When Moving Your Family Overseas

Step 1: Making the Decision

You should remember to always include your family when making decisions that will affect all of their lives. Nowadays, parents often tend to disregard the opinions and the feelings of their children in making decisions affecting the whole family. The common line that can be heard is this: “Kids, we are moving overseas.” That’s it, end of discussion. What needs to be heard from you is this: “Kids, we have been presented with a wonderful opportunity, but in order to get that opportunity, we are going to have to move overseas. What do you think we should do?”

Parents know that any child will always react negatively to the question. Because of this, they would rather not listen. This can be very harmful to a child’s self esteem. He or she might grow up thinking that you never had any respect for his or her opinion. Because of this, children often grow up resenting their parents.

Some parents think that the step of making the decision and breaking the news to the family should be separate. However, you need to understand that making the decision of moving the family overseas needs to be done by the family. You need to consider every opinion and you need to show that every opinion matters.

Step 2: Comforting Fears

Once you have made a decision, you should encourage your children if they have any worries regarding the move. Of course, your children will have all sorts of questions about what would happen. They will also have a lot of fear. This is natural. We all fear the unknown. This understanding will give you the first thing that you can do to ease those fears.

You need to learn about where you are going. This is the best thing that you can do to assuage your fears. When your children know what to expect when your family moves overseas, they will be able to drive their fears away. This step will also help you since knowing about where you are going will help calm your fears too.

Step 3: Planning

Moving your family overseas is not as simple as getting on a plane. There are a lot of considerations to face and there are plans to be made. Planning the move will help you make the transition much smoother for your family. In planning, you should try to find people who can help you. You should find and hire various services that can help you handle the intricate details of moving your family overseas. There are also people who prefer not to move the whole family overseas at once. Some people would plan the move in a series of steps with each family member following after a preset duration. This is ideal if you are on a tight budget.

Step 4: The Move

Moving your family overseas requires a lot of effort. You need to adjust to a new culture, a new climate, and a whole new way of living. The key to overcoming culture shock is to accept the fact that your way of life is not the only way of life. Respect the rights of others and you should be just fine. Make sure that your family also learns this lesson. By following these tips, you should find the experience of moving your family overseas to be pretty easy.