My wife and I are wanting to move out of the US. We are avid travelers, but now want to just experience something different and live abroad.
If it weren’t for our young child, this would he a lot simpler. Do any of you have young children?
How is your experience? Do you recommend it? Technically, we live a very comfortable life in the US, we own a house, good job, cars, live in a safe place, etc.
Would love to get your advice and insights and your story. Thank you!
The hardest thing about raising a family in a country that’s not your own is being away from family. Children only building a tenuous relationship with grandparents - FaceTime doesn’t cut it. Rare visits with cousins. No backup child care. Your parents will start to age, much faster than you expect, and you won’t be around even as you know their good years are numbered. That’s very hard.
The rest - raising your kids with complex and complicated linguistic and cultural identities, identities that will be fundamentally different to yours, the cultural differences in child rearing norms, educational systems, values… the rest has some good and some bad. It’s up to you to decide if you can make the best of the good and live with the bad.
Ahh, yeah, that whole first paragraph doesn’t relate to us as it’s just been me and my wife raising our kid anyways. We have no ties to anything here, so that’s why we’ve thought about this.
And those next points are great. So hard to know without having actually lived in those countries before.
You may want to read up on the concept of “third culture kids” and what your child’s experience would be like being raised as one. How it would differ from your expat experience. That’s independent from the country you end up choosing.