Challenges of High Mobility and Different Cultural Exposure
As just discussed, benefits of Global Nomad experiences come along with the unique challenges of spending formative years abroad.
The purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive list of all the difficulties global nomads might encounter but to raise the awareness of parents, caregivers, and other professionals working with them. This is the first step to proactively help global nomads deal with theses challenges.
What are the challenges of parenting abroad?
Anywhere, parenting is the most challenging, yet the most rewarding adventure. Although, like any other kids, TCKs need consistent and loving parenting, challenges of living and moving in different cultures will bring additional complexities for parents.
Expatriate Life Challenges
Role and responsibilities of parents can be complicated by their own struggle to deal with the many challenges of their expatriate life.
In the same way their children will experience culture shock, parents will have to face the roller coaster of emotions when adjusting in a new country.
They will also have to deal with many changes: in their job for the working parent, in their status and identity for the accompanying spouse, or in their relationship as a couple.
One other challenge is to maintain a work-life balance in the hectic expatriation life-style. Often expatriates’ jobs require traveling, time and energy. Nowhere else is the interdependence of work, life and family more enhanced than it is for mobile families (Pascoe 2006).
How coaching can support parents to turn overseas experiences in a lifetime enrichment?
Away from their own support systems, embracing new parental responsibilities and facing mobility challenges, parents themselves need support while they have to provide support to their children.
Schaetti and Ramsey have written in the May 1999 issue of Mobility that “no matter the number of expatriates services on hand, it is only by choosing to engage the expatriate experience with consciousness and creativity, from the inside-out, that an expatriate family will truly maximize the potential rewards of its international sojourn”. The authors further explain that living from the “inside out” means that families distinguish their internal experience from external circumstances, recognizing that they are the creators of the former and never the victim of the latter.
Thirteen years later, this statement is still very valid in the context of the challenges faced by global nomads’ parents.
Among the many services available for expatriate parents (cross-cultural training, support groups, counseling, etc.), only coaching offers to support parents with an “inside-out” approach.
“By essence coaching honors the client as the expert in his/her life and work, and believes that every client is creative, resourceful and whole” (ICF Code of Ethics 2007).
Coaching empowers parents to find their own answers and solutions and in many ways, can support them in their overseas adventure. Some of them are explored in the next sections.
Coaching encourages consciousness and creates self-awareness
By offering resources and sharing success stories, the coach can raise mobile parents’ consciousness that their kids are now part of the “global nomad” tribe. They can invite them to learn more about the global nomads profile and the benefits and challenges of international mobility.
Conscious of “both sides of the coin” parents can pay more attention to their children’s own experience. They can choose to stop their “automatic pilot” and actively listen to their kids. Being mindful during family time, they can acknowledge and nurture benefits brought by the experience overseas, they can also recognize behavior changes and search for the underlying issues. The coach will support them to identify and implement relevant and creative strategies to address these issues.
Coaching will also encourage parents to reflect on the purpose, goals and priorities in their life abroad. It will support them to identify their family values and empower them to live by them. By creating self-awareness, coaching increases the ability to respond to situations instead of reacting, it fosters proactive parenting.
Coaching supports parents in discovering and embracing their new responsibilities
Once parents decide to move their family into cross-cultural situations, it means that they have decided to raise TCKs (Pollock & Van Reken, 2009).
The coach will support parents to explore the responsibilities coming with TCKs upbringing and find personal strategies and action plan to endorse them. Pollock and Van Reken have suggested five main areas of actions to support global nomads:
Turning challenges into strengths is a blessing for the future of global nomads. Enriched by their cross-cultural upbringing, global nomads will enter with confidence adulthood as global citizens.
Coaching is an effective approach to support global nomads’ parents turning challenges into lifetime enrichment for their children.
CONCLUSION
Children’s upbringing abroad can be the most exciting and rewarding experience but also the most challenging one leaving painful memories. Whether the rewards or the challenges predominate will depend on the awareness of the parents, their commitment to their responsibilities and foremost, the support that they will have.
The coach, through an inside-out approach, an unconditional support and creative resources is an ideal partner for the journey of the global nomads’ parents.
Coaching for global nomads’ parents is an effective method and should be largely advocated and offered to mobile families in the different stages of the expatriate life cycle.
References
Pascoe, R., (2006). Raising Global Nomads – Parenting abroad in an on-demand world: Expatriate Press.
Pollock, D. C., (1998), in Bowers, Joyce M., ed. Raising Resilient MKs: Resources for
Caregivers, Parents, and Teachers. Colorado Springs: Association of Christian Schools International, 1998: 45-53.
Pollock, D. C., & Van Reken, R. E. (2009). Third Culture Kids: Growing Up
Among Worlds. Boston: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Schaetti, B. F. (2000). Global Nomad Identity: Hypothesizing a Developmental Model. Ph.D. Dissertation in Intercultural Communication.
Schaetti, B. F., & Ramsey, S. J. (1999). The expatriate Family: Practicing Practical Leadership. This article was originally published in the September 1999 issue of MOBILITY, the monthly magazine of the Employee Relocation Council.
Schaetti, B. F., & Ramsey, S. J. (1999). The Global Nomad Experience, Living in Liminality. This article was originally published in the September, 1999 issue of MOBILITY, the monthly magazine of the Employee Relocation Council.
Tanu, D., (2008) Global nomads: toward a study of “Asian” Third Culture Kids - presented to the 17th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in Melbourne 1-3 July 2008.