Choosing Part Time or Full Time Maid?

When considering whether to hire a maid, you need to ask yourself the purpose of hiring one - to care for young children, older children, elderly, elderly sick or mainly to perform household chores?

If the reason is to take care for very young children because there is no other child care arrangement available, then full time maid may be the answer. Not only does full time maid takes care of the children, they also cook and perform household chores. When the employer is home from work, you would have well settled children, sparkling clean house and steaming hot dinner on your table. In this way, you can pay full attention to the children, playing with them and reading to them.

However, we need to ask ourselves the long-term effects of full time maid on our children, will they be over reliant on the maids, thereby inculcating an irresponsible attitude, poor mannerisms and general lack of hygiene over their personal belongings? Unless parents can instill in them proper values with whatever little time they have after work, parents have to consider carefully before hiring full time maids over long period of time for their children.

For elderly or elderly sick parents, having a full-time maid definitely takes a load off the shoulders of children who have busy work schedules. They not only take care of all their meals and household chores, they can also accompany the elderly for walks and help the sickly to bathe and change, as well as accompanying them to hospitals.

However, we need to ask ourselves if we have any room to house the maids. Would our privacy be intruded? How safe are full time maids when we read news or heard from friends of children and old people being abused? Further how honest are they? Is it safe to leave valuables at home? Do they really have the expertise to take care of elderly sick? Would the maids have personal problems resulting in them venting anger on their charges or employers having to act as counselors to alleviate their personal problems? Would they bring strangers to the homes and cause harm to the family? These are real problems that employers have to face when handling full time maids.

With part-time maids, above problems raised become a lesser problem for the employers. Without housing them and them not being part of your daily life, part-time maids only serve your needs according to your wants. As part-time maids have experience in working in other homes, they can give suggestions on how best to maintain your homes especially if they clean your house only once or twice a week. With their experience, they can perform their jobs efficiently and effectively. Other than the first day of work where the employer needs to specify the requirements of the job and where most stuff are placed, part-time maids can carry out the work independently with minimal or no supervision.

If you can have alternate arrangements for your children and elderly or when the children are slightly older, I advocate employing part-time maids. This would reduce utmost reliance on maids in every facet of your families' life. Children can grow up more independently and chip in for simple chores like cleaning after themselves. Elderly will have more confidence too with their new gained independence. Employers can still have some restful time as household tasks have been deftly accomplished by experienced hands. With a little inconvenience e.g. needing to cook and buying daily meals but no daily intrusion of privacy or possible problems lurking, as well as more independent children / elderly, you will be able to face each day with renewed strength and comfort too.