A Kids’ Experience Of A Year Abroad
How do you make taking school aged children out of their comfort zone of home, family, school, friends, and activities, plop them down thousands of miles away, and have it be awesome for them? Much of it is in your hands! Of course their personalities and situations matter too: timid versus adventurous, confident versus nervous. You can greatly help steer their view of the opportunity despite their personalities, and have them come home MORE confident, with a wider world view.
Kids may not see or understand how incredible the opportunity is right off the bat. A multi-pronged approach helps make the transition easier for them and the year memorable in a GOOD way.
First: the sell. Start early, talk to them about the area you’ve chosen, and suggest there may be the possibility of going there as a family for an extended period. Research in advance and play up shamelessly to their favourite activities and comfort zones, be it the nearby sea, ruined castles, chess or football club like home.
They will balk and protest and cry they will miss their friends. Tell them you know they will and that a special part of the year will be exchanging letters and skype calls with that special friend: they can have lots of contact.
Then return to the draws: go through pictures that you know will interest them.
They will worry about school. Say you will help and give them details. Our kids here have Wednesday afternoons off as well as two weeks off every 6 weeks for half term breaks. This was a draw! Remind them that in a different school, expectations will be different (lower, in fact: we told our kids they wouldn’t understand or get top grades in topics that were new or approached differently and that was ok. They only had to try).
Then remind them of the draw and the good aspects. If necessary, throw in a sweetener. We suggested being open to our daughter being able to get her ears pierced earlier than previously agreed on, since she was ‘being grown up’ and experiencing new things. A bribe, yes, as subtle as possible.
And then give them time to adjust to the idea. Keeping the exciting fun bits to the fore.
When we arrived, they all found school hard to start with. School days were longer, there was a two hour lunch (five course french school lunches! Duck, lamb, cheese courses!). Our biggest job was helping them adapt. Speak to the teachers to see if they can be assigned a helper classmate, and to ask that expectations for school work be relaxed (our son for example hadn’t learned cursive writing and speaking to the teacher about these things early helped relax her about his level and get him some help). We were discouraged with the school system at home and approved of a more rigorous approach in France.
Make after school real recovery time. Strolls for ice cream, family games, less expectations and activities. Help with their friendships: we were a bit aggressive about cornering parents at the school gates and offering to have play times. The sooner they feel like they have a friend the happier they will be.
And the more they see you laugh at your frustrations and confusions, whether with the language or the paperwork, or getting lost while driving the car the wrong way down a tiny one way street and executing a 40 point turn, the less seriously they may learn to take their own. So give them a hug, ask what will help, and then watch them blossom and learn over the course of the year!
By the end of our year, our kids had had lots of get togethers with friends, even sleepovers, tried lots of new foods during their multiple course lunches, developed gorgeous french accents, learned to sweetly kiss their friends parents on both cheeks. They’d had tonnes of fun and adventures around our country farmhouse, adopted a starving kitten, traveled to Barcelona with their choir (in grade 4!), hiked up mountains, and visited the Sahara.
They came home with addresses of new friends to write (and miss), lots of new confidence for school which now felt really easy, new perspectives on problems, a better ability to adapt to new situations, oodles of adventures to tell their friends about, and a lot of forever memories that we share around the dinner table together.
More family stories and pictures can be found on our family blog: http://www.roamingfrance.com
