FAQ

As host family and au pair are going to spend a lot of time together and looking after children is a highly responsible task, it’s very important that host family and au pair really match.

While opposites attract in certain areas of life, this will not be the case when it comes to fundamental questions of living together and how to bring up the children - if au pair and host family don't share the same principals there, conflicts will be inevitable.

If the au pair doesn’t speak the language of the host country well (B2 level) and the family doesn’t speak the mother language of the au pair, it’s absolutely necessary to have another language (mostly English) which both sides speak well (at least B2), so that also problems and critical topics can be addressed in this language.

Although most countries only require language proficiency level A1 to get an au pair visa, we highly recommend that au pairs have at least A2, better B1 knowledge of the local language - most (but not all) kids are very patient if the au pair doesn't understand them too well in the beginning, but just think of an emergency case (children getting hurt on the playground,…) with no-one around speaking English…

If you have a common language to discuss everything, and you are a very tolerant and relaxed person, you might not need to restrict your search criteria any further.

All other might think of the following…

If an au pair was brought up with an anti-authoritarian parenting style and thinks this is the only right parenting style, it will be hard for him or her to support a very authoritarian parenting style of the host family - and the other way round.

Preferences regarding food and special diets are another important factor for a harmonic living together – an au pair being used to eating meat three times a day will probably not be happy in a host family on a vegetarian diet.

What someone eats is often also influenced by religious rules – with some tolerance and curiosity every “pairing” of religions will be possible – but a devoutly religious host family of one religion and a devoutly religious au pair of another religion are probably a rather disadvantageous pairing…

These are only some examples which illustrate, why we’ve developed perfectMatch.

If host family and au pair answer all questions of the extensive perfectMatch questionnaire, the optimum pairings for the best possible au pair experience can be found.

You think filling in the whole questionnaire is too much work or you simply want to see all possible matches?

Simply use fastMatch – here you only need to fill in the absolutely necessary matching criteria (date and time span, host country, language skills,...) to immediately get a list of matching profiles.