Helper attitude problems: what they usually turn out to be

Add up the tasks in the weekly plan, in minutes, and compare the total with her actual working hours. Include walking between rooms. Include the school run. Include the twenty minutes at the end of the day that nobody counts.

If the total exceeds the hours, you do not have a performance problem. You have a plan that cannot be completed by anyone, and the person following it has been quietly failing at it every week without saying so. That is arithmetic, not character.

The tell is a task that migrates. It moves to the end of the day, then to tomorrow, then out of the week entirely, and nobody mentions it.

Not implied. Not demonstrated once in the first week. Named, out loud, and written down where both of you can find it.

Go and look at where it should be written. If the line is blank, that is your answer, and what follows is a conversation rather than a correction.

This is the single most common gap, and it is not a sign that you did anything unusual. Almost nobody writes the job down. How to write it

If she does it one way on Monday and another way on Wednesday, the useful question is not why she changed. It is who asked her to.

Grandparents, a partner, an older child, a visiting relative. Each of them is being reasonable on their own terms, and she is receiving a household that contradicts itself and has no safe way to point that out.

The right cloth. A mop that suits the floor. A vacuum with a filter that works. Gloves in her size. A method described in a book and not supplied in the house is not a method.

This one sits underneath the other four, and it is the one most likely to be read as character.

Not every home has a washing machine, and among the homes that do, not every machine has settings anyone was ever taught to use. Not every home has a dryer, a dishwasher, an oven, a vacuum with attachments, hot water at the tap, or mains electricity that stays on. Someone who has run a household well without those things has real skill. It is simply not the skill of operating yours.

Household routine works the same way. How often bedlinen is changed. Whether shoes come off at the door. How long leftovers stay in the fridge. Whether the children brush their teeth before a story or after. What counts as clean enough for a floor people walk on barefoot. None of that is universal. Two households on the same street answer it differently, two households in different countries differ further, and neither answer is the careless one.

So when something is done in a way you did not expect, the useful question is not whether she cares. It is whether she has met this before, and whether anyone has told her which version this house uses.

Familiarity with a particular machine is a week. Willingness to learn is not something you can train into an adult, which makes it the thing worth asking about before you hire.

Ask her to tell you about a time she had to learn something new at work, and what she actually did. Ask what happened the first time she met a piece of equipment she had not used before. You are not listening for whether she already knows. You are listening for whether the answer contains asking someone, watching someone, or trying it and checking, because those are the behaviours that make the first month short.

Demonstrate the machine or the routine in full, once, saying what you are doing as you do it. Then let her write the steps down herself, in her own words, in whichever language she thinks in.

Notes she wrote are notes she can use. A sheet you wrote is a document she has to decode at the moment she needs it, usually with her hands full. Leave her page where the task happens, and the second and third time she does it she checks her own note instead of finding you. By the tenth time she does not need it. A task that has needed repeating three times is not evidence about the person. It is a task that has been repeated three times.

A new home, a new routine and unfamiliar equipment arriving in the same fortnight is a great deal at once. Expect the first attempts to be slow, say out loud that you expect it, and do not make speed the measure until the method has settled.

How someone performs in week one at an unfamiliar task tells you very little about month three at a familiar one. If you judge early you will be judging the equipment, not the person operating it.

The plan does not fit, and she does not say so. The most common one by a distance, and the reason check one comes first.

The fourth correction. You have asked three times and it is still not right. The fourth time is the one that does the damage, because by then you are not correcting a task, you are expressing an accumulated feeling and she can hear that. Break the pattern instead of repeating it. Stop asking, and go and do it alongside her once, in full, saying what you are doing as you do it. Twenty minutes, once. It resolves more fourth corrections than any amount of explaining.

Her initiative reads to you as intrusion. She reorganises the kitchen cupboards without being asked, and your first reaction is not gratitude, it is that something of yours has been touched. Both things are true at once: you asked for someone who shows initiative, and initiative looks like someone making a decision in your home without checking. The way through is to decide in advance where independent decisions are welcome. The cupboards, the fridge layout, the order of the weekly tasks, hers to arrange. Everything else, ask first. A boundary drawn after she crosses it is a reprimand.

Weeks three to six. The novelty has gone and the first month's money has gone home. It shows up as flatness, slowness, or small mistakes in work that was fine in week two. It is not a performance change, and treating it as one makes it worse and longer. What helps is small and unsentimental: protect the rest day absolutely in this period, make sure the phone and the data work, and ask her once whether she has met anyone here yet.

A rest day that exists but is not usable. She has Sunday off and is asked to be back by six, or to take the toddler with her, or the family goes out and she is at home with the baby, which is a working day in comfortable clothes. Employers doing this do not experience themselves as taking her rest day away, which is exactly why it needs naming. She is entitled to one rest day a week, and at least one a month must be taken and cannot be compensated in money. A rest day worked by agreement is paid at one day's salary on top of the monthly wage. (MOM, rest days and wellbeing, page last updated 16 January 2026. The rule has been in force since 1 January 2023.)

Salary late, short, or with a deduction that felt reasonable. Paying on the fifteenth because you were travelling. Rounding down. Taking fifty dollars for something she broke. None of that is a small administrative matter to somebody whose family is waiting for the transfer, and the deduction may not be permitted at all. If it has happened: pay the difference in full this week, say plainly that it was your error, and write the payment date down so it cannot recur. What the pay rules actually say

The first breakage. It will be a plate, or a glass, or something of your mother's. What happens next sets the reporting culture for the whole placement. If the first breakage costs her money or produces a scene, you have taught her in one afternoon that things which go wrong should be managed quietly, and everything after that gets managed quietly too, including the leak under the sink.

The four checks, the fortnightly check-in that surfaces this before week four, and the written record that means you are not relying on memory in month eight, are the working parts of The Domestic Helper Onboarding Book. There is a section in it for households already two or three months in, because that is where most readers actually are.

If you are earlier than that, the first three months covers the same ground as a plan rather than a repair.