Expat Parentsand Guilt

PRODUCED BY EXPAT EVERYDAY SUPPORT CENTER

A WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT

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ExpatParentsandGuiltTranscript of the webinar held on September 13, 2011Participants: Carol Van Dyken, Kate Berger and Norman Viss

Produced by:

Expat Everyday Support CenterWe provide global citizens with tools to overcome isolation.www.expateverydaysupportcenter.com

AND

Kate Berger, from The Expat Kids ClubExpat Children’s Cultural Consultancyhttp://www.expatkidsclub.com/

Copyright © Everyday Coach LLC All rights reserved

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YOU DO NOT HAVE TO FEEL AS GUILTY AS YOU THINK YOU DO.....

❖ For taking your children so far away from family and home

❖ Because your children are missing important childhood memories

❖ That you are not always competent to help your child handle school and other life situations

❖ For possible educational gaps your child may experience

While the expatriate lifestyle grants us invaluable opportunities to see and experience the world, there is often a price to pay – guilt about not being “home”.

That’s the topic of this Expat Everyday Support Center webinar (podcast), with special guest Kate Berger.

Kate holds a BA in Psychology from the George Washington University (Washington, D.C.), and an MSc in Child and Adolescent Psychology from the University of Leiden. She currently works as an expat kid cultural consultant, providing expat children with a safe haven to express their frustrations, and coping strategies to help overcome the difficulties associated with being a foreigner in the Netherlands.Kate is doing research on expat parents and guilt. In this webinar she interviewed Norman Viss and Carol Van Dyken, longtime parents of TCKs, about how they have experienced and dealt with guilt issues in raising a total of seven children in an expatriate environment. Norman and Carol are the two coaches at the Expat Everyday Support Center. So you will get an insight into how your coaches did things. How cool is that!

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WE HAD AN OPEN AND FRANK DISCUSSION ABOUT HOW WE AS PARENTS LOOK BACK ON OUR LIVES AS TCK PARENTS (WHICH

STILL CONTINUES TO THIS DAY, ACTUALLY!)

WE REFLECTED ON QUESTIONS SUCH AS:

❖ How have you, as parents, dealt emotionally with your lifestyle, also in relation to your children?

❖ How difficult has it been to raise children in the expat life?

❖ How have your children adjusted, and how do they look back on the choices you made?

❖ What kinds of differences are there between moving to another country and moving back to the ‘home’ country?

And the million dollar question: How do you deal with your own feelings of guilt as a parent, when your child has a problem/difficulty that is a direct result of being a TCK?

Read the transcript of the webinar, and hear Kate, Norman and Carol in this informative webinar, rooted in real life experience and guided by a professional!

Norman: I’m very glad you’re here. Thank you for join-ing us. We’re here with Norman Viss, Carol VanDyken and Kate Berger and we’re inter-ested in chatting today about expat parents and issues surrounding – guilt is a bit of a heavy word but also just how we interact with our children and how we feel about some of the stresses and strains that we put them through as ex pat parents.

The format for today is that Kate is going to be interviewing us. She’s doing some re-search on expat parents and so this is actually killing two birds with one stone for her. She will introduce herself in a second. I’d like to start with Carol. Are you there and could you introduce yourself, please?

Carol: I am here and I can introduce myself. I would love that. As Norm said, I have throughout my life had a few years and plus of ex pat life. Started in my late teens in Africa and Asia. Spent a year in Kenya and a year in Japan and then in my mid-20s with my husband and young son lived in the Caribbean on a very small island of Bonaire for five years and trans-ferred to another island. We called it island hopping. A little bit in jest there but to the is-land of Sri Lanka right off the coast of India. And were there for seven years and then eight years in South Africa.

So, since about 1988/89 I’ve been consistently overseas. We would come back to the States every several years for a couple months’ time and went over with our son who was two and

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proceeded to have three daughters in our first five years on that little desert island and so our four children pretty much only knew an overseas life. They hold American passports because my husband and I are both American and we grew up with fairly traditional Ameri-can childhoods but somehow got that travel bug and when we joined an international non-profit we were pleased to be able to begin spending the majority of our lives overseas out of our home culture.

So, our children have pretty much come full circle. I guess it’s full circle. For our son it’s full circle ‘cause he did start out in the United States but our daughters were born overseas and their lives were spent overseas so they de-scribe themselves as probably Americans just for the sake of ease but I don’t think they’re very American really.

And two years ago we repatriated to the United States because they were headed into their college years and as parents we wanted them to have an American college education and we said, “If it’s the last thing we advise you to do or sort of make you do, we think it’s a good idea for you to have an American col-lege education and from there you can make your choice whether to live in America or over-seas again.”

So that’s what we’ve been occupying our-selves with the last several years sort of launching our children into young adulthood. Our son was married last month to an Ameri-can who is from a small suburb outside of Philadelphia and has lived in the same house all her life, the same friends, the same neigh-

bors. So, that’s an interesting whole ‘nother topic of who our children then choose as mates, right? But that’s kind of where we’re at at this point: trying to help our children find now meaningful careers and spouses that are a good fit for them and begin their adult life with some un-derstanding of how their growing up years have impacted them and can be used for good in their future.

Norman: Great. Thanks, Carol. I appreciate that a lot. I should also mention that Carol is a colleague of mine, one of the coaches at Isolated Inter-nationals.

My name is Norman Viss. I’m also a coach at Isolated Internationals and started out my in-ternational career fairly young before I was married at the age of 19 with a short stint in East Africa. And then with my wife and our daughter of five months old headed for Nige-ria, West Africa where we lived for ten years.

During that time we had two sons, so our fam-ily was then complete. We lived very rurally and relatively isolated, less so the last couple of years. And basically did everything in what we call the bush scene of a West African coun-try that you can imagine.

Then at the end of the ‘80s we made a move and came in 1990 to the Netherlands just out-side of Amsterdam. Our children were then 13, 11 and 8. We pretty much dumped them out of the basket into Dutch schools within a few months and they all did their high school

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or middle school here. Learning language was also very important to us so they did that, too.

And then our daughter went back to the States fairly quickly to continue college. Has settled down, married and has two sons.

Our oldest son stayed in Holland for about 18 years totally. Married a Dutch girl and about three years ago emigrated to the United States for educational and career goals.

Our youngest son left Holland about 12 years ago and has ended up settling and studying and working in the Philadelphia area. And my wife and I are still here in the Netherlands for a few more months and are planning to repatri-ate at the end of this year after more than 30 years of being outside of the States. So that’s going to be an exciting thing, too.

So that’s a little bit about Carol and myself. Kate, we’re very glad to welcome you. I have met you in person. Carol has not. Carol’s call-ing in from Philadelphia but Kate is actually right across the canal from me. I think we’re both having the same thunderstorms over our heads right now so hopefully our Internet con-nection will hold on.

Kate, welcome. Tell us a little bit about your-self and then we are your guinea pigs.

Kate: Great, great. Well, thank you, Norman and Carol and I’m really excited to be participating in this with you guys today and so really appre-ciate the chance to be here.

I am originally coming from New York and I’ve lived in Amsterdam about five years now and I have a private practice. I’m a child psycholo-gist specializing in working with ex pat chil-dren. So I work with kids with all kinds of ad-justment issues. Kids in transition dealing with obviously moving processes as well as when sort of day-to-day normal things occur or divorce or a new sibling is born. Things like that.

When kids over here living in their non-native environment really need to be able to speak with somebody or interact with somebody in a therapeutic way that is in their native lan-guage or I also work with kids who are not na-tive English speakers but the English language is important for kids during these transition phases.

And sort of something that has come up in the work that I’m doing is I hear from a lot of par-ents who are dealing with their own feelings of being responsible for the pain that their chil-dren might be going through as a result of the move or, you know, guilt which is a big heavy word like we’ve already said. So it is just really a topic that I’m very interested in re-searching more because I think a lot of par-ents might be suffering in silence and don’t re-alize that there’s so many of you out there that really have a lot of experiences and you can share with each other what’s going on and how when parents are feeling guilty it can have a sort of an impact on family life.

And so hopefully as a long-term result of all this research and talking about this topic we’ll come up with ways to enhance the ex pat fam-

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ily experience to make it the most positive and rewarding experience possible.

And yeah, that’s my introduction and I just wanted to say that I think for the three of us at least and probably many people that are lis-tening that have had an expat experience and been a part of this lifestyle, it’s a really won-derful opportunity to meet a lot of interesting people and I find the network especially over here in Amsterdam because that’s my only ex-perience, everybody’s very supportive of one another and it’s really a pleasure to be in-volved in the ex pat community over here.

So, yeah, that’s basically my brief intro. I guess we can jump right into sort of some questions that I have for the two of you.

Norman: Yeah. Just to remind folks, the idea here is that we’re killing two birds with one stone. Kate is asking us some questions that she asks different people in terms of her research and then we’re hoping that our answers to that will provide some content that can be helpful to people who are listening.

So, go ahead, Kate. Fire the thing up.

Kate: It was great to get sort of background informa-tion from both Carol and Norman. And it seems like well both of you raised your chil-dren – I guess they were born into sort of a non-native environment. That’s correct, right?

Who are our children culturally?

Norman: Actually my oldest was five months when we went so the first five months don’t really count.

Carol: Yeah, and our son was two when we moved so it’s the same. He doesn’t remember life be-fore living overseas.

Kate: I’m curious to know sort of about how as your children, you know, when they were young and getting older how they sort of identified themselves. If you noticed that they, you know, who they interacted with in terms of their peers and if there were sort of any sur-prises along the way in terms of oh, for exam-ple, Carol, maybe your daughter or was it your son that was born in the islands, you know, maybe picked up some certain tendencies that were a bit strange or unique to you guys.

Is that a clear question? Could you maybe talk to that point?

Carol: Sure. I think that my kids very much took on the cultures that we lived in. To them, they didn’t know what a traditional, normal sort of American life was because we didn’t live it.

Carol: So to them their normal was the South African kids around them or in Sri Lanka they went to an international school that had 35 different countries represented. So that was a huge va-riety. The influence was largely British. I re-member being quite humored when they would come home from school and be playing a game and they would say to each other,

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“Oh, let me have a go.” And I’d think, “Oh, wow.”

Carol: That’s about as British as, you know, a very British saying. And they would come back with a lot of these and I think they began to realize that when we would reenter American culture because overseas everyone would say to them, “Oh, you’re American.” And they’d think, “Yeah, I’m American.”

And then we would come back to America and they would say something like, “Let me have a go,” and American children would stare at them like what planet are you from. And you could see on their faces it registering wait, why doesn’t this work here.

Kate: Yeah. You could see that there was some sort of sense of their –

Carol: All of a sudden it was awkward. All of a sud-den they were a misfit in a place they thought they’d be a fit because they thought, “I’m American.” But they’re really not American.

Kate: Yeah. And Norman, you had a similar –

Norman: Yeah, I think probably something that Carol and I both have in common is that our chil-dren were really born into their situation so in some sense they felt the most misfit, I think, when they came back to the States and every-body expected them to be American and they weren’t.

Norman: That’s probably the area of misfit more than when they were in the – our kids when they

were little they played with the kids that lived around us and for them that was just as nor-mal as anything.

Kate: And then when they moved – because you’ve moved them all around. When you came back to the Netherlands or when you arrived in the Netherlands at first and your kids I think you said were 13, 11 and 8.

Norman: That’s right.

Kate: That’s quite say, difficult time anyhow for kids. It can be.

The impact of moving between cultures

Kate: A lot going on developmentally and socially and emotionally and I can imagine that it might have been – well, let me not put words into your mouth. Maybe you can explain a lit-tle bit if that was different than when they were younger moving around how that –

Norman: I should place a caveat here that you might for some of these memory type of things be better off speaking to my wife at some point because there’s a lot of things I just simply don’t remember any more.

I think in general they did okay. The two boys that were younger started off at the upper end of elementary school and that really seemed to go okay. They picked up language really quickly.

There were some cultural mistakes that they made. I remember one year in Holland they have on December 5 their Santa Claus day

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with presents and at school the kids all draw names and then exchange gifts. So, we thought that was easy. Our youngest bought I don’t know, a car or something for the person he had his name.

But what we didn’t realize was that you were supposed to make what they call in Holland a surprise. Which was package the gift and make a poem and pack the gift in something that reflects the person receiving the gift. So it’s much, much more than just a little gift. So everyone in the class had a surprise except for my son who just had his little car wrapped up in wrapping paper and the boy that he was supposed to give it to I think burst out in tears. Because he didn’t get the surprise that he had been waiting all year for.

Norman: And the misunderstanding there was because our son looked exactly like all the kids around him so no one thought he wouldn’t know what that was. And that was a traumatic enough experience that I still remember it.

Norman: But I think generally they did okay. Some of the things that were stressful for them we didn’t hear about until later, of course, but I would say in general it was not terribly diffi-cult. It was not exceptionally difficult for them.

What does it mean that a child is “ OK”?

Kate: And what do you think when you said they seemed to do okay? Do you think there are certain reasons that might have been easier or less difficult for them to adjust than other kids

maybe in their situation would have dealt with it? I mean –

Norman: I think a couple of things. One is they had al-ready had experience in another culture so they were aware of some things already and one of the characteristics of our life in Nigeria was that our kids learned at a very young age how to interact with adults. Whenever we had company it didn’t matter what age the company was the kids were there and inter-acted and that continues to this day that they interact with adults. Of course, now they are adults but we’ve always been impressed by how easily they interact with adults and I think that made it a little easier for them to in-teract with us and also for other adults that were around us which made things a little more balanced for them.

I think we involved them as much as we could in the things that we were doing, whatever that was. We really saw ourselves as a unit of five people making this move together.

Norman: And I think although certainly the relationship of my wife and me, you know, it has its ups and downs like every relationship, but I think in general the stability of our relationship was a very, very significant factor and my observa-tion of other expat parents both in Nigeria but also here in the Netherlands or wherever is that the stability of the marital relationship is probably the most crucial factor.

Norman: Kids can take almost anything as long as that relationship is stable.

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TCKs and interaction with adults

Kate: You bring up a lot of interesting points that I want to go back to. One in particular about what you mentioned about your children hav-ing interaction with adults and about how you have your strong family unit and a lot of ex pat families that are moving around a lot, of course, they only have each other every place that they go and I’m curious how – maybe Carol can answer this.

Moving around as kids are maturing and grow-ing up, they don’t want to spend as much time with their parents and rely on parents for cer-tain types of support. Peers become much more important and how did you sort of – were you able to maintain – well maybe I should ask first did you have this strong family unit as you moved around place to place and were you able to maintain it as the kids started growing up and maybe peer influences were becoming more important?

Carol: I would say yes, we had a strong family unit and that especially came out when we would make a move. I noticed that we would unpack all the boxes and get the house all set up and then funny enough your phone doesn’t ring. And that’s when it sort of dawns on you that oh, yeah. Now I have to go out and make friends here.

Carol: Because I’ve left behind what I had in that area. But one thing that you do bring is your family unit and in a way those first six months or so before you really know a lot of outside people is a wonderful time to strengthen those bonds with your children and say, “Let’s ex-

plore this country together. Let’s see what’s fun about living here.” And that kind of thing can do a lot for your family life.

We had the experience of we moved to Johan-nesburg, South Africa when our children were entering their teen years and because we moved into an English speaking culture and a pretty first world culture living in the Johannes-burg suburbs, our children did make friends, local friends, in the school and so they had a lot of their teenage years – they began that kind of natural parting from parents that I would think might be more challenging in a more rural culture or other areas.

But because of our particular setting, it was pretty first world and so the kids would be able to go to malls, to movie theatres, that kind of thing with friends although it was still more limited than the States because the driv-ing age is not until 18 in South Africa and it’s not safe really to be out at night. So there were those physical limitations that still kept our family I think a little stronger as a unit than may have happened if we had lived in the United States.

How do you as parents deal with a child who is strug-gling?

Kate: Okay. Okay. And when you’re having this strong family unit and it’s sort of you’re all act-ing as a unit, as one, how would you deal with let’s say one person in the family, either your-self or one of your children or whoever might have been struggling with certain things maybe having a harder of a time making friends or did things like that come up and

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how were you guys able to deal with it? Who-ever wants to answer?

Carol: My guess is we dealt with it like most parents would. Talking with the child, trying to help them understand, give them strategies for how can you make a friend, how can you be a friend. I think I guess I tend to think that would be normal in any family. I wonder how unique it is to an ex pat family although you do have depending on your culture and the lan-guage barriers and that, there probably are more hindrances that definitely can be as an ex pat.

And especially I think if you’re moving with your children already having experienced a number of years in the United States and then you’re moving into another culture. That’s go-ing to take a lot of your time and attention and I guess I would encourage people to really allow time. If you’re the spouse, whatever your working situation is let one spouse be there for the children the majority of the time.

Like I would not recommend that both spouses work outside the home if you have school age children and you’re in a different culture. Your children need a spouse who’s got more time on their hands to just be there and interact and seize those moments because it’s not gonna be – and this is an old saying probably but it’s not gonna be quality time un-less you’ve got the quantity of time there. Those moments don’t just happen if you’ve only got a couple hours in the evening, in my opinion.

So, I would really recommend that at least one spouse not be out of the home for many hours at a time but give those hours to your children and just be available to them.

Kate: Yeah, yeah. Of course it can be very difficult also for especially expats who are moving to a specific place for work and are expected to really 110 percent commit to their new job and stay late or be there early or there’s sort of, you know, cultural workshops and these kind of things so it can take up a lot of time when you’ve got kids who are also going through this adjustment process with new school and new friends. I think it’s definitely important.

I mean I guess these days it might not finan-cially be possible for one spouse to stay home all the time but I definitely agree with you that being there and sort of hearing and seeing what’s going on that’s under the radar maybe with children because they’re not always gonna just walk up to you and say, “Hey, I’m feeling really bad. Here’s why.”

Carol: Exactly, exactly. I think you risk a lot if you are looking at putting 110 percent in your ca-reer even if there is one working spouse work-ing outside the home and they’re putting 110 percent, I think they’re putting their family at risk and I think that the company itself, compa-nies should be realizing the extra stress on people moving them cross culturally and hope-fully giving them a little time to at least during the adjustment time to give them a bit more time with their family.

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How did you as a family transition to the new environ-ment?

Kate: Right. And what kind of things did you both do when you did spend time with family in a new location or just sort of transition or pick up new customs and cultures. Did you spend some time doing activities or maybe things to get used to the new environment?

Carol: Oh, yeah. I would say we definitely bought books about the new place we were going to and we bought not only tourist books, you know, what there is to see. When you move to a new place you don’t have a lot of commit-ments initially so you have Saturdays free. You have Sundays free. You can say, “Hey, let’s take a morning. We don’t have anything else to do. Let’s go see this or that.” So you spend time together.

I would also encourage people to, if they’re not moving with a lot of their household goods, to at least take some small things that are the same. The same tablecloth on the kitchen table. The same small things on the coffee table in the living room.

If you can put a few little things in your lug-gage that can be around the house for the chil-dren to say, “Oh, I remember this. This is a part of my home. This is what I think of when I think of home.” And obviously if you can bring your household goods, that’s a wonder-ful thing. But not everybody can do that. But that would be something that would make that transition be more seamless.

Kate: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that brings me to a next point that I wanted to ask you guys about how –

Norman: Can I just interrupt you and add one thing?

Kate: Sure, sure. Go ahead.

Norman: I think what also helped was that as soon as possible we tried to develop adult level friend-ships with other couples, particularly other families so we had them over and they had us over so that we were all going through that process of making friends together also. So that you can talk about it afterwards and if problems arise or misunderstandings or what-ever, you’re going through that moving into the new culture as a family and your kids are experiencing some of that with you.

Kate: That’s a nice point because then the kids are not the only ones going through the experi-ence.

Norman: Right. And especially when there’s language involved they see you trying, doing your best and making your mistakes and that’s good for them also.

What should the relationship to the ‘ home’ culture be?

Kate: The language is a huge topic. I don’t know if we’re gonna have enough time for it today. But it’s something that I hear from a lot of par-ents who are wondering if they’re making the right decision having their child learn the Dutch language over here for example. But I wanted to just go back to one question coming up.

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How did you – did you find it important – you mentioned bringing the things from home in the luggage. Did you find it important in other ways to stay connected with the home culture and people, maybe grandparents and so how important was this or is this and how have you been able to keep those connections?

Carol: I think it’s very important and I think it relates somewhat to the guilt we talk about – about raising our children overseas and are our chil-dren – I always felt bad. Oh, my kids didn’t have the experience of riding their bikes in the neighborhood on a summer evening. The places we lived it wasn’t safe to do that. It wasn’t practical. It just didn’t work.

So I always thought, oh, that’s too bad be-cause I loved that as a kid or playing at the lo-cal park, which just doesn’t happen in some cultures that you live in. And the traditions. Did my kids know what a traditional Fourth of July in America was like? Well, they didn’t.

But when I would go back to the States I would collect all the cheesy dollar store stuff, the little flags and even headbands with Ameri-can flags coming off ‘em and on Fourth of July even if it was a workday in another country that obviously didn’t celebrate Fourth of July as a holiday, I would gather as many Ameri-cans as I could and make a red, white and blue cake and fly the flag and have a Fourth of July party so that my kids know hey, this is a part of your heritage and we’ll celebrate it. At least you’ll get a taste of it.

So I’d really encourage creating your own fam-ily traditions. For a long time I had a big box that I kept in storage and it had my holiday decorations and even though we lived in the Tropics and the seasons were hot, hotter and hottest, at Christmas I would decorate our house for Christmas even though the weather outside didn’t change. And that was impor-tant to me and I think my kids look back on that with fondness and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. We always had those out at Thanksgiving.”

I think it’s very important to hold your own cul-ture as much as you can. Not terribly tight but do give your kids some footholds in their own culture even though they’re not growing up in it.

A question from a listener: caught between multiple cul-tures, how do I raise my children?.

Kate: Right, right, yeah. And we did get a question from somebody speaking to this point. Nor-man, do you want to tell the listeners what the question was?

Norman: Yes, we got a question from someone living in Belgium and it’s really right along this area where the person, the mother, asks about she’s in a multicultural marriage and then liv-ing in another setting in Belgium and the kids are going to local schools. So how do you deal with the tension and even the word guilt can be used of not being able to give your kids enough of your own culture that you grew up with and the important aspects of that? And the kids and the family learning a totally new culture.

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And that gives a kind of a tension that can lead to feelings of concern or guilt like Carol said with, “Yeah, my kids can’t ride their bike on a summer afternoon like I used to do when I was a kid.” So it’s a very concrete question that we got from somebody. I don’t know if you want to respond to that a little bit, Kate.

Kate: Yeah. I mean it’s a question I think that a lot of parents are concerned about. How you deal with sharing your own culture with your children and then adapting to a new culture and my first thought is what is it maybe that as a mother or a father, what is it that you’re feeling guilty about? Is it that your kids are missing an experience that you had like Carol said with the bikes? That you had that was wonderful, but you do have to realize that your kids are individuals and experiencing life from their own perspective so it’s of course never gonna be the same even if you were in the same place where you had grown up your-self.

And yeah, the sort of burden or the feeling that to share your own culture with your kids. I mean I think it is very important, of course, to give them some – what did you say, Carol, foot –

Carol: Footholds.

Did you feel guilty as parents? And how did you deal with that?

Kate: Yeah. I like that. I think that’s a nice way of putting it and it sort of gives them a founda-tion of where they come from and that’s impor-tant for anybody.

And yeah, the guilt is something. Obviously that’s what we’re here today to address and how have you two as parents been able to sort of deal with this – I mean did you feel guilty? Did you feel guilty for putting your kids in the situation because of course you were the ones making the decisions? They didn’t have any say in it.

Norman: Yep.

Kate: It was we’re going here. If you had seen them struggling or how did you deal with those sort of feelings of guilt or if you want to call it something else, that’s okay, too.

Carol: I think for me I did feel sad and a particularly sad point for me was that my children never knew their grandparents probably as well as some of their cousins did or their aunts and un-cles. They had other people that we were around all the time that they ended up calling aunt and uncle and I like my family. I like my siblings and I feel sad that my kids didn’t know my siblings as aunt and uncle so well.

So that was a hard one. And I guess for me I had to just come to the conclusion that well, even people in the United States, who stay in the United States all their lives often live far from their grandparents and cousins and don’t see them maybe even less often than my kids saw them. So, there are tradeoffs and almost no matter what lifestyle you choose you’re go-ing to have tradeoffs.

Carol: In terms of riding our bikes in the neighbor-hood as kids. Okay, my children didn’t have

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that. However, they got picked up by an ele-phant’s trunk. They’ve been swimming at some of the world’s most beautiful beaches. They have encountered the poorest of the poor in underdeveloped countries.

So, really, you know, it’s a little bit in the eye of the beholder. What is of value and what do you want your children to see is of value.

Finding out what is really important

Norman: I would agree with that, too, and maybe just pick up on one of the words that struck me in the question that someone sent in. Where the mother says, “I’m afraid they’ll miss out on im-portant aspects of what it means to be what-ever culture the parents are.”

For me it’s helpful to look at that word impor-tant and just say okay, what is now really im-portant. Sometimes I think I feel things are important, but are they really? And if you can spend some time thinking about that. Okay, what is important. What do I want to give my kids? And can I give them that and what can I do to give them that regardless of the culture that we’re in.

That brings a little clarity so you’re not just feeling generally guilty or that they’re missing things without being able to put your finger on it. Those vague feelings of unease can usually be relieved by sitting down by yourself or with your partner or with someone else like a coach –

[Laughter]

Kate: Oh, really?

Norman: Yeah, really. Or a child psychologist. And say-ing, “Okay, what is really important? Let me get that concrete and then I’ll know whether I am meeting my goals or not for my kids.”

Kate: Yeah, there’s so many – I don’t think we have time for all the questions today.

Norman: No.

Kate: That come up from this but it would be defi-nitely interesting to continue the discussion at some point.

Norman: Okay. Yeah, I think you’re right. We probably should be winding up. I don’t know if you have, Kate, any kind of last question or some-thing that you’d like to hear from us that we could just in a short way respond to?

What would you have done differently?

Kate: Yeah. Sure. I’m curious to know you both seem to have had really positive experiences and from how you talk about your kids now as young adults it seems like they haven’t had any major difficulties or problems. I’m sure there were bumps in the road but if you look at it now, years down the line and looking back, would you have possibly done things dif-ferently in terms of having this ex pat interna-tional lifestyle because of the way it affected your children?

Carol: I’m not sure how I would have done this differ-ently. I haven’t figured that out yet but we had a very stressful time when we sent our

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son back to America for university on his own and we thought it was the right thing to do and I’m not sure now that it was not the right thing to do and I’m not sure what other op-tions we had because our options were few.

But he had an extremely difficult time and he did not want to come back to the United States. He did not want to leave South Africa. But he was 18 ½ and he needed a kick out of the nest and he needed an American educa-tion and so that was the thing to do. But that was probably one of our most difficult periods in helping our children deal with okay, I’m an ex pat but I’m going to this place that’s sup-posed to be my home and it’s not. And how do I do this.

And I would just encourage people to think really carefully about that time of life for their children and how they can best help their chil-dren transition back into a culture where they need to spend some time probably before they go out again and make their own choices for their adult life. That transition time is really pretty pivotal and explore various options for your kids at that time I would say.

And for your family. For our family it meant after several years of struggling with this proc-ess for our son we ended up coming back to the States looking at our three daughters and thinking we can’t do that again. We can’t be across the ocean when they are trying to set-tle in their home country so for us that was a huge decision to come back at least for a while.

Kate: Okay.

Norman: I think for us the answer is we certainly would do it again. I don’t think we regret having taken ourselves or our children on the road we did. I think we’re very, very positive about it.

I think just as with Carol, there were some mo-ments where we felt we could have paid more attention to providing support for our kids than we did. And one thing I can think of is sending our oldest daughter off to college. We just basically sent her away in a car with some-body that she didn’t even know. A 13-hour drive with an older man that she didn’t even know. It was really stupid on our part. We should never have done that.

So I think we certainly can look back and see things that we did that were not helpful or wise but I think if we had to do it over again we would not make fundamentally other differ-ent choices.

Carol: Absolutely. Yep.

Kate: Okay.

Carol: I think it’s a wonderful gift you give your child to experience a world view and a perspective from living the overseas life. I just think if you can provide them with a solid family back-ground and a great family unit, I don’t know that any of our kids regret their life overseas or say, “I wish I had been brought up in Amer-ica.” I don’t think any of them say that. I think they’re still trying to figure out what their upbringing means and how it influences their adult life but I don’t think they regret their upbringing.

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Norman: Yeah. And then I’ll just repeat what I said be-fore. For wherever parents are in whatever situation the stability of that relationship is really the key and that makes all the differ-ence in the world.

[End of Audio]

Click here for a link to the mp3 recording of the webinar. You may listen to it at that site, or download it for your mp3 player.

This webinar was brought to you by:

Carol Van Dyken and Norman VissExpat Everyday Support CenterWe provide global citizens with tools to overcome isolation.www.expateverydaysupportcenter.com

And Kate Berger, from The Expat Kids ClubExpat Children’s Cultural Consultancyhttp://www.expatkidsclub.com/

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