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I was studying for an exam for my last semester of college, and procrastinating on the internet, when I saw the website advertising how to become an au pair. I clicked on it, thought it looked really cool, and made a profile. Then I completely forgot about it.
Three weeks later, I had emails and messages in my inbox. I started talking to a family—messaging back and forth for three weeks, and then calling on FaceTime. After one of our calls, I thought: being an au pair sounds like something I could actually do. It felt right.
I finished college in Ontario, Canada in December, 2021, and the following February I flew to Annecy, France, where I would spend three months looking after a couple's three children, aged 2, 3 and 6.
In my first three weeks, I wanted to go home so badly. The kids were on school break, so I was watching them all day, which was a challenge. And I had no friends. That was really hard.
But I realized I wasn't going to have a great experience or find friends unless I actively searched for them. So I had to get creative: go to meet-ups, talk to strangers, try friend apps like Bumble BFF and Facebook groups, and message people randomly. It felt like dating around for a friend, but I grew comfortable with meeting new people and eventually developed a support network.
The perks of being an au pair
Firstly, France has so much culture, and it's so different from Canada. Where I stayed, everything shut down for two hours until 2pm because everyone was out for lunch. That was amazing to experience: the fact that people valued human interaction and their own time, and they didn't live their lives to work. In Canada and America, we get so invested in our work and so consumed by it. In France, it's illegal to answer a work email after-hours. It was so laid-back; I loved everything about it.
The best part of the job itself was looking after the youngest child, who was only 2 years old. Every day was exciting, and we would go on our little adventures together—to the park, or to the city. I got to be like a kid again.
I didn't have as close of a relationship with my family growing up, so showing these kids love and playing with them kind of healed my inner child. When the kids were home, we would dance around the house, and play games, and do silly facial expressions. I felt so comfortable and like I could be myself; kids never judge you for how you act. If adults were around they'd be like, "That's kind of weird, why are you doing that?" When you're around little kids it's like you're free to be whoever you want to be.
Creating my TikTok account was a fun aspect of it, too. We treated it like a game—the kids would always ask, "Can we make videos?" and that became something they loved to do. They knew they were being filmed but I never wanted to show their faces.
I felt like I was part of the family. The parents were so warm, and they would invite me on family trips, so we all went skiing, hiking and mountain biking together. Those things were so amazing for me.
The downsides of being an au pair
The biggest downside is the lack of boundaries. I was working insane hours, especially at the beginning. You're contracted to 25 hours a week but a lot of us work longer. I would be looking after the two-year-old throughout the day, dropping the other kids off at school and picking them up, taking my French classes, doing bathtime with the youngest, cooking dinner, doing the dishes, and then chores like laundry, sweeping and mopping the floors, and vacuuming.
And then I would get frustrated because the parents would come home from work and then they would go out and have fun and I'd be like: I haven't had any time to myself, I haven't even taken a shower!
I was supposed to have weekends off but, at the beginning, the parents would be like, "Are you doing anything? Can you just watch the kids for a few hours while we run errands?" And then a few hours would turn into half the day.
Part of me understood, and I just wanted to fit into the family—I didn't want them to think that I was treating it as a job. I wanted it to be like I was a big sister. So I didn't speak up a bunch of times. Instead, I would spend the weekend round a friend's house, to make it clear that it was my time off.
The biggest challenge of being an au pair is that you live with your employer, so it's hard to bring up any issues because you don't want to create a toxic living environment. But I did eventually have to sit them down and talk to them about my work hours, and having weekends off, and they changed my schedule.
I didn't get to travel much in my free time—although I did go to Paris for one weekend. There were weekends where I had planned to travel to Lyon or other neighboring cities, but after a week of being so "go, go go!" I decided to instead spend the day in bed.
I felt exhausted at the end of the day and, when you live where you work, you can't show that or talk about it. You're eating around the dinner table, or watching TV with the kids, and you have to put on a brave face. You bottle those feelings up inside.
That's when it reaches burnout because you don't have a place to unwind—you have your bedroom but, to me, spending time in your bedroom creates a really weird environment. Besides, even if I went to my room, I'd have the kids knocking on my door, so I thought I might as well play with them.
Another reason I felt so burned out is that I was in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend who lives in Canada. Even if I was really tired, I would stay up really late to talk to him because of the time difference. When you're long distance, you have to have non-negotiables or "bare minimums" and for us that was calling once a day. When you start being complacent, that's when the relationship starts to fall apart. But for us, it worked out well. He was very supportive of everything I was doing.
Looking to the future
Even with the downsides, it was the best three months of my life. When you choose to do something that's so terrifying, it ends up teaching you so much about yourself. When I came back to Canada, I really appreciated the changes that I went through: I'm no longer scared to speak to new people or get outside of my comfort zone.
I didn't have a passion for kids before going away—I was very much someone who was like, "I don't know what to do with them." But I ended up loving it and wanting to stay there for longer.
It made me change my career path. I had planned on doing a masters in athletes and mental health. But when I went to be an au pair, I fell in love with kids so much that it changed my perspective, and now I'm applying to teachers' college to teach primary-aged kids.
I have signed up to au pair again in France, although this will be my last experience as an au pair because I think it's definitely not a job that you can sustain forever. You don't make a lot of money and if you're trying to plan for the future, that becomes really difficult.
Being an au pair was a way for me to find what I loved, and I think that when you do something once you shouldn't necessarily keep trying to chase that—you should learn from it and then try to seek out new experiences.
Olivia Kyriakopoulos is an au pair, currently living and working in France. She is on TikTok at @livvykaykay.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
As told to Newsweek editor Katie Russell.
