My Experience with Culture Shock: Raising Children in a Foreign Country

Living abroad can benefit your child in so many important ways, but definitely, it has its drawbacks as well. This essay will examine the advantages and disadvantages of raising children in a foreign country.

The two main benefits of raising children in a foreign country are learning a new language and exposed to a different culture. Firstly, children who raised abroad are more likely to be bilingual; they are more likely to speak at least two languages, if not more. This will help children develop linguistic skills and specific areas of their brain, as it will help them to understand more about the concept of communication. Secondly, they will develop a better understanding of other cultures and will be more open to cultural differences. For example, if you are living abroad with your children and they are registered in international schools, this could be a very fertilizing environment for them to capture different languages and learn about different cultures. As a result, they will end up with wider knowledge and perspectives about multi-languages, and they will learn how to accept cultural differences.

On the other hand, raising children abroad also has some side-effects, such as identity crisis and culture shock. When children live among many different cultures and nationalities, they can lose the sense of their own identity and what they stand for. It considered being a very sensitive issue for the children who live abroad and have no sense of belonging anymore. They might also expose to culture shock when they come back to their homeland. For instance, if it was a holiday season and you go back with your children to your home country, they may find difficulty in accommodating and sometimes they may refuse to go back again. This is what we call culture shock. It happens when people visit or live in a society that is different from their own. Therefore, when a child gets used to living in a specific environment with a certain way of living and then move to another place which has another lifestyle, she might develop this type of problem. However, through maintaining a sense of belonging and being familiar with the history of our own native country, the idea of living with our children and raising them abroad will turn into a wholly positive experience.

In conclusion, I believe that the benefits of living overseas, learning a new language, adopting a new culture, and having new experiences far outweigh the negatives of identity crisis and culture shock.