January 22, 2005
From the ashes a fire shall be woken (3)
Raising kids abroad.
Personally, I think that we're doing our kids a great service by raising them abroad. Huh, you say. Of course you would think that, having been raised abroad yourself.[1] Yeah, I say, you're right. However, others agree with me.
In general, third culture kids (TCK)[2] tend to be more flexible and tolerant than their peers and often exhibit strong observation skills. Having lived in foreign cultures, they have a multi-dimensional world view and feel a stronger connection to other people on this planet. Often, this kind of tolerance and openness comes along with a greater spiritual perspective, as well as a higher maturity level. Finally, add in the fact that most expat kids are raised bi- or multilingually, which makes for great linguistic abilities for the rest of their lives.
It does sound a little like they're only lacking the ability to fly, then they'd be superheroes.
Alas, not all is so rosy in the lives of expat kids.
Rootlessness, restlessness, trouble with intimacy, loneliness, isolation, and unresolved grief are only some of the problems that TCK's are battling with. Subsequently, their parents are dealing with vast amounts of guilt about inflicting all those feelings on their precious children.
Where do you come from? (That one has multiple answers.)
When are we leaving this posting, where will we be the next? (That one is difficult to answer. Our last move was announced one week ahead.)
You're my best friend now, but soon I'll be gone. (...)
I hate this (new) place and I want to go back (to the last place). (...)
It's not easy to be raised an expat kid. I remember all those feelings well -- I hated Istanbul and everybody there when we moved to Turkey. I hated Germany and everything about it when we moved back. For a year or more, I absolutely refused to mingle with my classmates in Germany. Still today, I don't know quite what to answer when people ask me where I'm from. And that was just one country that I lived in, other than my passport country (the other countries came later, in adulthood).
My boys will have a much harder time of it. Not only do they have the additional burden of a bi-cultural home with parents coming from two different continents. They also have not spend much time in the country of their birth (Germany) and even less time in the other country they hold passports of (US). (Let's just skip entirely over the Irish passports and the fact that they've never even been anywhere close to Ireland.)
When Alan was six months old, he made his first move from Germany to Serbia. At this point, he'd already accumulated frequent flyer miles in the tens of thousands[3], and had visited no less than seven countries. At the ripe age of sixteen months, he was moved from Serbia to Romania. He had just started to babble his first words and the shock of relocation (and the well-timed arrival of his brother) rendered him speechless for about half a year. He caught up, though, and another year later he's fluent (whatever counts for fluent at the age of two) in three languages, one of which he'll forget entirely before the age of five.
He's had two nannies, both of which he loved dearly and which he won't remember at all as an adult. His current classmates come from Israel, Turkey, Sweden, US, Belgium, and Romania, but he will very likely graduate from a High School where the most exotic specimen might be the guy from Tennesee. Or he himself.
But I hope that the advantages will outweigh all of those drawbacks. I turned out okay (if I may say so), and I think that some strategies and some applied lessons from my childhood will help raising healthy kids.
We are moving with plenty of stuff -- which is annoying and cloying sometimes but it gives the children a sense of belonging. Sort of, this is my bed, has been my bed since I was born, so I feel safe to sleep even if the bed is in a strange room. I have no idea whether that actually works.
We also enforce a strict daily routine that doesn't change wherever we are. We have a bedtime ritual that is set in stone. The boys are sleeping sacks at night and each has a favorite plush toy that travels with them, always. We have a sit-down dinner every single day. We go outside and to the park every single day, never mind it's freezing cold/raining bullfrogs/blistering hot. We cook ourselves, so the food is familiar too.
[We've only broken once with this routine and that was recently when we spent Christmas in Germany. It didn't pay off. The kids were squirly and uncontrollable without regular bedtimes and daily outings. It was stressful for us, them, and the grandparents. Never again, we swore.]
It's definitely a challenge to move kids around. I'm already dreading to tear Alan away from his friends at school and at the park. I'm not even thinking about the nanny. That will be awful.
However, they are healthy normal kids (thus, only moderately screwed up). They will suffer, as will we, and then life will go on. They will explore new surroundings, they will find new friends, and I think they will be fine wherever we go next. After a while, at least.
This is not the case for all parents. One of the definite downsides of expat living and frequent moves is that there is no such thing as a continuous care for kids with special needs. Speech therapy? Physical therapy? Hard to provide when you change locations every 18 months. If one of the boys needed any kind of long-term therpy, I think we'd break this venture off and return to either the US or Germany permanently. In fact, I know only one family who has a special needs child, and that child has a very mild case of Trisomy 21. I don't know of any blind, deaf, autistic or other children in this expat community.
One contributing factor to this might be that expat schools don't usually provide for special needs kids. They are often stretched to the limits anyhow, and depend on lots of volunteer work by the parents. They can ill afford specialized teachers and expensive equipment for some rare cases. I'm not sure whether this is a vicious circle - no special provisions, no special needs kids, no special provisions... or whether parents with special needs kids just always choose to do the sensible thing and stay put.
Guilt is definitely a feeling all expat parents know well. But we're also very proud of our children, of the way they travel well and speak multiple languages, adapt to new situations and people. We all hope that one day, our kids will look back and think - it's great I got to see all those things and meet all those people. It's made me who I am.
I certainly am grateful to my parents that they opened our eyes for the world. The downside is, of course, that my brothers and I turned out to be vagabonds in our own right. There was a time when we all lived in different countries -- Serbia, USA, and Turkey. It's not easy for my parents to have children and grandchildren so inaccessible but then, it makes for nice vacation destinations.
[1] My family moved to Istanbul/Turkey when I was nine.
[2] The term TCK was first used 40 years ago by Ruth Hill Useem in her research on North American children living in India. TCK refers to someone who has spent a significant period of time in one or more
culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture. (Kay Branaman Eakin, According to my passport, I'm going home, page 18)
[3] But since he was a baby without a seat, he didn't get to cash all those miles in. More's the pity.