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Balancing connection, independence, and growth

Studying abroad in an international program can be an exciting experience for students and the family and friends that support them. The development of social media channels and smartphone apps has made staying connected with loved ones simple and inexpensive. Students can easily share pictures via social media, text quick travel updates, and make FaceTime calls, allowing their families to indirectly share their experiences.

However, understanding that healthy boundaries are needed for this experience to be maximized can be helpful. In this spirit, we make several recommendations:

1. Encourage your child to be fully present in their study abroad location. While it can be difficult to practice, one of the most valuable gifts families can give their children while they study abroad is permission to be away. Students need to know they are loved, and then given freedom to be on their own. They should not feel guilty about not calling home, and the family can play an active role in releasing the student to be fully present in their travel location. If family and friends expect students to call home or FaceTime each day (or even each week!), it can put a lot of pressure on students as they try to “straddle two continents” by living life in Leipzig, Oxford, or Valencia while (virtually) living life back home. Not only can frequent communication with families result in students not being “present,” it often inhibits them from connecting with their immediate community. After a while, they can find themselves isolated because they have been sharing their stories with people across the globe rather than with the person next door. Therefore, providing space can help your child maximize their learning and take full advantage of the potential of the overseas experience.

2. Be aware of how busy the overseas schedule is. During a normal week, students press a full load of classes into a shorter work week; they work hard to keep up with the required homework and projects; they participate in many in-house activities and local events; they plan weekend (or even week-long) travel with all the complexity of transportation, lodging, and sight-seeing. After weekends of busy travel, students return exhausted and rush to get ready for the classes in the week ahead. Often students are too busy to get an adequate amount of sleep. You can encourage your child to live a balanced life by not putting extra pressure on them.

3. Encourage your children to embrace “encounters with difference.” Research demonstrates that study abroad experiences produce growth because of “encounters with difference.” As students come face-to-face with new ways of viewing the world, new political or economic models, new types of social interactions, and other radically different ways of life as they travel internationally, it can be difficult! More dramatically, these experiences can produce cognitive dissonance, causing them to question their basic assumptions about life. This process produces deep reflection and forces students out of their provincial worlds. Be as supportive as possible in this process, allowing them to grapple with complex questions without “swooping in” to rescue them with a simple answer.

4. Let your children make their own decisions and learn from them. Part of the power of the study abroad experience for students comes from being away from everything familiar (their families, friends, home culture, support structures, and so forth). In this new and strange context, they must learn “how to learn.” Through trial and error, they gain the skills to navigate various forms of public transportation, communicate in places where they do not know the language, and pick up on cultural norms without being instructed. Perhaps even more challenging, students have to make their own decisions about their classes, budgeting, health, and balancing their travel goals and academic goals. In this struggle students learn more than information – they gain confidence and skills that will last them a lifetime. Unfortunately, and ironically, well-meaning family members can short-circuit this critical learning process by not allowing students to struggle and solve the problems themselves: they sometimes offer to talk to a professor about a child’s academic issue, intervene in their child’s roommate conflict, or take on a child’s discipline case personally.

We ask you to support your child through listening, encourage him/her to be persistent when difficulties are encountered, and offer advice when solicited. But allow the student the full weight of responsibility for the issue and solving the issue: in the end, this is the only way real growth can occur. Remember, too, that often failures can be even more important than successes in the development process, so help him/her see the value of such occasions.