For many people, the term ‘nanny’ conjures up images of older, European women caring for children of wealthy parents who have no time for their children. Despite the stereotype, the average nanny, also referred to as an au pair, is between 19 to 28 years old.

Eastern student Lee Alison Friedrich, 22, took a year off of school to be an au pair for three small children in Lausanne, Switzerland. Friedrich, a senior elementary education major, heard about the opportunity from a woman in her church who had gone on a mission trip to Honduras.

The woman had a friend whose daughter, Amy, had been an au pair.

“I talked to her on the phone a lot to find out about it. She made me feel better about it,” Friedrich said of Amy, who was an au pair for the same family.

Friedrich and the family she worked for made a private contract. Usually, families pay an agency a fee to find them an au pair. Once the contract is made, the family pays the au pair directly.

When a potential au pair goes through an agency, they and the family are protected if either party doesn’t fulfill their part of the contract. For example, the family cannot make the au pair work more hours than the contract states when protected by an agency.

During a one-month trial period, the family has the right to dismiss the au pair. During that period, the au pair also has a chance to back out.

If the au pair makes a private agreement, Friedrich adds, it’s more flexible. But, if they go through an agency, it’s more set-in-stone.

“This is a long-haul type of thing. To anyone who is seriously interested, you have to sacrifice a lot, and the family sacrifices a lot,” Friedrich said, “People who are considering this are going to have to realize they will have to do things they weren’t expected to do. If you can’t be open-minded, I would say it’s not an experience you would be able to handle.”

The three children Friedrich cared for were Giorgio, 6 at the time; Giovanni, 3 at the time; and Giacomo, almost 2 at the time. Going over there, Friedrich said she knew she would be working for an Italian family.

“I went over there trying to be open-minded. It was easier for me because I come from a military family. The ability to adapt is easier,” she said.

Friedrich started work in August of 2000.

“Lausanne was so beautiful. It took me four months to adjust to the cultures. I didn’t feel at home until after Christmas. It was a big challenge for me to adjust,” Friedrich noted, adding that she had trouble at first adjusting to the mother’s methods.

“I was stubborn in the beginning. I had a hard time accepting the differences. I had a hard time adjusting to the family and how I would go about having my own free time,” she added.

The children were free to do what they wanted most of the time, Friedrich noted. “In a sense, it seemed chaos to me because I always had guidelines and rules. She (the mother) wasn’t specific, except for bath-time and bed-time,” Friedrich said. “I had to switch from ‘future mode’ to ‘live day-by-day mode’. I wanted to be able to plan ahead for my free time.”

She spent Christmas with her friend’s mother and sister. After traveling with friends during a three-week break, Friedrich said the children’s mother was more calm and open-minded and easier to communicate with.

“The break gave us reflection time to see how we could work together,” Friedrich commented.

One expectation Friedrich had was that she would be mainly taking care of the children and not doing so much housework.

“Sometimes I would get really frustrated about it, but I would just suck it in,” she said. “You don’t always like your job. You have to take the good with the bad. Being an au pair is definitely taking the pleasant with the unpleasant.”

Some of the cultural differences she encountered were the living space, transportation and laundry, just to name a few. Since there are no dryers, everything had to be ironed, even socks and underwear.

As for the living space, everyone pretty much lived on top of each other. There was no place for children to play.

“You’d actually have to leave your house and go to the park,” Friedrich said.

She also said it was hard not having a car.

“I walked or took a bus or train the whole time I was there,” Friedrich said.

Another cultural difference was adjusting to the metric system. Also, there are no such things as personal checks. To pay bills, people have to pay in cash at the post office or have the money taken out of their bank account, she commented.

While in another country, Friedrich advises people to be cautious of what they say.

“You have to be careful with what you say and how you say it because of all the cultural differences– because you could easily offend people. That’s one thing I’ve carried over. I used to be a pretty blunt person, but now I’m cautious,” she said.

Families hire au pairs because they want to work despite the conflict of a two-hour break in the middle of the children’s school day. The average payment for an au pair ranges from $300 to $650 monthly, depending on what the au pair does. Also, families seem to frequently switch au pairs.

“They would have let me stay another year. You don’t usually have someone between the age of 19 to 28 who wants to stay two years. I know one au pair who stayed for three years,” Friedrich said. “The change is so frequent because people don’t want to commit more than one year. There’s no way I could take two years. It would be too much.”

With the family that Friedrich worked for, the mother did not work. The father worked for Phillip Morris and traveled extensively. In the family home, Friedrich had her own bedroom and bathroom. Friedrich was supposed to work 30 hours a week, but often ended up working 40 hours.

“Every weekday I was the first person to wake, make breakfast and dress the kids. The mom took the kids to school. I made beds, cleaned and vacuumed the kids’ room and playroom and helped Liliana, the housekeeper. Everything had to be cleaned,” Friedrich said. She had to be there every day from 5 to 8:30 p.m. for bath-time, dinner and bed-time.

Liliana, the housekeeper, who was 24 years old at the time, was Portuguese. She spoke only Portuguese and French. She and Friedrich mainly communicated by sign language at first.

“When I got there, she was like a godsend to me even though we couldn’t communicate,” Friedrich noted.

One night a week, Friedrich took French classes. “The French classes really helped me to get started with communicating with her. It gave me some basics of French. By the time March/April came around, we could have an actual conversation,” she said. “She was a friend. It was good to see her come in if I was having a stressful morning. She really helped me realize how to separate your opinion from your job. The fact that we were so close in age made a difference.”

While caring for the children, Friedrich had to teach them English. Giorgio, who was fairly fluent in English, needed help mainly with his homework and vocabulary. On the other hand, Giovanni and Giacomo hardly knew English.

“By the time I left, Giacomo was speaking phrases in English,” Friedrich commented.

She went with the family to visit their relatives in Reggio Emilia, Italy. While in Italy, she and the family lived with the grandparents on the second floor of their villa. One tradition Friedrich liked the most was that the family had dinners at huge tables with long benches.

“I liked being there because of the sense of community with the whole family being there. The whole family was very nice,” Friedrich added.

During the summer, her mother and brother came to visit her.

“It was so weird seeing them after not seeing them for so long. I didn’t know how to react,” she said. “I wanted to cry, but I was so happy.”

Friedrich says she would do the experience again.

“I feel like I’ve learned a lot. You can read all the books you want to on something, but when you experience it, it’s real,” she commented.

Being away from her support system, accepting another culture and adjusting to the family’s methods were the hardest parts about her experience as an au pair, Friedrich said. The best parts, she adds, were the children and the variety.

“When you started the day, you never knew how it would end up, where you would go or who you would meet,” she said.