Show her once, and the towels come back folded your way.

Why the first attempt comes back wrong

You asked for the towels to be folded. They were folded. They are just folded in thirds, and you fold them in halves, and now they do not fit the shelf.

Nothing went wrong here. A new domestic helper arrives knowing how to fold a towel. What she cannot know is how your household folds one, because that piece of knowledge exists nowhere except in your hands and your linen cupboard. The same is true of how strong you like the congee, which cloth is for the bathroom floor and which is never for the bathroom floor, and whether the school water bottle goes in the bag the night before or the morning of.

Household standards are learned, not assumed. Almost every friction in a first month is really this: a preference that lived in somebody's head, met for the first time by somebody who could not have guessed it.

Show once, do it together, then step away

The handover that works has three passes, and skipping the middle one is what creates most of the hovering.

1. Do it yourself while she watches, and talk while you do it. Not just the steps but the reason. "I rinse the rice three times because my mother did and the texture is better." The reason is what lets her get it right in a situation you did not cover.
2. Do it together, with her hands on it and you beside her. This is the pass people skip, and it is the one that surfaces the misunderstanding while it is still cheap. She will do one step differently, you will say "ah, like this instead", and that is the whole lesson.
3. Let her do it alone, and look at the result rather than the process. Standing in the doorway watching does not improve the outcome. It only teaches her that she is being watched.

For anything with more than about four steps, expect to run the middle pass twice. That is not a bad sign.

Why writing it down beats saying it again

Verbal instructions are fine for one thing. They fall apart at eleven things, in a second language, on the third day, in a flat where somebody is also crying.

A single sheet on the inside of a cupboard door does more than a week of reminders. Keep it short and keep it specific: the wash cycle for the school uniforms, the brand of oyster sauce, which day the recycling goes down, who to call if the water heater does something alarming. Where a description gets fussy, take a photo. A picture of the correctly loaded dishwasher settles a question that three sentences cannot, and it settles it at eight in the morning when you are not there to ask.

The other advantage is quieter: a written standard is not a personal criticism. When the sheet says thirds, nobody has to remember who said what.

The first time it comes back wrong

This is the moment the next two years get decided, and it usually takes ninety seconds.

Explain it. Show her the thing, say what you wanted instead, say why, and move on. That is the whole intervention, and it works because it hands her the information she was missing.

Scolding does not work. It does not work even when you are tired and it is the third time, and it does not work even when the mistake is genuinely annoying. What it teaches is that mistakes are dangerous, and a person who has learned that mistakes are dangerous stops telling you about them. You will find out about the broken thing later, from somebody else, or not at all. A household where small errors get explained is a household where you hear about the big ones early.

Treat her with respect while you are setting the routine, in the same voice you would use with a colleague who is new and competent. She is an adult who is good at this work and has been in your home for four days.

How much checking is too much?

A fair test: are you checking to find out something you do not know, or to feel better?

Checking the result of a task in the first fortnight is reasonable and she will expect it. Following her from room to room is not, and it has a cost most employers do not see. Hovering suppresses the judgement you actually want her to develop. If she cannot make a small decision without you in the room, then every small decision becomes yours, forever, which is the opposite of what you hired for.

The useful version is a short check at a fixed time rather than a running commentary. Five minutes at the end of the day, going through what came up, beats eleven corrections scattered through it.

Worth getting right early

A month of patient handover buys you a year of not thinking about the laundry. It is the highest-return time you will spend in the whole placement, and the families who get a genuinely easy second year are almost always the ones who were specific, written-down and unhurried in the first month.

If you are in the middle of this and something is not landing, that is an ordinary thing to want a second opinion on, and it does not have to wait until it is a problem. GMA has been settling helpers into Hong Kong households since 2003, and we are around after the placement, not only before it. Our office is open 10am to 7pm, seven days a week.

Talk to us about how it is going, or read more about how we work with families.