Here's a list of 6 challenges that foreign parents have to deal with when it comes to educating themselves abroad. Sometimes, the challenges expat children and learning languages face are bigger for parents than for children themselves. In cases when the expat parents are from one culture (the same), they might be totally unaware that the children growing up in TCKs face a variety of challenges. This may make leaving child friends behind more difficult, since they might already know their peers back in the US are not like them, who are TCKs.
This may be hard for the foreigners to adapt to, and parents would do well to discuss these differences with their children before entering the school system. Children can make things challenging too, since they will be making their own adjustments with their new schools and making friends. For them, this may be harder as they are unlikely to be as fluent in English as the colleagues and adults that you will meet.
The more you can do as a family to help your children settle into their new home, the more comfortable they will feel. Establishing independence When the family moves to home, the family members can grow even closer, providing needed support to children who are not yet developing new friendships. Family dynamics are especially important to expat families, since they depend on one another for comfort and safety in their transitory times. Needless to say, expats may find it difficult to cope when away from friends and relatives.
While being an expat is exciting, fun, and full of events, it can be challenging as well. Adjusting to a job may seem like an easy obstacle, but it is a frequently overlooked problem when moving to a new country. Not everyone adapts in the same manner, or faces the same struggles when moving to a new country. Here are some typical challenges that expats face, as well as a few tips to make moving abroad a bit easier.
For those planning on studying abroad, here are five challenges to studying abroad that should be prepared for as you apply, make the transition, and settle into your new country. We are going to look at six common challenges students encounter while studying abroad, and how you can get past them. For some, though, moving to a different country is not a smooth transition, and challenges arise along the way.
Transitions and changes are challenges your family will have to deal with consistently during the entire foreign service experience. Children of expat parents will experience the experience of changing schools multiple times throughout their schooling lives (separate from their old friends, having to make new friends, adapting to new teachers and environments). Expat parents attempt to avoid further changes to the lives of their children, and stick to the original choice of schools, even when not completely happy with the decision. Expat parents should verify, verify, and double-check to make sure that the school that they have chosen is right for their family, gathering as much information from as many different sources as they can.
Choosing the right school for your children is one of the toughest decisions that you will make as an expat parent moving overseas. There are so many options when it comes to schooling as an expat, with so much depending on the set-up and your childs personal circumstances, there is not one-size-fits-all schooling decision. When starting conversations about movinghome, parents should discuss realistic educational options with their children.
In a sense, foreign education may actually be a blessing for our children, since they will get breadth and a variety of knowledge that will be lacking for their peers back home. The breadth of experiences and knowledge acquired by the children who are foreigners, when they grow up to become well-rounded adults, will become the highlights of their lives. Challenges may come, but those challenges will give them skills and knowledge that set them apart from other job applicants later in life. Children who are expats usually have an array of new skills and knowledge that must be acquired before they truly can adapt to their new social group.
Expat children often develop a renewed sense of self-worth through attachments with their families in the time of transition. Singaporean expat children attending international schools eventually develop friendships with other expats, who may be moving again at any moment. Typically, teachers in Singapores international schools are under 2 or 3 year fixed-term contracts, and a good proportion will be moving out once the contracts are over, either to try out for another international school in a different country, or rotate home. This means that, although a child who speaks English as an expat will be able to speak his/her native language when moving to Singapore, he/she will also have exposure to Mandarin--in fact, the curriculum at international schools usually includes as much as five hours of Mandarin-language instruction a week.
Wanting may cause some discomfort or guilt, as a third-culture child might also feel the need to visit relatives at home -- typically the parents native country. While parents might be struggling with feelings of homesickness and planning an eventual return to the country they came from, the move may cause extra stress to children, since they might view it as an adjustment to a new culture. Parents should participate with their children in the process of adjustment during transition. Another issue parents are facing is maintaining the mother language of their children, although there is widespread agreement on the importance of doing this.
Another challenge parents face is uncertainty about how long a family will stay in a given place, and whether or not to switch schools and pay the extra tuition. One of the biggest concerns of any parent who decides to relocate the family abroad is how the decision affects the academic performance of the child. An expat placing their child at a Parisian school would be looking at high-quality, rigorous levels of instruction.