Help At Home |
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Reliable help at home, if you can afford it, can be a god-send for keeping stress levels down. You can be sure that the superwomen we would all like to emulate, combining a successful, high-powered job with happy children and a well-run home, and still with time left over for effortless entertaining, are not just well-organized people, but have help they know they can count on.
However, whether the help is a baby-sitter, daily (or occasional cleaner), or part-time nanny, or a live-in au pair, it is essential that both sides - the helper and the helped - should understand exactly what the duties involved are, and make sure that time off, for example, is not abused. And if your home help is specifically there to look after the children, it is vital that you should feel that relations with the children themselves are all you would wish. Otherwise help can become stressful in its own right.
A word about help from parents and in-laws. Parents often want to help, by baby-sitting, taking the grandchildren for the day while you are out, or even for longer periods to enable you to get a well-deserved holiday. It's lovely for everybody when this works out - an integrated extended family unit is itself protection against a number of stresses in family life, and is becoming all too rare here, compared with Mediterranean and Asian countries where it is very much still the norm. But kind offers of help from this source should not be abused, and are perhaps best thought of on an occasional basis, although obviously this will differ according to family circumstances.
Parent-child relations don't cease to be a well-known area of stress just because you're all grown up, and if you allow parents to do too much for your children, however kindly this is meant, you may end up by regretting it. Leaving children with parents while you go on holiday may seem ideally convenient, but for older people unused to young children on a regular basis, it can be exhausting, and you may find yourself returning from a relaxing holiday only to be met with an unexpectedly stressful situation at home.
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