In Germany the idea of a teenager spending a few months abroad looking after someone else’s children while they study or travel has given rise to a new concept — the “granny au pair.”
Newspapers now explicitly solicit applications from older women rather than students with advertisements such as: “Family living in Australia with two children aged four and two seeks German replacement granny for three to six months.”
“Older women [aged between 50 and 70] are often better than young ones because they have more life experience,” says Michaela Hansen, 50, who has set up an agency in the northern German city of Hamburg to help put families in touch with would-be hired “grannies.”
Photo: AFP
And the German “Mary Poppins” have as good a reputation abroad as the fictional eccentric nanny with magical powers from the children’s books.
Families are keen to take on “serious and reliable” women “who will know how to look after a child and be strict when necessary,” Hansen says.
Anke Vendt, a 61-year-old retiree from a naval construction company, remembers harboring some doubts as she fastened her seat belt in the plane flying her to Spain.
“But what am I doing?” she remembers thinking after she responded to an advertisement from the agency calling for a mature woman to look after two boys from a German family living in southern Spain.
However, a year later, as she sat sipping coffee back in her home town, she remembers the experience fondly.
“I had a super life there,” she says. “My work involved me taking the two boys, aged 13 and 16, to school in the morning and fetching them in the evening.”
She got on well with the family and now returns regularly to look after the boys when the parents have to travel for business.
At the other end of Germany, in southern Bavaria, Embjoerg Elster remembers looking at the snow fall, thinking it was a romantic sight, but that nothing very much happened in winter at home.
The former air hostess, who retired aged 55, had raised her own two daughters, but both had long ago left home.
So, she accepted a job in Hamburg, as an au pair, looking after four children, aged three, eight, 10 and 12.
“At first it was a little difficult getting used to all the noise,” she says, smiling.
However, like many older women taking up such jobs, what mattered “was having the feeling one was still useful,” she says.
“The idea is to find a new calling in life after years of working or looking after a family,” Hansen says.
“I’m in shape and active,” says Elster, who is soon to go to Munich, in southern Germany, to look after two other children.
Vendt also sees it as a way to broaden her horizons.
“It’s another way to travel, an opportunity to discover a country, away from the beaten tourist track, and meet the locals,” says Vendt, who has been working on improving her Spanish.
The agency, known as “Granny Au Pair” just helps families and grannies get in touch. It charges 35 euros (US$50) to register and 250 euros if a match is made.
However, granny and the family must work out their own agreement about terms and conditions.
Asked if some women might be exploited as cheap labor, the agency boss suggests the grannies benefit in many ways.
“Compared to what it would cost them to live abroad for three months, with room, board and a little spending money, this hardly amounts to exploitation,” Hansen says.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
Clambering hand-over-hand, sweat dripping into his eyes, a durian laborer expertly slices a cumbersome fruit from a tree before tossing it down to land with a soft thump in his colleague’s waiting arms about 15m below. Among Thailand’s most famous and lucrative exports, the pungent “king of fruits” is as distinctive in its smell as its spiky green-brown carapace, and has been farmed in the kingdom for hundreds of years. However, a vicious heat wave engulfing Southeast Asia has resulted in smaller yields and spiraling costs, with growers and sellers increasingly panicked as global warming damages the industry. “This year is a crisis,”
HIGH-TECH: As leading-edge process technologies become more complicated, only a handful of players are able to provide design services, the company’s CEO said Artificial intelligence (AI) chip designer Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯) yesterday said that revenue would grow significantly again in 2026 after adding a major AI chip customer, reversing moderation amid a product transition next year. The Taipei-based application-specific IC (ASIC) designer reiterated its strong revenue growth forecast for this year and 2026 after its stock plummeted about 23 percent to NT$3,145 from a peak of NT$4,085 on March 6 amid growing competition. Alchip said it has built strong partnerships with cloud service providers (CSP), denying that it had lost orders to smaller competitors such as Faraday Technology Corp (智原). Faraday said it has secured