Becoming a Host Family and Yet Still Au Pair-less in 2020
Au pair search, Childcare in CA, COVID-19 Impact
We love to host friends and family, and parties (before Covid), but we’ve never hosted a stranger from another country, who is under the age of 26, has to take “classes” for credit, and responsible for our children at the same time. Oh, and we committed to hosting for at least a year, even though we’ve only met them over video chat a few times. That might have sounded like a disaster in the making, but I swear we made the decision with sound judgment…except, the person we finally matched with was to fly out of WuHan Airport on March 11, 2020.
Let’s start with the bottom line: Childcare for ONE kid in Santa Barbara, CA, costs about $1300 - $1850 monthly, even though we share the care provider and the extra germs that come with daycare. An au pair costs about $1760 monthly (including agency fee, $500 education stipend, and incidentals), and they generally have no problem taking on up to THREE kids. They are in-house, so no running around coordinating drop-offs and pick-ups every day around the childcare provider’s schedules…and it lowers the rate of passing around germs. To summarize: Au Pairs are cheaper for parents of 2+ kids, more convenient, work around our schedule, and have a higher probability of keeping our kids healthy.
That was the short version. Read on for the detailed process from decision-making leading up to setting an ETA for our Au Pair's trip from WuHan to LAX, and ultimate delay...potential cancelation:
Our journey to becoming a host family began in the middle of the night, among the many sleepless nights that come with pregnancy, and charting out a plan for juggling 2 kids under 2…I was on my phone, under the covers, looking up information on what an Au Pair actually is (some parent friends had mentioned it earlier that day). Then, my thumbs just naturally registered our family to access a candidate search portal, after answering a few questions about our childcare needs. While researching and filling out questionnaires, it became pretty evident that cost of care will be a huge determining factor. Ah, but there’s a bonus factor for us: We are determined to provide a multilingual environment for our children, and now we can import the language environment into our own home!
The hard part was finding the right agency because their reach is very different, and access to care is dependent on whether there is a representative located within 50 miles of where we live…because that person has to initially interview us and survey our living space to make sure we are host worthy, and be able to check in once the au pair arrives. During the process, I recorded and compared the preliminary cost for the various agencies on this Google Sheet, though it excludes living expenses like food and cell phone bills, etc. The top agencies that met our criteria and could service the Santa Barbara area - AKA “greater Los Angeles region” - were: Great Aupair USA and Cultural Care.
Cultural Care granted me full access to their candidates upon registration, which is $75, but waived using their discount code. They are the only ones who have a Santa Barbara representative (Local Care Coordinator) and were plugged into the local community, so invited us to several events that allowed us to get to know them and their au pairs better in person. Their Matching Coordinator was based in Colorado, and I had to schedule a time to talk, so she can recommend candidates to us based upon our needs. Super nice and attentive service, you can tell they spend a lot of effort on the vetting process, and they subject their au pairs to a week-long training in New York before sending them our way. They, however, didn’t have a big Chinese speaking pool to choose from, though it did grow a bit over the months. We corresponded with 4 potential candidates, ended up interviewing 2 via Skype / WeChat, did not match with either.
Great Au Pair USA allowed me to filter and search through their candidate pool pretty easily, and for FREE upon registration. Their representative had to drive over from Oxnard (40 mins away), but their matching coordinator (Account Executive) was a total gem. She’s based in Texas, super experienced, responds right away, can be reachable by phone or email directly, no prior scheduling required. There’s no in-State training, so they could cut out any extra costs there, which makes them the cheaper option. For us though, it’s the fact that they have a China center - where they have staff on-site to vet and train Chinese candidates - that got my attention. We corresponded with 8 potentials, interviewed 5, proceeded to chat and conduct second interviews with 2, and matched with 1.
GreatAupair.com, Great Au Pair USA’s sister site for nanny/babysitter search without agency involvement, is kind of like an international version of Care.com without the subscription fee. However, unlike Care.com, the candidates are not vetted, so there could be fraudulent accounts listed. The great part was that I could find a person from anywhere in the world, based upon the language(s) they speak, and coordinate with them directly for hire. The problem with that is we’d have to screen them like crazy and help them navigate and secure a visa to get to the U.S. My inner optimist did look into this option and preferred it initially because we could then expand our search for older, more experienced, nannies from Hong Kong or Singapore (where visa acquisition was not as tough at the time), or who are already in the U.S., and coordinate with them. However, after 4-5 interviews, it was evident that if they are from overseas, it will require more logistical planning than I had brain cells for; and the ones in the U.S. sounded like flight risks, who could just bail on us whenever they want.
Why Go Through an Agency? This one I grappled with for a long time because I’d much rather pay the $9,000 agency fee to our au pair than some third party. However:
Going through an agency ensures that this person will be vetted and subject to a set of structured rules in place, built over years of experience overcoming unforeseen adversities. If the au pair violates the agreement set by the agency, they run the risk of losing their visa and have to be sent back to their country. It’s like having a system of checks and balances in place just in case things go south.
The agency conducts monthly check-ins to make sure we’re happy with our au pair and if not, to intervene and assist in finding a replacement from their big pool of other vetted candidates. The word on the street is that they are more attentive to Host family needs than the au pair’s needs, which makes sense because we’re the paying customers. Though we are reminded to set our boundaries and not exceed 10 hours of work per day, or 45 hours total per week, and provide at least 1.5 days off each week…Not a problem for us.
They deal with securing a visa for the au pair, cover the cost of airfare, and deal with the nitty-gritty logistics, so we don’t have to. Knowing that it’ll be our 1st year with 2 kids under 3 years old, I’d happily outsource the international travel arrangement job to the professionals.
To reiterate, we did try to find an in-home nanny in the U.S. through local bulletins, Care.com, GreatAuPair.com, and it seemed like that would’ve been ideal, but the candidates that seemed to have infant care experience, who also speaks Chinese, either didn’t exist, were too young, sounded like they would come for the wrong reasons, or were probably phishing scam bots who tried to avoid video chatting with us.
Once word of the pandemic broke out, it became more worthwhile to have agency support, to stay abreast of changing border policies, and help navigate the government websites that inevitably sends their visitors in a stress-inducing loop. Once you took all of the above into consideration, especially the time spent on each, the agency’s profit margins are really not that high.
Things we needed to prepare ourselves for as a Host Family:
Opting to share our personal information and photos with a bunch of strangers
Interviews and more interviews until we find the one. This is the most tedious part of the process! Figuring how to cut through the BS, reading the candidate’s true intentions, figuring out whether they are a good fit for us, setting the proper expectations, there can be a whole playbook written about this! We either find a responsible au pair that we can trust, or it’s not worth the risk of endangering our kids.
Being interviewed by the agency and having our house inspected to ensure the space is legit.
Providing a room and access to their own bathroom.
Putting together a daily / hourly schedule so expectations and boundaries are clear.
Paying a giant lump sum of about $8000 to the agency before the au pair’s arrival, and then an extra $500 for their schooling, on top of a weekly salary of $195 to the au pair for a year.
Trusting the house to a stranger when we’re away
What are the “other” costs that come with an au pair?
Taking them to the Social Security Bureau for an SSN.
Helping them adjust to our environment and figure out transportation.
Setting up and paying for their cell phone service.
Covering food and meals they would like to join us for.
Covering travel expenses that we would like them to accompany us for.
If we want them to drive: Providing a car and covering gas and insurance.
To be fair, their journey to becoming an au pair isn’t a walk in the park either. They are subject to:
Annual Physical Exams to prove they are in good health, confirmed by their doctor.
Multiple Background checks.
Multiple Interviews with Agency.
Check-ins with the Agency representative to provide progress reports.
Creating a self-introduction video in a language they are TRYING to learn.
Constant logging of childcare hours, upkeep for their profile, and gathering of references after every job.
Getting their parents to accept that living and working in a stranger’s house overseas for at least a year is a good idea.
And that’s all done BEFORE their profile goes live so they can start being interviewed! Once live, they are subject to:
Multiple Interviews with Host Families (until a match is made).
Happily providing meals and doing laundry for children that could potentially give them hell.
Potentially adding driving practice to their prep list, for Host Families who would like a driver for their kids.
Trusting a family of strangers to look out for them in a foreign country.
Adapting to a new environment, figuring out how to get around using a foreign language, and learning the nuances, etc.
Given how tedious the process is, why not just hire a nanny State-side?
Given that we were relatively new to the area and do not live near family, we would’ve had to spend the same amount of time searching for a proper nanny anyway. So, if we are to put in the same effort, at least we can create an opportunity for cultural exchange within our home. They get to learn about our culture and we learn about theirs. Both parties get an expanded worldview, and our kids can pick up a different language in the process. Win-win-win.
Unless you know somebody who is not properly trained (family friend, unlicensed Grandma) and probably prefer to accept cash under the table, an in-home nanny would cost MORE THAN paying double the childcare for us. They usually charge $20 per hour here and they can easily bail on you if they find a better opportunity elsewhere. We have a few solid nannies on call (if anybody needs recommendations for date nights and such), but somebody full-time that’s available at your beck and call is hard to come by here.
There are very few Chinese speakers in our neighborhood, so we wanted to find somebody who can impose a specifically Chinese-speaking language environment on our family, especially for the kids. Ideally Cantonese and Mandarin, but I can’t be too picky on this topic, because it’s hard enough finding somebody who can speak the proper dialects without an accent. Trust me, we’ve interviewed them.
When our au pair could not make it out here, we tried looking on Care.com and various nanny services and tapping into FB groups, etc…knowing that we would be foregoing the foreign language element. However, we’d interview, invite them over to interact with the kids, get close to giving an offer - despite them not speaking Chinese - and then either their availability changed, or they decided to work closer to home, or plans fell through, or something felt off.
So, what happened to our au pair?
After forking over the $500 matching fee, our au pair was supposed to fly out of WuHan (now popularized as the origin of Covid-19) on March 11, 2020. For the record: She’s from the outskirts of WuHan, not actually from the area that was heavily impacted thankfully. But alas, her visa appointment got canceled as lock-downs started happening throughout China in an effort to contain the virus. The agency continued to reach out and offer other au pair alternatives, some in-State and looking to extend their stay, some trying to find a new home to work for, some from a different country and doesn’t speak Chinese. None panned out and we didn’t want to settle for just anybody when we like the one we are keeping in touch with. She continued to shelter in place while watching her nieces and nephews and keeps us updated on any news she had access to regarding visa regulations on the China front. We opted to hold out and wait for as long as we feasibly can because we feel like we found a good fit for our family’s needs, and that’s not easy to come by.
In the meantime, both sets of Grandparents stepped up and extended their stay to help us get through the first 4 months of parenting 2 kids, and then intermittently thereafter. Fortunately, and unfortunately, I have been able to reduce my hours at work and work remotely, so when we didn’t have help, I’d watch the kids most mornings and worked the afternoons (when Husband would take over childcare duties), once our toddler was down for her nap. Thankfully, once baby #2 started sleeping through the night, I was also able to get my sleep back and can manage both kids on my own. However, once it was confirmed that international travel restrictions will persist through to the end of 2020, we decided to hire somebody temporarily through our church community. Working while caring for our children is not sustainable, or possible for an extended amount of time. So, the language element won’t be in place until next year, but at least we now know how to get childcare shipped over from Asia, 2 years at a time.