Grubstake Mindset – Latter-day Saint Au Pair

In the US – is there a distinction between au pair and (live-in) nannie?

Aside – a successful female administrator at my ex-unversity had three nannies, working shifts round-the-clock (one, I think, lived in) and they took two on ‘family’ holidays. I read an article about how she was an exemplary modern woman in ‘combining’ career and children…

I’d be very cautious in this day and age of sex addicts, abusers, hidden cameras, lawsuits, defamation, etc. to engage in anything like this either as an employee or employer.

It’s already enough of a risk accepting a calling to work with youth (youth protections notwithstanding) or sending your youth of to work with adults. An adult trying to do the right thing by a troubled youth, can end up having their life ruined. A parent or youth trusting in authority can be irrevocably scarred.

It’s unfair from every perspective. It’s unfortunately fear based, but the risk/reward is just not worth it.

Being from Alaska,

The saying goes (and the saying is quite true): For women in Alaska, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

The other (quite true) saying is: Alaska girls become the men they always dreamed of marrying.

Y’know what other business is booming? Cleaning services. Everyone has had to live in their own filth for months on end now (instead of just ignoring it because they’re gone most of the time anyway), and they’re tired enough of it to be willing to shell out cash. I have more work than I know what to do with currently, without even looking for anything. If you can keep a clean house, you can bet you could be making money at it.
@ IAW,
Both of those sayings are gems, and quite accurate if the Alaskans I know are any indication.

Source: me, I’ve had au pairs for years.

@brucecharlton: In short “yes”, there is a distinction. In the US, the Au Pair program is a special foreign visa program run by the Department of State, and nearly everyone goes through agencies for a fee of around $8-10K a year, and which cover a lot of the overhead to include health insurance and all the employee-employer legal details. Au Pairs are exempt from state taxes, payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, etc.) and exempt from ambiguous rules regarding “room and board” taxation, and until recently were also exempt from state minimum wages (now it is up to each state, with Massachusetts having recently raised the rate quite a lot). As with any visa program, if the underlying basis of the visa is no longer operative (i.e., you are breaking up), and the au pair cannot find an alternative host to sponsor her visa, then she has to go back. This may seem like some stronger leverage on the part of the employer or incentive for better behavior than a domestic employee, and it somewhat is, but it also tends to balance out the greater risk of sudden turnover. As I’m sure you can imagine there is a thriving and dramatic equivalent to the dating scene online with regards to matches and also covert attempts to upgrade to better matches. Because one cannot go “unattached to a household”, if one tries to make a move to another host family, the second family almost always wants to talk to the first, and this can be awkward. If the second family backs out and the first family feels betrayed and wants out of the relationship, the au pair is suddenly without attachment and usually has to go back. Overall, complaints that get to the level of lawsuits are extraordinarily rare.

With live-in nannies, there are also matchmaking agencies, but the typical total cost for a family is much higher, and the alternative is to form a private contractual relationship in which one has to take on the substantial burden of all the legal and financial requirements and risks. Lawsuits are more common.

As for having multiple nannies or au pairs, this is more common than you might imagine (at least in “super zips”), and while it may not be ideal, there are some real benefits beyond the merely economic considerations of comparative advantage and opportunity costs of time. First one has to compare it to the baseline of high human capital women having no children at all, which is now very common. Second, it is somewhat of a throwback to the old ‘Downton Abbey’ / ‘landed planter’ lifestyle of the upper middle class, in which the there is less alienation and more of a familiar (as in familial) kind of relationship between employer and servant, and members of the family are taught by automatic absorption and observation the methods of leadership and management from direct experience. Overall, a social presumption of “Those who are not currently in a position to raise families should be helping those who are raising families, sometimes by being adopted extensions of those families” is not a bad principle of social organization.

@sute: The risks are real, as they are in any big “matching” circumstance, but in my judgment they are fortunately lower than the threshold which would warrant avoidance. In my experience, when you are working very close together with someone, it is usually obvious in as little as a few days that there is some personality issue, or there is something off or incompatible or fishy about the situation, and if people trust their social instincts they will usually find a way to quickly make a graceful exit. This is the opposite for when one feels pressured or stressed with suddenly having to face the rigors and difficulties of unfamiliar work, in which case the advice is to persevere with determination because eventually everything will become routine and much easier, and also overcoming that kind of challenge and stress and experience in “getting over the hump” is beneficial to one’s self-development, especially to any young man or woman just starting out. Life is full of humps! Most of them can be gotten over, and many times the difference between wildly different outcomes in terms of life success and happiness is not so much big differences in ability but the slight character difference needed to get through temporary difficulties, like adding a tiny amount of catalyst to a reaction. Imagine two runners, one who just barely can’t jump over a hurdle, and the other who just barely can. The former will get nowhere, the latter will go all the way to the finish line.