The “reverse au pair” system provide affordable child care AND a bilingual education for a fraction of the cost of traditional household help!

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Background:

An “au pair” is a sort of “study abroad” nanny: the idea is that an approximately-college-aged individual will travel to a foreign country to help a host family take care of their children (Figure 1). Conceptually, the idea is that it provides a job and opportunity to see a foreign country (benefitting the au pair) and relatively inexpensive childcare (benefitting the host family).

Fig. 1: In this example, the au pair (in blue, highlighted in yellow) has traveled from the blue country to the green country to help take care of children there. For this example, assume that the green country is very expensive to live in, and the blue country is very cheap.

Unfortunately, the au pair system doesn’t address the problem that a family in an expensive host country will still need to pay the normal high-cost-of-living costs for raising their children, plus the additional wages for the au pair!

Proposal:

We introduce the revolutionary “reverse au pair” system: instead of importing an au pair from the cheap → expensive country, we simply send the children to live with the au pair in the cheap country (Figure 2)!

Fig. 2: Here, the children (highlighted in orange) have been sent from the high-cost-of-living country to the cheap one.

Now, all child care costs are reduced to the amounts seen in the cheap blue country!

Additionally, if the people in the blue country speak a different language, the children will naturally learn that language as well: it’s basically a free bilingual education!

Conclusion:

Parents could use this to both “skip” phases of their child’s life that they find particularly annoying (e.g. the “terrible twos” or middle school), and save on home expenses at the same time! And the children benefit by having an interesting story for college applications.

PROS: Reduces the cost of raising children and provides bonus bilingual education “for free.”

CONS: None!

Originally published 2024-10-07.