusely. "I could tell by her reaction that she had never done anything like that before," says Janet.
Three months later the au pair threw a dinner party for her Irish boyfriend and another couple while Janet and her husband were away. When their eldest daughter walked into her parents' room in the middle of the night, to tell the au pair the youngest boy was crying, she found the strange couple in her parents' bed. "Things went downhill after that," says Janet, describing the end of her first au-pair experience.
Dublin mother Miriam and her husband found their first child's creche inflexible and overcrowded. So they decided to try an au pair and found a young Polish woman who worked out very well. Unfortunately, her replacement was "pretty unhappy all the time", so things were not so good. "From the moment she got off the plane I sort of knew things were not going to work. We did try to make it work, but at the time we were both stuck into fairly full-time jobs."
Now they have three children and a full-time, live-in South American housekeeper. "She really loves children, and she puts them as the priority, which is exactly what you want. One of the problems with the second au pair was she didn't talk to our son at all. She would just put him in the buggy. You can be lucky or unlucky. After that experience we were put off the au-pair idea."
Miriam agrees that the au-pair arrangement works best when one or both parents are working flexible hours and the au pair is a back-up rather than the main carer.
In all the choices and difficulties parents have over childcare, the needs of the child are a huge factor. The question arises of whether having a non-English-speaking carer will affect the language development of a child. Marie Murray, director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital in Fairview, Dublin, believes very young babies need a motivated carer who will speak to them and respond as if they can understand from the very earliest stage of development. She would not recommend handing over a very young baby to a homesick non-English-speaking teenager with no experience.
"Turn-taking is a critical factor in communication, and that begins so early, like clapping hands, making a face and waiting for a baby to respond. All those early interactions when parents talk to a baby as if they can understand are attuning the child's ear to language. A newborn has the propensity to speak any language, and they are usually immersed in the language of their parents and the culture. There's always comprehension before articulation."
Interaction with adults, preferably one to one, is crucial to children's language development, Murray says. "That's the reason to talk to babies, even very small babies, initiating a response and repeating patterns. Language therapists are the real experts, but from a psychological point of view it's all about expansion of language. When a child says, 'Mammy home,' a parent says, 'Yes, Mammy's home now in her car.' So they affirm the child is right and give them a model for an extended vocabulary. "
Attachment issues can arise, depending on the amount of time children spend with the stable set of people who are there predictably day in and day out, she says. "There's a vast different between a mother who is at home and where there is an au pair who is not the primary carer. Older children who can articulate it can be really very upset when a childminder leaves."
The other alternatives to caring for children in their homes are much more expensive than an au pair. Iverna Hynes runs the Hynes Agency in Dublin, where au pairs are a small part of its business. "By definition they are not liable to pay PAYE or PRSI, because they're here on a cultural exchange. The majority are students, and they're usually quite young girls without a lot of experience of children."
The agency supplies childminders who will work in the child's home. The cost, of up to €14 an hour, will cover a part-time or full-time minder who might pick a child up from school and stay until the parents return from work. A large part of its business is providing "family helpers". "These are usually Eastern European girls, and are an extra pair of hands. They usually have full driving licences and are more mature than an au pair." For a 39-hour week a family could expect to pay €350 after tax. A nanny could cost up to €600 a week after tax, and could live in or out.
"When people ask me about choosing someone, I say references, references, references," Hynes says. "And speak to the referee. You'd be amazed at the number of fakes we see. The person at the end of the phone could be a family member or friend, and the only way of seeing through that is experience . . . You need to be absolutely secure in choosing someone to mind your children, use a reputable agency. Unfortunately, some people put more effort into choosing a car than choosing a minder."
The Hynes Agency can be contacted on 01-8728170 or www.hynesagency.ie
CHILDCARE COSTS
Au pair: Typically €80-€100 for 25 hours a week and one night's babysitting. Bed, board and, sometimes, travel costs and language-school fees are provided by the family.
Childminder: The National Childminding Association of Ireland recommends a weekly rate of €170-€190 for a 40-hour week, with payment for bank holidays, children's sick days and parents' days off.
Creche: A 2005 survey found costs of €700-€1,100 for a month's creche care for a baby and €630-€900 for a toddler.
Nanny: Up to €600 a week after the employer has taken care of tax and PRSI payments.
AU PAIRS: A PARENTS' GUIDE
Talk: From the first meeting, talk about what the au pair wants from the exchange, their ideas about children, flexibility for babysitting and whether they will be responsible for cleaning up after themselves or the children. If you are given contact numbers for other families, follow them up and ask for a landline number.
Listen: If the au pair seems more interested in the broadband access than the baby, maybe it's best to go onto the next candidate on the list.
Keep talking: If something happens that you're not happy about, don't let it fester.
Set boundaries: When you say "make yourself at home" be sure that you are okay if they run up a large phonebill or have a boyfriend spend the night. While making her welcome remember the au pair needs her own space. Ensure her time off is really her own.
Respect your spouse: Concerned that a fragrant young woman in the house might be a temptation to your husband? You can always take radical action and go for a male au pair, or what Americans are calling a "Hairy Poppins."