When Your Child Understands a Culture You're Still Learning

Many expat parents describe a moment that catches them off guard. Your child comes home from school with a joke, a social rule, or a phrase in the local language that you don't fully understand yet. You watch them move through a classroom, a playground, a whole set of unspoken norms, with an ease that took you years to build in your own country and still hasn't quite arrived here. Underneath the pride of watching your child adapt, something else shows up too. A kind of vertigo. Sometimes a grief you can't name right away.