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• Build resilience in your life and your family’s life – the ability to bounce back when things are not going well. • Build a vocabulary of emotions so everyone in the family knows exactly what the other members are feeling. • Proactively address the need for positive role models for your children (or yourself) as you move around the world. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins – the people who would normally serve as important role models – are thousands of miles away.

• Build persistence. For expat families especially, it’s easy to avoid dealing with problems “because we’re moving soon”. That excuse can easily mask the underlying issue, which is lack of persistence. We need to make sure we are not using a relocation as an opportunity to run or hide from situations or people.

• Build play into your life. In our hectic expat lifestyle, we often overlook the importance of play. All families need to spend time having fun together.

top tips

for moving your family

“too hard”, or you felt that you wanted to quickly leave the country and say good riddance, then your next assignment will likely also seem shallow and unimportant. The baggage we carry around the world becomes flled with anger, disappointment or sadness.

It’s important for a family to deal with the emotional side of relocating, rather than letting it get swept under the rug when the rest of the move details get cumbersome. Any change is emotional, but that doesn’t mean it has to be negative.

Get connected

One key psychological issue everyone faces – even we nomads – is the need to belong. After we cover the basics – food, water, shelter, safety and security – we need to fnd “our people”. We need to connect. We need to belong to a family, a community, a unit, a race of people, a tribe, a great school, a good job … something. If we feel connected, we can feel happy and fulflled.

Parents can ensure social and emotional stability in their changing environment by blending past and present. You have to connect to both the new location and your past locations or home. The importance of attachment and those vital close connections are keys to a person’s happiness. If you understand how relationships develop, then you’ll have more success as a global nomad. I like to think of levels in building healthy connections: proximity, sameness, belonging, loyalty and signifcance.

Let’s look at an example that applies to most parents here. Through your child’s school, you come into contact with many different people (proximity). You may be different nationalities, but you all have children about the same age (sameness). You are all very different, but you all come together because you belong to the same school community (belonging). You begin to feel loyal to your new community (loyalty), and the time you spend together and the work you do takes on signifcance for you, both socially and for the sake of the school (signifcance). Signifcance is key for global people: we need to feel like we’ve got something benefcial out of living in our host country – so far away from home and extended family – and we often need to feel like, when we leave, we’ve given something back.

The way you leave a location sets you up for your new location. If you continue to feel like you missed out of something because you weren’t living in your home country or you felt put out because you assignment was