Did you change countries as a tween? How was it?
November 7, 2024 1:02 PM Subscribe
If you moved from one country to another in your tweens (10-12-ish), what was your experience like? How did you feel a few years later? How do you think it affected your development?
Best answer: I grew up overseas (18months to 18 years, with home country visits periodically.) so I don't have direct personal experience (I was already overseas) but witnessed a lot.
It's a hard age for sure. Better earlier rather than later - the kids that struggled more where probably 12-15. Emotions are big anyway at this age and "my parents are ruining my life" happens but when you've got a big international move it intensifies that.
posted by freethefeet at 1:55 PM on November 7, 2024
It's a hard age for sure. Better earlier rather than later - the kids that struggled more where probably 12-15. Emotions are big anyway at this age and "my parents are ruining my life" happens but when you've got a big international move it intensifies that.
posted by freethefeet at 1:55 PM on November 7, 2024
A close friend lived abroad (Northeast US to Beirut, Lebanon) for a year and a half in high school and it influenced them tremendously in a very positive way. They were very depressed by their life in the US and I think living away made them feel that other ways to live might be accessible in adulthood. Their younger brother (in early HS at the time) didn't seem to get much out of it and was sort of disgruntled by the disruption to his life.
posted by Summers at 2:17 PM on November 7, 2024
posted by Summers at 2:17 PM on November 7, 2024
Best answer: When I was that age my [Australian] family moved for a year to Spain for work reasons. I was enrolled in a regular Spanish school, where obviously all the teaching was in Spanish, a language I had had some fundamental lessons in but not much more. It was very disruptive but I adapted well enough that I have a really pretty positive memory of it. In the long term: Spain at that time [the early 1990s] was extremely monocultural, and the experience left me with respect for the sensation of being a foreigner and a stranger.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:45 PM on November 7, 2024
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:45 PM on November 7, 2024
Best answer: I moved from Europe to Asia for exactly that timespan. I was very unhappy about the idea and missed my extended family and my friends tremendously. I also felt extremely insecure about the language barrier. For instance, I was perfectly happy to stay home alone with my younger siblings in Europe. In Asia, I was scared. I didn't have the network of trusted adults other than parents that I was accustomed to. This changed in my second year, because we'd gotten to know our neighbours and because I was able to speak the community's language (English).
I very much disliked many of the cultural differences. Hated the food (too spicy, why raw, I'm not eating a tentacle, this one was literally just alive!). However, I was in an international "bubble" and began to love my school and my immediate community. I think I was settled in after maybe four months. It helped that my school was excellent; very patient teachers who were funny, kind, and good role models. They made very clear that bullying was not allowed and somehow successfully taught twenty kids from about ten different nations in one classroom. The kids in my classroom were from England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia, the U.S., Malaysia, India, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. I don't know if that changed me, but I imagine it probably did. I'm very sensitive to nation-based stereotyping, at least.
Sadly, I aged out of that excellent school and had a private tutor for my second year. I loved her, but I got pretty lonely without my friends. So if I were to give any advice here, it would be to make absolutely certain that the kid gets to interact with local kids, ideally on a daily basis.
Overall, I think the experience had a tremendous and largely positive effect on my development. I was bullied a little bit in my home country (didn't care about celebrities or fashion - not cool). Because I was one of the oldest at my new school, I gained a lot of self-confidence. It was the little things such as being able to run faster than others or having a bit more self-control. Also, this school was just a much kinder place because the teachers made sure of that. It made me want to become more reliable, responsible, and conscientious. And for the first time in my life, getting up was easy because school was fun. I learned to juggle at school, we did cool science experiments, and art/music were treated like serious subjects.
I was delighted to eventually go back home, but it was a really good time. Looking back on it, I can appreciate the opportunities it provided for me. As an example, I was fluent in English way before my peers at home. All through to high school, this guaranteed me perfect grades with basically no work. That was very helpful, felt like a joker.
I also appreciate that I just learned so much. Everything was different. Snails were food. Ice cream was topped with a paste made of beans. There were cockroaches and big centipedes and I know what roasted silkworms smell like. TV and books were not available in my language, so I started reading my parents' National Geographic and parenting/lifestyle magazines. The cities were very flashy, but I also saw many old women, permanently bent over while wading through the rice fields. Saw inequality and experienced being an outsider, but an extraordinarily welcome one. I fed stray cats, climbed around on the net of a golf range, and fled from the custodians on their little motorcycles. Became a pro at air travel. Got several babysitting gigs and a newspaper route. Slept under a mosquito net and fell asleep to the sound of cicadas. It was good. I hope I can go back someday.
posted by toucan at 5:23 PM on November 7, 2024 [6 favorites]
I very much disliked many of the cultural differences. Hated the food (too spicy, why raw, I'm not eating a tentacle, this one was literally just alive!). However, I was in an international "bubble" and began to love my school and my immediate community. I think I was settled in after maybe four months. It helped that my school was excellent; very patient teachers who were funny, kind, and good role models. They made very clear that bullying was not allowed and somehow successfully taught twenty kids from about ten different nations in one classroom. The kids in my classroom were from England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Australia, the U.S., Malaysia, India, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. I don't know if that changed me, but I imagine it probably did. I'm very sensitive to nation-based stereotyping, at least.
Sadly, I aged out of that excellent school and had a private tutor for my second year. I loved her, but I got pretty lonely without my friends. So if I were to give any advice here, it would be to make absolutely certain that the kid gets to interact with local kids, ideally on a daily basis.
Overall, I think the experience had a tremendous and largely positive effect on my development. I was bullied a little bit in my home country (didn't care about celebrities or fashion - not cool). Because I was one of the oldest at my new school, I gained a lot of self-confidence. It was the little things such as being able to run faster than others or having a bit more self-control. Also, this school was just a much kinder place because the teachers made sure of that. It made me want to become more reliable, responsible, and conscientious. And for the first time in my life, getting up was easy because school was fun. I learned to juggle at school, we did cool science experiments, and art/music were treated like serious subjects.
I was delighted to eventually go back home, but it was a really good time. Looking back on it, I can appreciate the opportunities it provided for me. As an example, I was fluent in English way before my peers at home. All through to high school, this guaranteed me perfect grades with basically no work. That was very helpful, felt like a joker.
I also appreciate that I just learned so much. Everything was different. Snails were food. Ice cream was topped with a paste made of beans. There were cockroaches and big centipedes and I know what roasted silkworms smell like. TV and books were not available in my language, so I started reading my parents' National Geographic and parenting/lifestyle magazines. The cities were very flashy, but I also saw many old women, permanently bent over while wading through the rice fields. Saw inequality and experienced being an outsider, but an extraordinarily welcome one. I fed stray cats, climbed around on the net of a golf range, and fled from the custodians on their little motorcycles. Became a pro at air travel. Got several babysitting gigs and a newspaper route. Slept under a mosquito net and fell asleep to the sound of cicadas. It was good. I hope I can go back someday.
posted by toucan at 5:23 PM on November 7, 2024 [6 favorites]
Best answer: My son age 9 went through something quite similar and it has been confidence building for him to start in a new place and a new school and figure it out and see it is possible to adapt and thrive. And by some grace it’s worked out well - his teachers have been sensitive and within a month he found a new BFF and those two are inseparable. He has also stayed in touch with friends from back home and they call every few months and pick up like no time had passed.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:32 PM on November 7, 2024
posted by St. Peepsburg at 5:32 PM on November 7, 2024
Best answer: We moved from NYC to Puerto Rico when I was 7 due to my mother's work. Of course my little brother and I weren't "consulted" on this change. He was 3 and I don't think he really remembers living in Queens and going to school in Manhattan. I did, and it was a hard change for me. So many things were different! Although both places are beautiful in their own way you cannot compare them so it was an abrupt transition for me. From having seasons during the year, to one season (summer) all year long. From a multicultural group of schoolmates in NYC, to a more monocultural, spanish speaking community. Even though I spoke spanish fluently, it was another type of spanish (south america) than the words and pop culture phrases typical in PR, so again I was behind there and was "ignorant" and trying to catch up just to fit in with my peers. From roadtrips that took us to different places in NY state and outside, to drives that still meant we were in PR. It felt (to 7 year old me) isolating and foreign and strange and so different and not what I wanted for a long time. We spent 10 years there before I left to the US for university.
posted by alchemist at 5:42 PM on November 7, 2024 [1 favorite]
posted by alchemist at 5:42 PM on November 7, 2024 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I moved (with my family) on what was literally my 13th birthday (so just outside your age parameters, but barely); we immigrated to the United States. It was in some ways exciting, in some ways hard for me. I didn't really know the language, and it was anxiety-provoking for me to watch my parents take on "fresh off the boat" menial work that was so different from their professional lives in our country of origin. I missed my grandparents and witnessed my parents missing their parents. I missed my friends -- this was before the internet or social media, so it wasn't easy to stay in touch with them. The worst mediating factor for me was initially being stuck into a school that had no ESL resources, in terms of language or cultural integration. When a year later I switched to a different school that had all that, things improved. Overall, it was definitely a lot, having immigration stress layered onto the standard challenges of adolescence (figuring out who you are, how you fit in -- simultaneously negotiating those identity issues interculturally had an amplifying effect).
Overall, it absolutely affected my development. I think ending up bilingual shaped my cognition in some key ways, and I think navigating between two languages and cultures organically cultivated a strong understanding of cultural relativism in me, one that ultimately ended up shaping my professional life.
I think experiences will vary greatly for kids that age depending on whether they are moving somewhere where they speak the language, how well they can feel connected to their friends via texting and social media, whether there is a drop in quality of life and socioeconomic status as a result of the move, etc.
posted by virve at 7:00 PM on November 7, 2024 [2 favorites]
Overall, it absolutely affected my development. I think ending up bilingual shaped my cognition in some key ways, and I think navigating between two languages and cultures organically cultivated a strong understanding of cultural relativism in me, one that ultimately ended up shaping my professional life.
I think experiences will vary greatly for kids that age depending on whether they are moving somewhere where they speak the language, how well they can feel connected to their friends via texting and social media, whether there is a drop in quality of life and socioeconomic status as a result of the move, etc.
posted by virve at 7:00 PM on November 7, 2024 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I turned 10 during a half year abroad. I had three months of private weekly one on one language tutoring beforehand, which helped a lot - a handful of words and phrases and pronunciation that allowed me to at least connect the spoken language to the written one. I got put in a class for new immigrants and it was hard but it really helped my social development - and my political development since I went from an all white country to a class where the only other white people were ugh, boys (and all of three of us total in a class of 16).
This was before the WWW and ebooks so the main downside was limited reading material in my first language. I remain the only person I know in this country who has read the Bible cover to cover. I watched a lot of old MGM cartoons because they had very little language. The only newspapers available for the immigrant community there were grown up ones, so my parents got a news weekly and I read it cover to cover. It frustrated me so much that I couldn't level up fast enough in the local language to read fluently.
It was absolutely seminal for me - not exactly trauma but a lot of stress I had to learn to deal with and a tonne of experiences that shaped me. I can directly trace major facets of my personality to that time, food tastes, patterns of leisure time. The expanded horizons were worth it.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:39 PM on November 7, 2024 [2 favorites]
This was before the WWW and ebooks so the main downside was limited reading material in my first language. I remain the only person I know in this country who has read the Bible cover to cover. I watched a lot of old MGM cartoons because they had very little language. The only newspapers available for the immigrant community there were grown up ones, so my parents got a news weekly and I read it cover to cover. It frustrated me so much that I couldn't level up fast enough in the local language to read fluently.
It was absolutely seminal for me - not exactly trauma but a lot of stress I had to learn to deal with and a tonne of experiences that shaped me. I can directly trace major facets of my personality to that time, food tastes, patterns of leisure time. The expanded horizons were worth it.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:39 PM on November 7, 2024 [2 favorites]
Best answer: Growing up, we moved internationally multiple times due to my father's job. So my siblings and I all experienced moves during our tween years. The schools we went to played a huge role in how we adjusted to the moves. For example, my younger sibling was unhappy in public middle school in the U.S., but blossomed attending an international school in my father's next assigned country. I think it was because he got more individualized attention, and there were other kids like him who'd grown up moving a lot, or at least spent significant time outside their home countries. I was also happier attending schools where there was a good mix of well-traveled kids from different nationalities. "Monoculture" schools were a lot harder - teachers didn't necessarily understand our difficulties, and students weren't as welcoming, and we didn't share much common experiences.
My siblings and I all ended up multilingual, and undaunted by international moves. I'd say it was positive overall.
posted by needled at 6:05 AM on November 8, 2024
My siblings and I all ended up multilingual, and undaunted by international moves. I'd say it was positive overall.
posted by needled at 6:05 AM on November 8, 2024
Ok, not exactly a tween, so apologies for not quite answering your question: but my family moved permanently from the UK where I was born to the South Asian country my parents were from, when I was about 8 years old.
The cons:
- School was challenging for me because most social interactions took place in the language of the country and I was not very good at it; even though I am fluent now, 3 decades later, my accent gives away that I didn't grow up speaking it and I'm still not as confident in it as I should be. This was before the internet and mobile phones etc and kids there were not as immersed in Western culture as their equivalents would be now.
- The kids at school were largely unfriendly and I was bullied throughout my teenage years for looking and sounding different. I wasn't friendless, but I was definitely given a hard time for being different for all the years I lived there.
- When I initially moved there, I was shocked and scared by the poverty around me. I want to say that this made me develop compassion but that came later, at first I was just frightened. Also I really hated cockroaches and mosquitoes and my childhood forced me to grow up in close quarters with them. My fear never abated.
The pros:
- As someone who moved from West to East, I became familiar with the scale of the world from a young age. Does that make sense? From childhood I became aware of context, of the fact that where you live isn't the centre of the world, of cultural relativism, that you can code-switch depending on where you're from, and you can be more than one thing at a time.
- I feel a deep sense of love for that country, something you can't manufacture, something that comes from spending so much of your childhood immersed in its seasons, culture, food, etc. I can't overstate the impact spending my formative years there had on my sense of identity. It's something that's baked in to me no matter where in the world I live as an adult. And that certainty is something I really value.
- Because we moved to the country my family was historically from, I grew up knowing my extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc very well. This might not be applicable to your situation. But looking back, I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to grow up in my community.
Moving abroad as a young child was certainly a stressful event and it was surrounded by other personal/familial stressors I'm not going into, but I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity I had to move there when I did. It was probably the defining event of my life in that it shaped core parts of my personality and established some of my deepest-held values. Life could so easily have taken another turn and I never would have had that chance. I honestly would have been an entirely different person.
posted by unicorn chaser at 12:14 PM on November 8, 2024 [1 favorite]
The cons:
- School was challenging for me because most social interactions took place in the language of the country and I was not very good at it; even though I am fluent now, 3 decades later, my accent gives away that I didn't grow up speaking it and I'm still not as confident in it as I should be. This was before the internet and mobile phones etc and kids there were not as immersed in Western culture as their equivalents would be now.
- The kids at school were largely unfriendly and I was bullied throughout my teenage years for looking and sounding different. I wasn't friendless, but I was definitely given a hard time for being different for all the years I lived there.
- When I initially moved there, I was shocked and scared by the poverty around me. I want to say that this made me develop compassion but that came later, at first I was just frightened. Also I really hated cockroaches and mosquitoes and my childhood forced me to grow up in close quarters with them. My fear never abated.
The pros:
- As someone who moved from West to East, I became familiar with the scale of the world from a young age. Does that make sense? From childhood I became aware of context, of the fact that where you live isn't the centre of the world, of cultural relativism, that you can code-switch depending on where you're from, and you can be more than one thing at a time.
- I feel a deep sense of love for that country, something you can't manufacture, something that comes from spending so much of your childhood immersed in its seasons, culture, food, etc. I can't overstate the impact spending my formative years there had on my sense of identity. It's something that's baked in to me no matter where in the world I live as an adult. And that certainty is something I really value.
- Because we moved to the country my family was historically from, I grew up knowing my extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc very well. This might not be applicable to your situation. But looking back, I'm grateful for the opportunity I had to grow up in my community.
Moving abroad as a young child was certainly a stressful event and it was surrounded by other personal/familial stressors I'm not going into, but I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity I had to move there when I did. It was probably the defining event of my life in that it shaped core parts of my personality and established some of my deepest-held values. Life could so easily have taken another turn and I never would have had that chance. I honestly would have been an entirely different person.
posted by unicorn chaser at 12:14 PM on November 8, 2024 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Moved around a lot as a kid due to dad’s job. My parents were from different countries so there was no home base. This included a move from Norway to France when I was 11, a move from France to Texas when I was 12, and a move from Texas to Japan when I was 14. I always went to international or English-speaking schools. I learned about the Middle Ages a lot and repeated some of the same books in English class. There wasn’t really a way around repeating things I’d already learned. Middle school girls were a tough crowd (and I say that as a corporate litigator now). It would take me a week or two to make new friends, which in retrospect was fast, but at the time felt like forever. I constantly had to prove myself to teachers all over again and adapt to things like different paper sizes, different notebook styles, different pens (in Paris we used fountain pens and French-ruled notebooks). I wish my parents had paid more attention to the random cultural things like what types of paper I needed or what type of backpack or clothing.
I can’t imagine growing up in just one place, but it was difficult moving around, particularly at that age range. I think it gave me more empathy and adaptability. I make friends pretty easily, and can fit into most conversations because it’s easy for me to pick up on commonalities. My experience is probably a bit different from others because I didn’t have a home country, some place I’d eventually go back to.
posted by loulou718 at 1:28 PM on November 8, 2024
I can’t imagine growing up in just one place, but it was difficult moving around, particularly at that age range. I think it gave me more empathy and adaptability. I make friends pretty easily, and can fit into most conversations because it’s easy for me to pick up on commonalities. My experience is probably a bit different from others because I didn’t have a home country, some place I’d eventually go back to.
posted by loulou718 at 1:28 PM on November 8, 2024
Best answer: When I was nine, we moved *back* to Denmark. The thing was that in my perception it wasn't moving back, it was moving away. I saw myself as English, a Yorkshire lass. I didn't even speak Danish properly. I expected to go to boarding school in England when I was 12 like my friends, and only when that didn't happen, I understood that I was now Danish and I had to learn the language and mores.
The weird thing was that soon after, my dad moved to Belgium. My bi-weekly visits were made by Hercules planes along with other army brats. So I had to learn French.
My younger siblings don't have the longing I had. Some of them feel at home where we landed, and some feel at home in the world as people who have never had one specific place that is theirs.
I think that everything is different today, where we have the internet and many forms of communication. Still, I've tried to protect my own children from those huge changes. I don't see them as positives.
posted by mumimor at 6:30 PM on November 11, 2024
The weird thing was that soon after, my dad moved to Belgium. My bi-weekly visits were made by Hercules planes along with other army brats. So I had to learn French.
My younger siblings don't have the longing I had. Some of them feel at home where we landed, and some feel at home in the world as people who have never had one specific place that is theirs.
I think that everything is different today, where we have the internet and many forms of communication. Still, I've tried to protect my own children from those huge changes. I don't see them as positives.
posted by mumimor at 6:30 PM on November 11, 2024
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
posted by PussKillian at 1:48 PM on November 7, 2024