LivinginBrno

Being a parent is already hard enough, but parenting your cute, precious little energy bombs in a foreign country brings a little extra to the situation, of course the great things outweigh the bad, at least that is what we think so far. I searched online information about how the expat parenting is done, what are the common traits of expat communities and, particularly, how to the parents living in foreign countries are different from those who live in their native country.  I strongly believe the expat parenting has some peculiarities that are more prominent, we are a different segment of society groups and even if we prefer the global type of thinking and living, our behavior as parents is strongly shaped by the socio-economic context of the country we chose to relocate to. As not much information is available online - for example, statistics or real life opinions about the differences between the two groups, I came up with my own view on this. Far from me to label people - I t...

Not much is written on the parenting experience as expats and far less is documented online about raising children without the support from an extended family. I will briefly summarize what it means for us as expats in Czech republic to have a family without any support from the ' village'. In 2014,  we had our first son and I was really scared about the idea of being far away from family and with almost zero support from anyone. I cried many days and waited 2 long weeks to make courage and give my son a first bath as newborn. Although the nurses had instructed me how to do it and there were many online helpers, I really missed some other mom around me - maybe my own mom, just anyone with more motherly experience. In the end, my husband said - 'look I will help, is our son, what can go wrong, we know him better than anyone, let's give him a bath, everything will be alright, no worries.' And we just did it, it was actually simple task. That was crucial moment when ...