We have a child with downs syndrome and contacted Au Pair International around March/April, 2018 looking for help with child care. We had hosted two au pairs previously for 3 years with a different agency and we loved the program in that we helped au pairs from different countries experience US while getting child care from a family-like member. Our experience with Au Pair International, however, turned out to be a night mare. The au pair put our kids in grave danger. It is, however, the unprofessional and callous response of Au Pair International that stung us. They were not empathetic to our au pair rehire requests and instead employed delayed response tactics while holding our deposit amount which prevented us from hiring any other agency. With our deposit amount held hostage and hence the inability to get child care, my wife had to quit her job causing us severe financial distress. As a fellow host family, I would strongly recommend that you do not employ Au Pair International. Below is a summary of our experiences with Au Pair International.
Screening - I am very concerned about the misrepresentation of the Au Pair's experience claims on their profile and the due diligence performed by Au Pair International. Our first au pair profile through Au Pair International stated he had experience managing kids. In the 7 days, he lived with us, it was evident that he had never managed kids before! There were a couple of incidents which left our kids in grave danger. However, the two consecutive incident's that led us to terminate him - he left our boys unattended on a busy (45 mph) road completely oblivious of the deadly danger this posed and left the boys unsupervised in a swimming pool. He lacked basic caretaking skills. Before we set onto the path of rematch process, we asked that Au Pair International share their screening process. Sharyce, the South East Regional Director, kept responding that Katrina Vanderhulst, Au Pair International's Vice President, will call to clarify. They have not despite repeated follow ups since Aug 28th!
Expectations - To allege that we set the "wrong expectations" and blocking our access, in my opinion, was seemingly retaliatory and discriminatory. To ensure the incoming Au Pair has a clear understanding of his/her responsibilities and workload, we detailed all work responsibilities on our family profile pages. Description of the responsibilities could not be detailed any further short of doing the work! The needs of our special needs child, was described in detail as well. We also validated the Au Pair's understanding of their responsibilities through multiple Skype interviews with our children. I am skeptical now of what training/induction the au pairs receive from Au Pair International. This program is defined as a cultural exchange program while they get paid to perform a defined set of responsibilities.
As you have seen above, Au Pair International has been totally unprofessional and completely ignorant of our requests. Please stay away from Au Pair International.
Ganesh read more
