Why Your Child Fell Apart in Week Three of School — Transition Fatigue in Expat Kids, with Kate Berger

📬 Get the monthly email: damparenting.nl — everything from the podcast, in four minutes.

Your child went back to school and seemed fine. Then week two happened.

For internationally mobile children, September isn't just a new school year. It's a re-entry. They've come back from a summer in a country that might feel more like home than this one, said goodbye to grandparents again, and walked into a classroom where they have to switch languages at the door. The tiredness doesn't show up on day one. It shows up when the adrenaline runs out.

Kate Berger is a child psychologist and the founder of the Expat Kids Club in Amstelveen and Wassenaar, where she works with internationally mobile children and their families. In this episode we talk about what September actually does to expat and third culture kids — cumulative transition fatigue, the difference between a child who's struggling with school and a child who's struggling with coming back, and why so much of what parents read as behaviour is really exhaustion.

We also get into the thing nobody says out loud: how much of a parent's own anxiety lands on a child at the school gate, and what to do about it when you're anxious for good reasons.

If your child has been more tearful, more clingy or more furious than usual since term started, this one is for you.

In this episode: re-entry after a summer abroad · why week two is harder than week one · transition fatigue and how it accumulates over years · what internationally mobile children lose that nobody names · how parent anxiety transfers at the school gate · what actually helps, and what makes it worse.

Kate Berger runs the Expat Kids Club ( www.expatkidsclub.com — Insttagram @expatkidsclub.)

Part of DAM Parenting's ongoing series on what it actually takes to raise children in a country you didn't grow up in.

New episodes every Wednesday.

www.damparenting.nl