Resolving vacation issues of Au Pairs
Au pair host families can often face problems in resolving holiday issues with their au pair. Your au pair from AuPaire Care might need off on certain days when you are not available to take care of your kids. You need to discuss it with your au pair and then accordingly mutually agreed dates should be finalized. When you are negotiating dates with your au pair, you should neither be too stubborn that your au pair feel bad nor you should be too flexible that you end up on losing side and then later on repent for this decision.
For the last few weeks, our au pair has been working on vacation plans with a fellow au pair from AuPaire Care. They chose the date, cleared it with their host families…and then discovered their tour was full. The girls went back to the drawing board and chose the only other time this summer their tour was offered, which just so happened to be the same week our back-up childcare would be on vacation. Mia looked so disappointed and I felt awful, but clearly, this date did not qualify as “mutually agreed upon”. So we had to agree on a common dates on which both us as well as our au pair had to agree.
What’s this, you ask? “Mutually agreed upon” is what vacation dates must be – acceptable to both host family and au pair. Just as an au pair should never book a vacation without consulting her host family, host families also do not have the right to dictate when an au pair can have vacation solely based on their schedules or desires. The mutual respect that au pairs and host families should have for one another must extend to the realm of vacation time as well.
As much as I want Mia to have every experience possible while she is here, I also need to look out for our family’s best interests. As I expected, she handled the news gracefully and understood our situation. She and her friend plan to look for a different trip, or will consider travelling in the fall. You can be sure we will do whatever we can to make her dream trip happen – finding a mutually agreed upon resolution is what being a family is all about. This way, we resolved this issue with our au pair amicably and settled a mutually agreed date for holidays but in that both of us had adjusted a little bit.
Visit http://www.linkedin.com/company/aupaircare to know how to resolve vacation issues with au pairs from AuPaire Care.
Processing your request, Please wait....
