I am going to set the scene: I am sitting on a beach in the September heat. I was eating a baguette with serrano ham that I had bought at the shop across the road. Everyone around me is speaking German, but I am entranced by my book. I had taken the bus to the coast after dropping the kids off at school. I saw a castle in the morning and now I was taking in the Mallorcan beach culture. I would have to head back in a few hours, but for now I am living my best life by the clear blue water. Now you may be wondering how I got here? Let me tell you!
How I decided to Au Pair
It actually is an interesting story to how I ended up au pairing because it was something I thought I never would want to do. I had a cousin suggest it to me because of my experience with kids and desire to travel, but this was my response. I had been a PCA in high school, and while it was an amazing experience and one I would never take back, I knew what it was like to work in someone’s home and I was a little concerned about living and working in the same place. Its definitely a different kind of job. For some it is great, but for others it is a not a good fit. If you are someone who wants to be able to leave their job at the end of the day, this is not the job for you.
Now this how I was quite easily swayed. It is interesting the things you will do when you have no idea what to do with your life. It happened during the spring of my last year of college. I was graduating a year early and had no idea what to do with my life. At the time I was working part time in my college’s study abroad office with some girls that ended up being really good friends of mine. We had a blast the days we were in the office together working. One of the girls had been talking with a Spanish family she met on AuPairWorld about coming to spend the next year with them. We were so invested in it. Then before we knew it she was officially going to spend a year in Madrid. Then she convinced us to get on AuPairWorld. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought it would be if Lucia was interested in doing the exchange.
So I created my profile, which is a bit extensive and took me awhile to get to my liking. By the time I had it up and running it was the end of May. It was pretty hard getting that together while also completing finals. I also was really bad about focusing on it even after because I was living in an apartment with friends that summer and really needed to get a job, so all my energy was put into finding a job that would hire a recent college graduate for a few months.
Eventually I got into the swing of things and I was messaging anyone that looked like a good fit and scheduling video calls with families that responded to my messages. I should say though, I had no intention of going to Spain to au pair. I have no idea why, but I just didn’t have a desire to. I talked to a family in Italy, Ireland, and other countries in Europe. I wasn’t having much luck and finally decided I would be ok with going to Spain if it was somewhere unique. So when I got in contact with a family that lived in Mallorca I thought that would be really cool! Luckily they thought I would be a good fit and wanted me! It was the very beginning of August and so I needed to get things together pretty quickly to leave to be in Mallorca in September. Luckily flights weren’t too bad. I also got my contract signed and exchanged any other information needed. I also was given the task of learning stick shift before I left because I would need to drive a manual car to bring the kids to and from school. I did a few lessons with my aunt and applied for an international drivers license. It was a bit stressful and felt so rushed, but I got everything I needed to get done in order to embark on my adventure in Mallorca.
An Average Day of Au Pairing
You do in fact really need to love kids to be an au pair. Do not, and I repeat, do not become an au pair just because you want to live abroad. It is great for people who want to have the experience of living with a family in another country, but thats only if those same people love kids. Here is what an average day as an au pair for me to show you why.
The amount of time I spent nannying heavily outweighed the time I spent traveling around. I actually did get to quite a bit a traveling around Mallorca on my day off (Sundays) and an occasional weekend to the continent to see Barcelona and Madrid. Otherwise I didn’t have much time during the day to do such things, because the kids were only in school from 9 am to 2 pm.
I had my own house next door to the family’s home but it really was only a bedroom, a bathroom, and some storage. For food I would have to go to the main house which I was always welcome in. I actually spent most of the time there and only went to my house for sleeping. On a normal weekday when the kids would have school, I would have to be at the house at 7 am, which meant I was getting up between 6:30 and 6:45 to get dressed. At the house the kids were usually already eating breakfast, but if they weren’t I was helping prepare them breakfast and then getting my own to eat with them. And there was coffee. You cannot forget the coffee. We would leave for school around 8:45am, so whatever time we would have left we would play a game, read, a book, or just hang out.
I would drive the kids to school, which is only really about 5 minutes. Then I would run errands if I or the family needed anything. Once a week I would have Spanish lessons with one of the family’s friends that teaches languages. This was usually an hour. It wasn’t a whole lot of work. I had workbooks that I would do stuff in which we would go over occasionally, but I studied Spanish pretty extensively in college, so I knew my grammar. I mostly just needed to interact in Spanish to perfect my use and grow more comfortable in it, so most of the time we would just chat in Spanish and sometimes play a game.
On the days I didn’t have Spanish I would just go back to the house and go back to sleep for a bit or read a book. I got pretty lazy, but when you are working with kids all the time, you need that. In my first few weeks there the mom was pretty sick with Covid and wasn’t working, so she would let me have more time to myself when the kids were at school and would drive me to and from the bus stop so that I could see some new places. This only really worked when she was home because the dad works from home so him and I would share a car. I could only get to the bus stop by driving and he couldn’t be without a car, so someone would have to drive me and as an introvert, I didn’t like to ask. That was ok though, because like I said, I liked that down time and I also had a lot of opportunities to do stuff on the weekends with the family and on my day off alone.
At 1:45 pm I would get ready to pick the kids up. Sometimes I would have some household stuff to help out with before I left, like laundry and vacuuming. Also depending on what activities the kids had in the afternoon, I would maybe need to get lunch ready before I left to pick them up. Once I got them back home we would eat lunch together. If they had activities like music lessons or chess I would bring them in for that. They didn’t always have the same activities so oftentimes I hung out at the park with one while the other was busy. It was fun when we could go into the town and do stuff like that. It was a really small town so it was fun seeing the kids talk to people they know and meet their friends at the park.
In the evening we would head back home for dinner, which was usually around 8 pm. The family didn’t eat as late as most Spanish families do because they are quite German because the dad was German. I would sometimes help up with dinner or at least help clean up. Once a week I would go to the dance classes in the town at 6pm so I wasn’t quite as helpful with dinner on those days. Dinner was a slow time. The Spanish really value family time during dinner. By the time the kids would go to bed and I would head back to my house was a little after 9pm. Then I would shower and maybe watch a show before going to bed to do it all again the next day.
Experience with Hosts
Host families are always hit and miss when it comes to au pairing. No family will be perfect because we are all just people and no one is perfect. This is an important fact I think we need to remember when we are au pairs. I have heard such horror stories from other au pairs and was so grateful for the host family I got. While sometimes the job wasn’t easy, at least they made me a part of the family, gave me a nice room, fed me, provided me with an allowance, and encouraged me to travel around the island and country. They were great people that showed genuine interest in me and wanted me to have relationships with the kids.
I think the only thing that was maybe a bit difficult was that I am an introvert and they seemed to be more extroverted. As an au pair in Spain you have to advocate for you needs which I was not very good at as someone who doesn’t want to bother others. That is the culture though. Everyone is very direct. I suppose my experience is maybe not the best baseline for a Spanish host family because the dad was from Germany so they were multicultural.
Overall I enjoyed my time with my host family. I created jokes with the kids and we made music together. They always kept me on my toes, but in a good way. They were so sweet and it was quite sad saying goodbye to them. They all came to wish me farewell even though my flight was bright and early on a school day. This is why I say it is important to recognize not everyone is perfect because your experience with a host family will be defined by your relationship and impact on each other, not the things that were wrong with either of you.
Reflection
Here are my whole thoughts on the experience and what anyone who is looking to AuPair should consider.
First I want to note the different ways to au pair. You can use a free website like I did to find a host family or you can go through an agency to be placed with a family. Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages. Doing it through an agency will be more formal and professional, so you would have someone to help with issues and making sure your contract is being respected. You have less of a choice with the family you are placed with though and you have to pay. Through AuPairWorld you don’t have to pay anything to be matched with a family and you have a say in who you end up staying with.
I also want to note what to take into consideration when au pairing in Spain. In Spain to stay past the 90 days that is granted to American tourists in the country you would end up needing to get a student visa for a longer au pair experience. That means you can only work a certain amount of hours because you have to be enrolled in a 20 hour a week Spanish course to qualify for the visa. While you will end up having school work with this route it is nice because it makes it harder to work too many hours. If you do the 3 months like me to stay under those 90 days you don’t have to enroll in any kind of course but you are more likely to work more hours. If I had done things differently I think I would have went the route of doing a Spanish course so that I could not only improve my Spanish but have a more structured day there that wasn’t solely working. Everyone is different though and either way you will have an amazing experience.
I don’t know if I would necessarily have changed the route I took to au pair because I am not sure if the agency for au pairing would be worth spending the money on, but I think it is valid way to go because you never know what you may get for a host family. I got fairly lucky, but it is not the case for everyone. Not every family will do a contract either so you could end up doing work that is not relevant or you could end up working too much. I just recommend no matter what making sure your family is willing to do a contract.
I am really glad I did the experience. Out of all the experiences I have had living and working abroad I don’t think au pairing would be my go to though. I’ve always told anyone that asks I would never take it back, but I wouldn’t do it again. I think there are other opportunities that are a much better fit for me, but I still learned so much from this. Not only did I grow hugely in my confidence in Spanish, but I learned so much about myself. I was at a pretty low point in my confidence before I left for Mallorca and honestly I let just a lot of stuff happen to me. With this experience and just the travel aspect of it in general I learned a lot about advocating for myself, the kind of people I connect with, and just becoming a more independent person through my solo day trips around the island. These things I would never give up. I think anyone could highly benefit from learning more about themselves in a foreign place. Now it didn’t really help me to figure out my life and what was next, but it set me up with the skills I still use in my job and travels everyday to this day. That is why it was such an importance experience to me.
Thanks for reading about my life changing experience in Mallorca. If you are interesting in au oairing, click here to check out AuPairWorld which is a free website you can use to find host families abroad. Be sure to check out my Spain page for all my adventures from traveling around the country!
The Journal of Wanderlust 