How to cope with long-stay visitors

Are you now a holiday destination for friends and family? International living.  It’s exciting. It’s exotic. It’s different. Perhaps even glamorous if you’re lucky. You get to live,

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The circle of expat life

Adjusting to expat life Life is rarely a straight line. Despite my own neurotic push for things to be linear and collated, tidy and neat, most of the

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Surviving summer and the expat exodus

How to enjoy being ‘home’ without going ‘home’ Summer, the time of the year where the biggest event in the expat community takes place: the Expat Exodus. What

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Expat child – a gift or a curse?

The emotional impact of a move abroad for kids At the age of seven I moved to Nigeria with my parents. Looking back, this move and the many

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An expat child has many layers of influence

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory This was mentioned in Rianne Cornelisse’s paper about how expat children adapt when returning home. What is the theory of Bronfenbrenner all about? Model

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How an expat child experiences life in their home country

Moving home after living overseas as a child In response to the articles about of self-harm in TCKs and expat teens, Rianne Cornelisse wrote the succinct and perceptive

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An expat teen in trauma

A mother’s love This is for all expatriates who are struggling as they parent a teen in trauma. It doesn’t matter that statistics quote 25% of teenagers self-harm.

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Help for parents of expat teens in crisis

Advice for parents of teens who self harm What helps us as parents live through a teen trauma and crisis journey? Here’s what I learned: 1. Don’t isolate

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Perception on teens in crisis

Self-harm is a coping strategy, not the problem itself Another comment on the TCK Problems article was very insightful and could be of use to others experiencing mental

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Expat relationships are not ‘normal’

TCK problems – a response As I mentioned previously, I had numerous responses to an anonymous article I published on behalf of the mother of a self-harming expat

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