Practically Perfect in every way?

Finding the right nanny or au pair can be challenging. Bethesda-area parents share their experiences, good and bad

By Julie Rasicot

Kelly Murray of Chevy Chase wondered a few years ago why certain personal items were disappearing from her home—until she discovered that they’d been stolen by her German au pair. “I could not figure out where my bras were going to, until one day when I went down to her room,” says the mother of six young girls.

Stolen clothing is just one of the inconveniences that Murray and her husband, Sean, have dealt with over the years as au pairs and nannies cared for their daughters. The couple have had several good experiences with caregivers, but the ones who caused trouble left a bad taste. There was the young Brazilian au pair who vanished without a trace shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. “She just left in the middle of the night. She didn’t say a word to us,” Kelly Murray recalls. “All of her stuff was gone. It was very odd.”

And Murray hasn’t forgotten the au pair from the Czech Republic who didn’t know how to drive. “She was literally with us for one month,” Murray says. “In that time, she had three accidents—and she left our kids at the library.” As Murray and other Bethesda area parents have discovered, finding a caregiver isn’t easy—luck often plays a big role. Tales of bad nannies and au pairs often make the rounds at school bus stops, such as the story about the nanny who put tar paper on windows to keep out evil spirits, or the one about the au pair who was arrested for drunken driving.

It seems like almost every parent has heard of a bad experience, but there are many who speak glowingly about nannies and au pairs who are so beloved that they are considered part of the family.

“I was really, really lucky. Unbelievably lucky,” Leslie Stein of Rockville says about the young Norwegian woman who took care of her three now-grown sons. After a series of nannies, including one who went home to Colombia for a visit and didn’t return, Stein found Bjorg Elin Hakegard Jakobsen, an au pair whose primary responsibility was Stein’s youngest son, Andrew, now a senior at Wootton High School.

“I knew she was good because my son wanted to be with her more than with me,” Stein says. “She was just unbelievable. She played with my son and collected acorns for hours on end. He adored her.”

Parents sometimes rationalize that a beloved caregiver is too valuable to lose— even if his or her actions warrant dismissal. Cindi and Mike Pollack of Bethesda found themselves in that position a few years ago, when they suspected that their longtime nanny was stealing small items from their home.

Cindi Pollack says she only became aware of the problem after the nanny also began working for a friend, and the friend asked whether Pollack had noticed anything missing from her home. Pollack, who says she’s not very organized, recalled that some items—a T-shirt, a raincoat and a new tie—had vanished and that she assumed they’d been lost or thrown out.

“It was the kind of thing that was very random,” she says, adding that the two families overlooked the missing items because they were worried that they wouldn’t find another nanny who would be so attentive to their children.

“You sort of turn a blind eye because your kids’ safety, health and welfare are most important,” Pollack says. “We used to laugh about it. I was really careful about putting stuff away.”

Finally, when a long-missing watch was found in the nanny’s handbag, the Pollacks decided that enough was enough. They confronted her, and she quit. “It was heartbreaking,” Pollack says.

Wanted: Mary Poppins
The right match is key to a successful relationship between a caregiver and her employer, says White House Nannies owner Barbara Kline of Chevy Chase, who founded the Bethesda child care placement agency in 1985. “Someone who is taking care of your children is the most important person that you’re ever going to hire,” she says. “It’s a [much] harder job to stay home with children than to go to work.”

Hiring nannies or au pairs is a popular choice for parents looking for in-home child care. Nannies may work full time, part time or live with the family, and usually contract to work a set schedule. In the Bethesda area, they are paid between $16 and $20 per hour, according to Kline.

Au pairs, who come from other countries, offer greater scheduling flexibility because they live with an American family for one year under a program run by private sponsoring agencies and supervised by the U.S. State Department. The average weekly cost for an au pair can be between $300 and $350, depending on the agency and its fees. Au pairs can apply to extend their stay for an additional year. Some families, like the Steins, make their own arrangements to find young women who want to work as au pairs, outside of the State Department program.

Every parent would love to find a Mary Poppins, that silver screen ideal who provided loving care with a firm hand—and a bit of magic. Reality, of course, is usually much more mundane.

“The most important thing is trust for the nanny and the mom,” advises Melba Bustamonte, a nanny for a Chevy Chase family. “The mom trusts you to take care of the kids. It shows in how you do it every day. If the kids are happy with you, the mom will know.”

In fact, trouble between nannies and their employers is less likely connected to negligent child care than it is to disagreements over duties, personality conflicts or nanny burnout, nannies and parents say.

Kline has seen and heard it all from caregivers and parents. “Washington is such a unique place. All the power brokers are here,” she says. “For me, the most amazing fact is you have all of these really incredibly bright parents and yet there’s this incredible disconnect in their homes. Their houses are completely disorganized. They were running the country, but couldn’t run their own homes.”

Carrie Taylor, a nanny who cares for a nearly 1-year-old Silver Spring boy, left a job caring for a toddler because of a conflict with a high-strung parent. “The dynamic between the mother and [me] was challenging,” Taylor says. “Lots of times it was the basic tone of voice, a lack of tact. There are certain things you say and don’t say, things you don’t say in normal conversation. I’m a sensitive person and I had to develop a really thick skin.”

Common misconception
When it comes to au pairs, troubled relationships often are the result of misunderstandings over job expectations. Host families complain that some au pairs arrive expecting a vacation without any work obligations.

That attitude is not uncommon, says Paige Connelly, a local child care coordinator for Cultural Care Au Pair, an agency based in Cambridge, Mass. Connelly works with au pairs and families in Rockville, Potomac and North Bethesda.

“That is kind of the way that agencies promote it, to experience American culture,” she says. “But they also definitely make clear that they’re [going to be] caring for children. Unfortunately, that’s not always the way the au pairs see it.”

When Jakobsen was living with the Steins for a year, she met au pairs with precisely that attitude. “Sometimes, the au pair sees the year away from home as a time to do ‘whatever they want’ and the ‘job’ is more an obstacle, something they just have to do to be able to stay there, and therefore [they] are not really motivated to really do what they are supposed to,” Jakobsen wrote in an e-mail from Norway.

The most successful relationships occur when the hosts accept the au pair as another family member and there’s some give and take, host families and au pairs say. Jakobsen described her relationship with the Stein family as “a rare one” that succeeded because the family opened up its home to her. Years later, they remain in touch. The Steins attended her wedding in Norway last summer, and Jakobsen and her husband are planning to visit the Steins this spring.

“They let me take part in all their family gatherings, let me meet their friends and their family and treated me like another family member; and they also trusted me with everything,” she wrote.

How to choose a nanny
It’s clear that finding the right child care can be frustrating. And in the Washington area, where powerful and well-educated parents set high expectations, the search contains an additional element: Who will be good enough for our children?

A review of online ads in the D.C. area reveals families who seem to be searching for Super Nanny. Adventurous, creative, caring, engaging, active, fun, nurturing and proactive are just some of the qualities being requested. For some employers, a college degree is required. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want the best for your child,” says Kline of White House Nannies, adding that educated nannies are the “gold standard” for her clients.

“I think people have high expectations for themselves. Consequently, they have high expectations for the people around them,” Kline says. “I don’t think the lowest common denominator is what you want for your kids.” So how does a family find that ideal match?

Placing ads, working with an agency and using referrals from other families can produce successful results, local families say. And e-mails frequently pop up on neighborhood and school Listservs from families recommending nannies who need new jobs.

Kline says families hire a service such as hers because they don’t have the time or ability to thoroughly screen candidates, including performing criminal, driving and other background checks.

Melissa Silverman, Carrie Taylor’s current employer, says she turned to Kline’s agency because she was planning to return to her full-time job at a biotechnology company after her son Charlie was born last summer.

“As a busy person, I just knew I wasn’t going to have the time and the energy to go out on my own,” Silverman says. On the other hand, Chris Meyers of Bethesda says he and his wife, Sarah, decided to place an ad after determining that it was “tough to judge” the competence of candidates supplied by an agency. They figured they could better test candidates’ English-speaking skills and other abilities by seeing how well they wrote their résumés and how well they interviewed.

“At the end of the day, if you’re a nanny in this country, if you don’t have many skills, you go to a service,” says Meyers, whose family has employed the same nanny since 2002. “We found Ingrid because we placed an ad out there.”

Some nannies say they prefer to find employers through referrals from other families, and they advise parents to do the same. With personal referrals, both the nanny and the employer have someone to vouch for them, they say. Asking lots of questions and carefully checking all references, especially previous employers, are keys to making the right decision, parents and agency officials say.

Never hire someone before meeting the candidate more than once, Kline advises. Also, make sure both parents interview the candidates so there are two points of view. And, Kline says, ask questions designed to elicit information, such as what the nanny’s favorite soap operas are—her answer could reveal whether she regularly watches daytime TV.

“There are no magic questions to ask that are going to elicit magic answers that are going to assure you,” she says. When Katie Herman of Bethesda decided to go back to work part-time, she began searching online ads on Web sites like DC Urban Moms & Dads for a nanny for son Asher, now 2. But she wasn’t comfortable cold-calling potential nannies or running her own ad. “I just felt like, ‘how do you know who is going to reply to you’?” Herman recalls.

Instead, she found nanny Wubit Kidane, a native of Ethiopia who lives in Silver Spring, after responding to an ad posted by Kidane’s former employer. “I went to their house and actually talked to Wubit there, talked to the mom and saw Wubit interacting with their child. That was perfect,” says Herman, who gave birth to another boy, Leo, in December. “You see her in action and you know who is referring her. I felt better and more secure in trusting the reference.” The pairing has been very successful.

Kidane has three children of her own between ages 8 and 12, child-rearing experience Herman says is a huge plus. “She is a wonderful mother and has very similar values. The way she has raised her family is the way I want to raise my family,” Herman says.

Au pairs: an arranged marriage
Families seeking less expensive care than the steep hourly rates nannies can charge—and the added benefit of a cultural exchange—can apply to private agencies to host an au pair. Au pairs, who are between the ages of 18 and 26, provide child care and do some household chores in exchange for a weekly stipend of about $180, plus other amenities, such as the use of a family car. In addition to roughly $7,500 in agency fees, families are required to pay $500 toward the cost of the six college credits au pairs are required to earn during their stay.

Parents say the great benefit of au pairs, who can provide up to 45 hours of child care per week, is that they are available to watch their kids at nontraditional times. That’s why emergency-room doctors Herlene Chatha and Kevin Reed of Kensington decided that an au pair would be the perfect fit for their erratic schedules.

“What we realized is that it would be pretty near impossible to get day care on a different schedule every week,” Chatha says. Families who host an au pair don’t have the luxury of meeting the person before she or he arrives on their doorstep. Typically, au pair agencies will select possible matches after reviewing applications submitted by families and by au pair candidates who have been screened for child care experience, education and their ability to speak English.

Once a match is selected, the parents interview the au pair candidate by phone at least once. But, according to host families, it can be difficult to determine through such conversations if both parties have the same expectations regarding child care. “The hard part is you never meet these people ahead of time,” says Chris Neal of Gaithersburg. “Most of the time when you’re talking to these people, it’s not great English. So it’s a broken conversation and they’d say what you want to hear.”

After successfully hosting two au pairs, Neal and her husband, Tony, had four bad experiences in 2007. Three au pairs quickly grew homesick and decided to leave, with one barely lasting the first weekend. Another, a young Bolivian woman, couldn’t perform simple chores and seemed to be expecting a yearlong vacation. The Neals kicked her out after two weeks when they discovered that she was pinching their kids.

“I’ve blocked it all out,” Chris Neal says. “It was such a horrible year.” Each time an au pair left, the Neals scrambled for child care until a replacement arrived. But why keep hosting if things weren’t working out? “We were desperate. I had to work,” Neal says. After the last fiasco, they gave up. Chris Neal rearranged her schedule to work part time from home.

But even the most careful scrutiny, especially with au pairs, is not a guarantee of success. “You don’t know what you’re getting until they’re living in your home,” advises Christina Guidi, a former longtime Bethesda resident and a stay-at home mom who has hosted two au pairs.

That’s the truth, says Denise Verburg, whose French au pair grew homesick for the boyfriend she claimed she did not have on her application. “You have to take [the application] with a grain of salt,” she says. “She checked ‘not having a boyfriend.’ That was not the case. She also checked that she was not a smoker. That was clearly not the case.”

Guidi’s first au pair, a young Polish woman, worked out so well that the au pair stayed another year. The next au pair, a 19-year-old, only lasted a few months. She was lazy, inattentive to the children and “really opinionated. She lectured my husband and me,” says Guidi, who is homeschooling her three children. “When you have an au pair, you think you [have an] extra pair of hands, not you need an extra pair of hands to handle someone else,” she says.

The third au pair match provided by an agency proved the charm for Chatha, the Kensington doctor, who says she chose a 19-year-old Mexican woman named Vanessa to care for her infant son and toddler daughter based on what she learned in three phone interviews. Chatha was impressed that the young woman seemed to understand an au pair’s duties. “What I liked, compared to the previous two, was that she had thought this through a bit more. She had specific questions for me. I wanted her to have questions for me,” Chatha said.

Still, Chatha and her husband weren’t certain they’d made the right choice until Vanessa met Ajay, who wasn’t quite 3 months old, and Cimrin, who was 21/2. “It was emotionally difficult for me,” Chatha says. “She walked in the door the first day. She walked straight to the bassinet and picked up Ajay. We both simultaneously took a deep breath and said, ‘OK, it will be all right.’ ”

Relationship rules
Setting expectations and keeping communication open will promote a successful relationship, according to parents, nannies and au pairs. Some parents advise maintaining boundaries and not getting sucked into a nanny’s financial problems or home life. Others argue that keeping the relationship on a purely business level can be a mistake; treat the nanny or au pair like a family member and everyone benefits.

Chris Meyers, the Bethesda parent, says he and his wife chose to disregard friends’ advice to keep the relationship with their nanny “very businesslike.” Over the years, they have provided a minivan for Ingrid’s use and helped her with family issues and the immigration process.

In turn, the two families have become interwoven. Ingrid’s grandson comes home from school with the Meyers children each day. The family attended the wedding of Ingrid’s son and knows it can rely on her extended family to help babysit if Ingrid is unavailable. “What I found is that if you get a little involved, there are a lot of headaches and it’s not worth it,” Meyers says.“If you get seriously involved, you end up with more of a family member than an employee. I feel like my kids are with a family member. It’s much more worth it than a few headaches and a few dollars.” Ingrid says she enjoys the closeness she feels to the Meyers family, but understands that she is an employee. “Although they treat you like family, there is also a line that you have to draw because they are my bosses,” she says. “They have respect for me, and I respect them. They’re willing to help.”

What also makes their relationship successful is that expectations are clear and the couple trusts Ingrid to do her job. “They can leave me with the kids and they know everything will be taken care of,” Ingrid says.

The relationship between a host family and an au pair creates its own issues. Host families and au pairs say it’s critical to define what the au pair is expected to do and to set parameters concerning such issues as use of the family car, curfews and visiting friends.

“These kids come here and they really don’t know what they’re getting into,” says Melissa Swensrud of Bethesda, a stay at-home mom who has had both nannies and au pairs care for her three boys.

“The kids need to know they’re not coming in and having a year abroad at the expense of an American family.” She recalls a conversation with her current au pair, 20-year-old Rene Wegner from Germany, shortly after he arrived last summer.

“So, what time do we have breakfast?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “What time are you making it?” Swensrud says that years of experience with au pairs have taught her that they need about two months of training in the family’s routine before things run smoothly.

For his part, Wegner says he’s enjoying being part of Swensrud’s family and happily participates in “the taking and giving, as we say in Germany.”

And host families would do well to remember that it can be difficult for an au pair to adjust to a new family and culture. “The best experiences I’ve seen are when they’re willing to open up the family to the cultural exchange. You have to really buy into that,” says Connelly, the child care coordinator. “It’s kind of like if you had a niece coming from Germany for a year, taking classes and staying with you.”

Though the au pair experience might not suit every family, Wegner advises fellow au pairs to take advantage of their time here and to be grateful for the experience.

“Take everything you want or can because you learn a lot. If you complain a lot, you need to go back,” he says. “It’s a whole family you never knew before. They trust you with their car, they trust you with their dog, trust you with their kids, trust you with their life, really.”

Training Tips
After hosting several au pairs, Melissa Swensrud knows what it takes to have a successful year. But that wasn’t always the case.

“I’m such a different host parent than I was at first,” she says. “I’m just a better manager overall.”

Swensrud and other parents who have hosted a number of au pairs say they’ve learned what works and can tell within a few weeks whether an au pair will work out.

Their advice? Don’t expect an au pair to hit the ground running. “I’ve had enough experience to not assume they get it all,” Swensrud says. “I’m extremely clear and not vague about expectations.”

And that’s good advice for both sides, host parents and au pairs agree. “Have a good talk with the family in the beginning, so they kind of know what you’re thinking it’s going to be and they can say, ‘No, that’s not how it’s going to be,’ ” says Wegner.

Host parents say new au pairs require several weeks to absorb a family’s routines and learn what is expected of them. Some parents provide a manual that lists information like emergency numbers, school bus stops and how to run the washer and dryer.

It’s also important, parents say, to be clear about such issues as use of the family car and who will pay for insurance and for repairs if the au pair is in an accident. Swensrud says she began requiring her au pairs to get a Maryland driver’s license after a young Bolivian woman got into an accident during her first month here.

The family also pays for car insurance. Carla Larrick of Bethesda, whose family has enjoyed hosting seven au pairs, makes sure the au pairs have an international driver’s license and checks out their driving skills herself. “I drive with them for 30 days before I let them drive with the children,” she says.

Curfews can be another contentious issue, especially with older au pairs. But if parents do set a curfew, make sure it is at least eight hours before the au pair starts work, says Ruby Warren, a former child care coordinator who worked with Bethesda- area families for Au Pair In America. “You don’t want someone hung over taking care of your children the next day,” she says.

When issues come up, host families and au pairs say they try to work them out. If they can’t? Some agencies require the family to keep the au pair for two more weeks while other arrangements are made.

If the relationship becomes untenable, those two weeks can be unbearable for both sides. And that’s when the au pair must go. “When it comes to a point where they can’t stand each other, that’s when the au pair” would come to live with her, Warren says.

Julie Rasicot is a Silver Spring writer and adjunct professor at American University who also writes for The Washington Post and other publications.