Good Company, Fun Travels, Occasionally Tough Kids

Aupairia was a good company to work with. Overall, most things involving the company went smoothly including arranging family placement, travel plans and required documents. The company arranged culture classes and language classes that were helpful for their intended purpose, and also were a nice opportunity to meet and spend time with other Au Pairs. I greatly enjoyed the opportunities I had on my day off each week to see the sites around Beijing and several other locations in China. I felt that the parents of my host family treated me very well in all aspects, including giving me a nice room to live in, good food, and bringing me along to family trips and other fun things.

Of course, the biggest part of being an Au Pair is spending time playing with and teaching the children of your host family. Overall, working with the kids wasn't too bad. I wasn't expected to be a super professional teacher or to provide an education for the child. Instead, the expectation of my host family was that I essentially provide an immersive language and culture environment for their host children. By and large, this wasn't too hard, and was sometimes enjoyable. However, especially on the weekends where I'd often be expected to spend more than eight hours a day with the host children, spending time with the host children could begin to feel very difficult because of communication difficulties (the host children in my family only have extremely basic English speaking and comprehension ability) and also because of trying to discipline and control children who are being raised very differently than I was, both in terms of culture and economics. I also struggled with finding any personal time- any time I was at home but not scheduled to work, I felt like I had to hide from the host children because if they saw me it was very hard to tell them "no, I'm not working right now."

Overall, I'd recommend this company, and I had a very good experience, but being with the kids could certainly be challenging at times. I'd recommend anyone considering this type of program remember that they'll be spending most of their time with the children and to reflect on how they'll feel about that.