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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

Travel with a baby sitter?!?!? How big can that market be?

Doesn't have to be a 100k/year governess. Lot of families bring grandma/grandpa or a niece along to help with the kids.

Who would describe their parents (the kid’s grandparents) as “babysitters” in this context?

(It’s a genuine question, might be some cultural differences at play, but in my family this would be a family trip with a grandparent, not a family trip with a “babysitter”.)

I was trying to speak generically to cover all options. Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.

> Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.

Sounds absolutely reasonable! Do they differentiate in any way between the grandparents and the au pairs, or do they, for instance, also share accommodations?

Also how do you separate the grandparents from the au pairs in the family photos???

> Friends of mine travel with an au pair AND grandparents.

Surely you understand this is completely out the reach of almost everyone in society?

Except for the target demo of this website.

Even a line Googler doesn't normally have domestic staff do they? Or am I completely out of touch with how most of tech live?

>Or am I completely out of touch with how most of tech live?

I don’t think you are..

Depends what you mean by domestic staff. With the at least somewhat common exception of au pairs if both halves of a couple work, people in the West don't typically have full-time dedicated staff because income disparities are mostly not that great until you get into the 1% or smaller slices of the population.

What I'm sure most Googlers--and indeed many middle class people to greater or lesser degrees--use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.

> use is a lot of shared services such as tradespeople, lawn care if they have a house, meal delivery, grocery delivery, car services, housekeepers, etc. You mostly don't need people full-time but many do consume people doing stuff for them that they could do themselves on a regular basis.

How often are these people brought on holiday?

I was responding to this comment: "Even a line Googler doesn't normally have domestic staff do they?"

> at least somewhat common exception of au pairs if both halves of a couple work

Wow this blows my mind TIL

A quick Google tells me that there are 17,500 au pairs in the US in a given year. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things but probably doesn't capture all live-in or otherwise more or less full-time child care arrangements. And of course, it's only an arrangement a couple will need for a bounded length of time.

It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.

In the bay area, I actually know a very surprising (shocking, to me) number of people with au pairs. It would never even have occurred to me that people would do this. But it’s common at least as far as I can tell, among people in their late 40s who’ve made a modest amount of money.

I still can’t get my head around it. These are people who have a relatively low asset base (owned house, 401ks, maybe modest taxable brokerage account), high combined salaries and high burn rate.

Also an unusual frequency of divorces, some of them explicitly tied to the presence of an attractive young woman in the home.

My sister has an au pair in the bay area, and she pays less for child care than I do at a in-home daycare.

The au-pair industry is a bit of a scam, bringing labor from low cost countries. They are not paid the same as a nanny or day care worker, often it is half of full time daycare. The idea is that you're providing room and board, and thats part of their comp.

Also the quality of care you get from an au pair is mixed, often its a bit like having a teenager care for you child. One acquaintance had a indoor play place call the au pair provider since they were concerned with how the au pair treated the children.

Not much of a scam when there's millions in second or third world country dreaming of such work experience.

We forget safe home + food security is far from given in many places. Let alone other perks of Bay Area.

Honestly not even 2nd or 3rd world, I know a few Western European au-pairs who did a year in the US.

Probably bigger than you’d think. My family occasionally traveled with a babysitter when I was a kid and at the time we were thoroughly middle class.

What is your definition of middle class?

Probably not American middle class ;-) . In Asia it is (was?) common to have a driver, servant and yes even a dedicated babysitter for the kids.

To respond to the people who are going to say that's just exploitation of the poor, well, your Uber driver and your food delivery person would like to talk you, as well as the people who were poorly paid to mine the rare minerals found on your fancy phone.

Surprise! You were not middle class.

Eh, an au pair from overseas provides childcare in exchange for rent and food, and comes on vacations.

If you aren't a stay at home parent, you can use some of the money you earn at your job to pay for child care.

Having an au pair puts one firmly above the middle-class. Not necessarily rich, but certainly flirting with "affluent."

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people in the US consider middle class to be anything between barely putting food on the table and flying around in private jets. It's probably fair that people hiring au pairs/nannies are on at least the upper range of middle class income but that doesn't make them "rich" in typical American parlance.

Au pair can be cheaper that the day care. Middle class people from much poorer countries than the USA have au pairs.

What’s really surprising is that a stranger on the internet is an authority on my childhood and family. What else can you tell me?

You have to be in some serious denial or have complete lack of perspective to think having the means to bring a babysitter on your holidays is "solidly middle class"

There are literally dozens of comments elsewhere in this thread about how an au pair can be extremely affordable, borderline cheap. Feel free to read some of them, it's actually pretty enlightening if you're able to get over your unwarranted knee-jerk anger :)

Don't think anyone expressed "anger" so I'm not sure why you had the knee jerk reaction to assume that.

You're entitled to believe that bringing a cheap babysitter on a family road trip a few times means we couldn't possibly have been middle class, but the assertion that I'm in denial or have a complete lack of perspective is uncalled for.

Not as big as the market of traveling with maid.

edit also sounds like the title of a xhampster video.

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