The First 30 Days With Your New Helper: What to Expect

Before You Start

A good first month is mostly decided by what is ready before she walks in. Have these in hand:

• Her room made up, with somewhere to put her things and a light she controls herself
• A written sheet of the household basics: the wifi password, the school run times, who is usually home when, what to do if nobody answers the phone
• Her phone sorted, or a plan to sort it in the first day or two, so she can reach her family
• A decision, made between the adults in the house, about who she takes instructions from
• One person nominated to answer her questions in the first fortnight

That last one matters more than it sounds. A helper taking instructions from three adults with three different standards cannot succeed, and she will not tell you that is the problem.

This guide covers the shape of the whole month. The first few days have their own detail, and those are set out in the first week with your helper.

Week 1: Let Her Land

The instinct is to start training on day one. Resist it for a day.

She has left her family, flown to a city she may not know, and walked into a stranger's home. Someone who is still disoriented does not retain instructions, so the first day spent on orientation is not a day lost.

1. Show her the flat, her room, and where everything lives before you explain any task.
2. Walk the neighbourhood together: the wet market, the nearest MTR, the pharmacy, the building's rubbish and recycling points.
3. Eat a meal together on the first day if you can. It does more for the working relationship than any briefing.
4. Settle which day is her day off, and say it out loud, before it becomes an awkward conversation in week three.
5. Let her shadow rather than perform. She follows you through the day and watches how the household actually runs.

Week one is orientation, not assessment. Do not judge her on it.

Week 2: Hand Over One Task at a Time

Now the real work starts, and the pace is slower than most employers expect. One task, properly handed over, beats five explained in passing.

For each task: do it yourself while she watches and you explain why, then do it together with her hands on it, then let her do it alone and look at the result rather than standing over the process. Anything with more than a few steps will need the middle pass twice, which is normal and not a warning sign.

Start with the tasks that are hardest to get wrong, and leave anything involving a child or an elderly family member until she knows the household. Introduce her to the people she will care for slowly, and stay close in those early days.

Where the household has a way of doing something that a reasonable person would never guess, write it down or photograph it. A picture of the correctly packed schoolbag answers a question at seven in the morning when you are not there.

Week 3: Step Back

This is the week to leave the room, and the week most first-time employers find hardest.

Hovering feels responsible and is not. If she cannot make a small decision without you present, then every small decision stays yours indefinitely, which defeats the point of the arrangement. Judgement only develops where there is room for it.

Pick a short, fixed check-in instead of a running commentary: five or ten minutes at the end of the day to go through what came up. That gets you the information you actually want without teaching her she is being watched.

Expect a wobble somewhere in this fortnight. Homesickness often arrives in week three rather than on day two, once the novelty has worn off and the distance from home becomes real. It is ordinary, it passes, and a kind word about it costs nothing.

Week 4: Sit Down Together

Book twenty minutes, properly, with the phone away. This conversation is the single highest-value thing in the month and almost nobody does it.

Ask, in this order: what is going well, what she finds difficult, what she needs that she has not got, and whether anything you asked for does not make sense to her. Then say your own piece, specifically and warmly: the two or three things you would like done differently, with the reason attached.

Keep the corrections concrete. "The bathroom floor cloth is the blue one, not the green one" is useful. "Be more careful" is not. Where something has been going wrong, explain it rather than scold it: a household where small mistakes get explained calmly is a household where you hear about the big ones early.

Then adjust the routine to what you have both learned. The plan you wrote in week one was a guess. Week four is where it becomes real.

What a Good First Month Actually Feels Like

It feels slightly awkward and mostly fine.

There will be a few tasks she does differently from you, a day when something gets broken, an evening when communication does not quite land, and a stretch where she is quieter than usual. None of that means the placement is failing. The normal case is a month of small adjustments ending with a household that runs more easily than it did before, and that is what most first months are.

What genuinely predicts a difficult year is not an early mistake. It is a month where nobody said what they wanted, and both sides settled into guessing.

Looking Ahead

By the end of week four you should be able to leave the flat without a list of instructions. That is the marker worth aiming at, rather than perfection on any single task.

If something in the first month is not landing, that is an ordinary thing to want a second opinion on, and it does not have to wait until it has become a problem. GMA prepares both sides before day one and stays reachable afterwards, which is when most of the real questions arrive. Our office is open 10am to 7pm, seven days a week.

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