Raising kids abroad can be liberating. In some ways, expat parents have the best of both worlds: they can adopt local family norms (insisting, for example, that their kids formally greet adults, as local children do) or they can chart their own course (homeschooling, for example), comfortable knowing their neighbors already expect them to act like outsiders.
But parenting in another culture can sometimes feel confusing. Last week, I published an essay in The New York Times about one such muddled parenting moment, navigating infant sleep training with baby Liam in India. Tim and I weren’t willing to share a bed with our child for years, as was the local norm, and yet we hesitated to adhere to the cry-it-out formula prescribed by the dog-eared British parenting book passed from expat to expat in our remote, mountaintop, South Indian town. So, instead we built a baby sleep machine out of an old sari, an ax handle, and a spring.
If nothing else, I hope my story brings you some good laughs. After reading it, you might get a kick out of this home video we took of the sleep machine back in 2007:
Please consider leaving a comment below about your experience parenting abroad. Has it been liberating to step out of your home culture as a parent? What local parenting norms have you adopted? Or have there been times when navigating parenting felt hard enough that you wished you were back home with your cultural peers?
January 29, 2018 at 11:05 pm
When our children were 10 and 13, our family took a 3 month driving sabbatical through 4 European countries. We had no advanced reservations, but instead stayed wherever that day’s journey took us.During those 3 months, we slept only two nights in our car, and made the best of it, with our son being able to sleep on the window shelf above the back seat. Our older child had studied school French for a year and a half, so she became our spokesperson, negotiated the price of our accommodations and inspected the room offering before reporting back to the three of us who waited in our car. During those 3 weeks in France, the French language, culture, customs and French currency all became real to our daughter. Our 4th-grade son became a cartographer. By the end of our journey, he was able to draw from memory an accurate map of the countries we visited, and the roads and towns along the way. Both of our children became our ambassadors in that their presence attracted local people for conversations.
We believe these travels gave our children the confidence to explore foreign countries and cultures different from their own.
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January 30, 2018 at 7:45 am
Lovely–and familiar–story, Mom and Dad. Thanks so much for having planted the seed.
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