There is an au pair drought in the UK. Since the 2016 Referendum there has been a 75 per cent drop in applications by foreign girls to work for UK families. Agencies testify that they can’t find girls for their clients, who must turn to other forms of childcare beyond the rare girl keen to ‘learn English’, grandparents, if they can be dragged out of restaurants, and baby-sitting apps like Bambino, Bubble and UrbanSitter.
There is a campaign to #SaveAuPairs. Its web page is illustrated with a cartoon featuring a ginger child screaming for its au pair and Theresa May washing up plates, which makes me wonder if this campaign is more ambivalent about working women than it says.
What will mothers — I mean parents — do when au pairs are so scarce parents feel they have to take any nutter, or give up work themselves?
I am grateful my husband took charge of our son’s early years. It wasn’t easy for him: people — usually NHS professionals — constantly asked where I was. I am grateful that my son is now at school, because the search for childcare is riven with fear and guilt.
No option is ideal except perhaps Jacob Rees-Mogg’s but very few people inherit a nanny outside Jilly Cooper novels — and even there it didn’t work out well. If you are rich you might have a Norland nanny, who is much better at childcare than you are, and yet is willing to be dressed in the most sexless costume in the history of clothing — the ultimate husband repellent.
If poorer — the 100,000 or so UK families who employ au pairs, mostly in the south-east — you pay about £15 a day plus bed and board for what #SaveAuPairs calls, disingenuously in my view, a ‘cultural exchange’ that is ‘neither work nor holiday’.

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