Childcare crisis: Au pair shortage leaves parents holding the baby
Constable Leeann Mainwaring was among hundreds of essential workers facing an impossible choice – care for her family at home or go to work.
As New Zealand locked down in late March, daughters Kaliyah, 11, and Mia, 2 needed her at home.
But Mainwaring was needed to patrol the streets.
A single mum, she had accepted a new job with the Turangi police, only after first arranging for a live-in au pair to fly from Germany to babysit her daughters.
But as New Zealand’s national lockdown neared, Mainwaring’s au pair still hadn’t arrived.
With no one to help care for her daughters, she dropped them 200km to their grandmother in Napier, before returning to work in Turangi.
“I don’t like being away from my children. It was so hard to leave them,” she said.
About 1000 new au pairs are needed nationally, yet three leading placement agencies say they can’t find people to fill the jobs.
Foreign au pairs remain locked out, while Kiwis do not want the jobs, the agencies said.
Operating as nannies, au pairs step in to cook, clean, teach and care for children when parents go to work.
They were most in-demand as livein workers, Carissa Vaudrey, managing director of Playschool Group placement agency, said.
Au pairs were also typically cheaper for families with two or more children, according to Vaudrey.
Paid the $18.90 an hour minimum wage, au pairs could expect to earn about $760 a week for 40 hours work.
However, families often provided food and accommodation, meaning au pairs received about $240 cash after tax.
Vaudrey said she tried attracting more Kiwis to work as live-in au pairs, launching a marketing campaign after the borders closed and job losses mounted in the resulting economic downturn.
She had close to zero take-up. “When you choose to be an au pair, you don’t do it for the money,” Kim Wafsmus, an 18-year-old au pair from Germany, said.
“You are doing it to get to know a different culture and be a part of your host family.”
Host mum Tori Burns’ four children now think of Wafsmus as family.
Burns said Wafsmus taught her children German, took part in karaoke and movie nights and went on holidays with them.
Wafsmus was also invaluable in helping Burns dedicate time to the family’s Russell-Orongo Bay Holiday Park in the Bay of Islands.
Wafsmus travelled back-and-forth with the Burns family from their Auckland home to the holiday park, allowing Burns and her husband to help park staff on weekends.
Burns said she didn’t know how she would cope when Wafsmus returns to Germany this month.
Immigration NZ’s general manager of border and visa operations, Nicola Hogg, confirmed au pairs didn’t qualify for entry into New Zealand.
Only essential health workers or those deemed essential by the Government were currently being granted entry.
“Employers, including families looking for live-in childcare, must consider the availability of New Zealanders for the work,” Hogg said.
Mainwaring, meanwhile, has turned out to be luckier than most. German au pair Anna-Lena Molder landed just before New Zealand’s borders closed on March 19 and went into two weeks of self-isolation before joining Mainwaring.
That meant Mainwaring only had to spend two weeks without her daughters.
Since then her girls have fallen in love with Molder.
Mainwaring’s also convinced Molder to extend her stay.
“I am in the ideal situation, but elsewhere I know lots of essential workers screaming out for au pairs,” she said.
When you choose to be an au pair, you don’t do it for the money.
Kim Wafsmus