I was wondering what are people’s experiences of having and raising children in a different country from your own, specially if your partner is a local. Did you find it challenging not having your family to support you? Did you manage to have them be bilingual? Do you find it’s hard for them to identify with your country, and if so, what are good ways to help with this?
Husband and I are both American, and we’ve lived in Australia for almost six years. We moved just after our daughter turned one.
The separation from family hasn’t been that bad, but I think it’s because 1) my family is spaced out all over the US, and 2) his family is concentrated in the Philly area and we lived in the PNW. So, we didn’t see family all that often anyway.
Technology makes it’s so much easier to keep in touch (we FaceTime/Skype with people much more regularly now than we ever did in the US). I miss my friends, of course, but it forced us to be more social in our new community (not a bad thing), because emergencies have come up when I need someone to pick-up my kid from school, etc.
We obviously don’t have to deal with a language barrier, and there is a lot of cultural overlap between the US and Australia; our transition has been very easy.