Emotional Resilience and the Expat Child: Practical Storytelling Techniques That Will Strengthen The Global Family

Introduction

Developing the emotions every child needs

The only thing you can be sure you can move around the world is your child's ability to thrive. In order to do this you need to help your children build up their interpersonal skills. Emotions are common in all languages and all cultures. As a parent, you can help your child build his or her emotional and basic social skills and you can do this in any location of the world. Using a wide range of emotions and the ability to understand when and why to use them are important for all children.

By the age of five children should be able to identify and relate to a wide variety of emotions. To illustrate this I have taken stories from our own travels and connected an emotion to each event that I will share with you in this book. My goal is to allow you to use this book as a tool that will help you to connect with your own child or children and to use it to build on their vocabulary of emotions.

My family

We are a family of four that hold U.S.A. passports but have not lived in the U.S.A. for most of our lives. I first went overseas as an elementary teacher then returned home for more education. I met Kevin who had also worked overseas but was back in the U.S.A. with his company. We married and started a life overseas again as soon as we could. In 1991, Jackie, our daughter, was born in Perth, Australia and three years later Grant was born. In our life of moving around it was amazing to have the same doctor for both of our children's births. This might have been the only consistent thing they have ever shared in their lives.

In 1999, Pollock and Van Reken stated the definition of Third Culture Kid in their book Third Culture Kids: Growing up Among Worlds as:

A third-culture kid is an individual who, having spent a significant part of their develop-mental years in a culture other than their parents ' home culture, develops a sense of relationship to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Elements from each culture are incorporated into the life experience, but the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar experience.

Like most Third Culture Kids, there is nothing ordinary about Jackie and Grant. They have had exposure to seven languages in their home (English, German, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Yoruba, and Thai). They are children raised on the cusp of two cultures, the one that they were born into and the one that physically surrounds them. Grant, now 16, feels it is routine to fly thousands of miles and set up meetings with his friends in new or different locations. Two such meetings stand out in my mind. Several summers ago we were heading to our summer home on Roatan, Honduras, with one overnight stop over in Houston. Grant set up a movie night - not with us but with his friends from Thailand that had moved back to Texas. Another time we met up with one of his friends from the International School of Bangkok in the parking lot of an amusement park in Colorado because his friend was visiting her grandma and we were visiting our extended family at the same time.

Jackie, now 19, has areal appreciation of globalization and was quick to let me know when a recruiter from a well-known university was misinformed about the geography of Europe (luckily she corrected him under her breath). Two days later and at a different university we were subjected to incorrect political information about Asia. I did not even look at Jackie for fear of what her opinion might be about this blunder.

Using Robert Plutchik's major work, Nature of Emotions (1989), and Gordon Neufeld's Six Stages of Attachment (2006), I have created what I hope will be a book of stories that you can share with your children and a workbook that will help you, as parents, to connect and make lasting, valuable, family memories together.

Emotions are formed in the family unit

Most children spend the majority of their time at home in the family unit and so they will develop ideas about how to express emotions primarily through social interactions in their own families. Today, many children spend a significant part of their developmental years in daycare or as expatriates with additional family support in the household provided by nannies and drivers. These interactions are important. Through socialization children learn an emotional vocabulary that enables them to name internal sensations associated with objects, events, and relations that they encounter. Children leam how to express what they feel about the environment they are in and the people they are around.

This book is what many families have been looking for, particularly when they have experienced relocations. Here you will find a guide to which emotions need to be explored in order to encourage stronger, healthier, more communicative relationships. It will also raise awareness of the wide range of emotional experiences all families have as they move around the world. Find support and empathy as the stories included resonate with you.

Understanding the classification of emotions

Grab an orange and slice it in half. As you look at it, you can begin to understand how emotions can be represented in a simple way. The segments can be seen as different but still related. I like how the orange shows pairs of polar opposites. Some emotions are similar and others seem to be exact antitheses of each other. Each emotion also exists in varying degrees of intensity. When working with young children it is important for them to be able to see or understand a feeling or concept, so using an orange is a wonderful tool. You can talk about opposite emotions by pointing to one side of the orange, joy, and then show your child the opposite section, sadness.

In order to understand how to raise emotional awareness in your own child, you need to have an understanding of the theory of emotions. Robert Plutchik is a leader in classification and the theory of emotion and through this work he identifies and separates a wide range of emotions into positive and negative segments of varying intensities.

Although there are cultural differences in how emotions are expressed and then interpreted, it is clear that some emotions are universal. These are often called basic,pn 'mary or fundamental emotions. These emotions form the core or foundation from which all other emotions are derived.

Primary emotions

Robert Plutchik created a wheel of primary emotions that consisted of eight basic emotions:

Joy

Trust

Fear

Surprise

Sadness

Disgust

Anger

Anticipation

The eight basic emotion dimensions could be described by words such as ecstasy, admiration, terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage and vigilance or other synonymous terms reflecting differences in intensity. Plutchik (1962) believes these basic emotions are primary and all other emotions derive from them.

Emotional dyads

This workbook will also cover what are known as dyads. A dyad is a mixture of primary emotions. Robert Plutchik first developed the idea of the dyad with follow-up work by T.D. Kempler and Jonathan Turnerr (1987). We know that emotions are not literally mixed like primary colors. Emotions are a lot more complex in our brains and bodies; however, this analogy helps us understand how basic and complex emotions are generated.

Looking at the primary dyads of the adjacent emotions, joy and acceptance, they lead to love. For example — you are expecting your second child so everyone is getting very excited. There is a lot of time talking about the 'new arrival'. Your oldest child experiences joy when she sees her younger brother. Yet, it is only after she has acceptance for her brother does she love him.

We will be looking at these emotional dyads. They are:

Optimism

Submission

Awe

Disapproval

Remorse

Contempt

Aggressiveness

Love

We will also look at two emotions that young children need to understand:

Grief

Serenity

Throughout this workbook, I will include a dictionary term (OED) for each emotion we are sharing. There will also be a child-friendly version to help with your child who is under five-years-old. In order to help with understanding the concepts in this book, at times I refer to your child in gender-neutral terms. I use 'he' to refer to your child.

How children reach their potential

I believe that experiences in the early years of your child's life deeply impact him for the rest of his life. Having a close connection to a parent allows him to reach his potential.

Talking about emotions helps young children understand their feelings. The key factor for understanding emotions in these young children is predicted by their overall language ability. Your child has to be able to explain why he feels the way he feels and be able to communicate that to others. One factor that may contribute to the social difficulties of children with limited language ability is emotional competence. Research by Fujiki, Spackman, Brinton and Illig (2008) found that children with language impairment do not recognize emotions as well as children their own age with typical language development.

Language

I always encourage parents to speak in the language that is most familiar to their child when it comes to talking about emotions. This rich language base of the parent can help define and explain the differences to their child. Many expatriate children have multiple home languages. When you factor in the host country language or languages of staff members in the household it can be confusing for a young child to understand emotions.

Children may have difficulty when the language of the school is not their first language. In International schools, where English is the medium of instruction, many parents stop speaking to their children in their first language or mother tongue. Parents think they should speak English all the time. It is important to maintain the mother tongue to ensure cognitive growth.

When you move your children around the world they face cognitive and emotional challenges as their learning involves both a new language and a new culture with each move. Children, especially those who spend time with second language learners, will need support to clearly understand emotions. Children need to have the ability to identify and label feelings. The reason why some children are good at this and others are not comes down to the child's family model or approach in talking about emotions.

Research shows that early childhood connections to parents are vital. Summarizing the results of a two-year study of 12000 teenagers, gender researcher Dooley (1999) wrote, researchers discovered that the best predictor of a teenager's health and the strongest deterrent to high-risk behavior was a close relationship with a parent. They concluded that a strong emotional connection with at least one parent or significant adult figure reduces the odds that an adolescent will suffer from emotional stress, have suicidal thoughts or behavior, engage in violence, or use substances (tobacco, alcohol, or marijuana). Good relationships help create resilience to dangerous, acting out behavior in your children. As parents, you owe it to your children to create that close connection. This book will help to show you how.

The importance of attachment

In order to forge that vital close connection, you need to understand the way healthy relationships develop. Psychologist Gordon Neufeld presents six stages of attachment that create the foundation for virtually every relationship your child will ever have, beginning with parents, and later with siblings, friends and intimate partners. This attachment is the cornerstone of parenting. It can help with keeping your child on track academically, managing challenging behavior, and maintaining the all-important role of being the one they turn to for advice and support.

There are many possible scenarios that outline a typical family group. Some children form an attachment to a carer other than a biological parent. Many children with a single working parent, or in families with nannies or other key people who do child rearing, form their attachments to these key people. Same families have an absent parent or a 'late' parent, for example, an adopted child at age five. Some families have a main income earner that is often gone or some families have a parent that travels a lot; these children learn to attach to key members and form special bonds to their parents when they are around.

The six stages of attachment

Interestingly, children move through the stages of attachment at a rate of about one stage per year.

The most primitive and basic stage of attachment is Proximity. Through touch, contact, and closeness, the infant begins attaching to his or her parents.

Secondly, toddlers seek Sameness with their parents, mimicking their mannerisms or dress, and looking for ways to be the same as their parents.

The third stage is Belonging or Loyalty. Often three-year-olds will be very possessive and say my mommy or my daddy.

Four-year-olds seek reassurance of the strength of their attachment to parents by wanting evidence of their Significance. This is the fourth stage.

The fifth stage develops around the age of five when we see the beginnings of genuine Love as attachment goes deeper and deeper.

And finally, the sixth stage. From age six onward, if the attachment roots have gone deeply enough, we have a child who allows him or herself to venture out into Being Known.

In his work, Dr. Neufeld explains that all relationships will follow these six stages:

Proximity

Sameness

Belonging/Loyalty

Significance

Love

Being Known

Each stage solidifies the attachment between parent and child. If