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Best and Worse Countries to be a Child

It’s hard to measure a child’s quality of life. Is he or she being Fed/ Educated? Valued? Loved? It all depends on a number of factors, both tangible and intangible.

A UNICEF study sets out to assess the well-being of children and adolescents among industrialized nations by measuring the way each country protects and nurtures its youth, according to six dimensions of well-being.

#1 Material Well Being

#2 Health and Safety

#3 Education

#4 Family and Peer Relationships

#5 Behavior and Risks

#6 Subjective Well Being

I hope these six dimensions of well-being are not listed in the order that UNICEF feels is the most important but a overall grouping of things kids need.

I would want the following for my children:

# 1 How they feel about themselves – their own well being

#2 Family and Peer Relationships

#3 Behavior and Risks

#4 Health and Safety

#5 Education

#6 Material Well Being

Picture 21
Total Count for Top Countries

Would it surprise you to know that these countries were the top hit in each category?

#1 Material Well Being – Sweden
#2 Health and Safety – Sweden
#3 Education – Belgium
#4 Family and Peer Relationships – Italy
#5 Behavior and Risks -Sweden
#6 Subjective Well Being – Netherlands

Where was the USA?

12th in Education –  17th in Material Well-Being – 20th in Family and Peer Relationships –  20th in Behaviors and Risks – 21st in Health and Safety – 21st in Subjective Well-being

It would be interesting to see where most CCK’s or TCK’s find themselves in this list of things they need. Perhaps they take somethings for granted, like their material well being?  Or the fact that they will have a very good education at an international school?  Or that their embassy, company or etc. is always looking after their Health and safety issues.

To me the big question is where do these TCK’s (CCK’s) place their Family and Peer relationships!

Notes:

http://awesome.good.is.s3.amazonaws.com/transparency/web/1206/where-are-the-best-and-worst-countries-to-be-a-child/flash.html

Our your predictions off?

 

thinking child

What can you do when you brain doesn’t match your hand?

With two kids in college, I thought I had most of this ‘child rearing’ figured out.  I do not.  I realize that half of what I have been telling my kids is possible wrong.  Or at least out dated. The world is constantly changing and nothing is for certain forever.

Are you OK with the notion that what your kids are learning in school may contradict what you learned in school. For some reason, that notion worries me!

Then I read this book – Yikes!

Samuel Arbesman’s “The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date” is very interesting and makes you think.  Most medical schools tell their students half of what they’ve been taught will be wrong within five years – the teachers just don’t know which half.

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Balikpapan Parents: What makes an Expat Child grow?

I was honored tonight to see the parents flow into the community center in Balkipapan, Indonesia.  They were all there to try and get a better understanding on how to support, nurture and help their expat child grow.

Here is the presentation we went through:

 

Unique Culture

By “A boy named Jack”

I am a third cultural kid. In my 8th grade humanities we needed to bring in an object that reflected our “culture”. This posed several concerns for me. First, we had just arrived in Thailand from a move from Africa so what sort of cultural things might I find in my backpack since our shipment had not yet arrived in our new home. This did not seem very promising. Second, what culture do I represent?

I decided to sit down and do a time line on my life to see if it might help direct me into finding just the right item to take into class. I decided to map my time line by months so it would reflect my summers in the USA.

The end results did not help narrow down my search for the idea culture object. I am 4% Australian, 25% African, 25% American and 45% Indonesian. Of course, I am 1% Thai since this is now my home country. I do carry an American passport but that is such a small part of my actual 13 years.

I finally had the perfect object for class. My object was a cardboard box. This box can hold your items when you are moving from place to place. I am a third culture kid, so I have moved a lot, this makes cardboard moving boxes a commonly used item for people like me. Most Third Culture kids have lived in other countries longer than their passport country. The packing box reflects the life of a moving family.

I hope my teacher will acknowledge this unique culture. If not, I have just blown my first grade in a new class in a new school. Being a third cultural kid makes you brave.

Notes:

Ruth Van Reken – Expert and founding father of Global Nomads

Rebecca Grappo – Education consultant

FIGT: Families in Global Transitions

Search Institute: Assets – Checklist of questions to build resilience

Panel discussion at the USA State Dept. 2012 – TCK’s

Exit Interview – Leaving one international school by Julia Simens

Prezi – additional presentation by Julia Simens go to Prezi.com and search for Julia Simens or Kjjgsimens

Mothers day: Momma raised me right!

mother and grandmothers hands

A mother’s touch . . .

 

A hearty hello to all the mothers in the world.  This day is for you even if your country celebrates it on a different day than my passport country.

In 2011, I was honored to be part of the “Gratitude Book Project – Celebrating Moms and Motherhood, edition Donna Kozik.  I wrote a short article about my mother and the power of “ummmm” or allowing silence to be a very important part of a conversation.

Due to the nature of my job, I meet people from all over the world.  Many of them are Moms.

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Death: Overseas when the unthinkable happens

When a Family Member Dies Abroad

A  checklist for the most difficult of times.

The passing of a loved one irrevocably alters family life but it can impact an global family way more than you ever thought!

After a death, there is so much to deal with. Some things may be put on hold. But …This must be done, though, and it is better to do it sooner rather than later.

Status of Residency

Check with your embassy on the status of your residency in your host country. If the deceased is the ‘work permit’ holder things might move very quickly on your staus of being legally in that country.

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Do words matter?

Screen Shot 2013 05 02 at 7 47 08 AM
Word Choice is Important

I believe that they do.

“Mom, I am so ugly.”

How do you respond?  Please tell me you are not one of those parents that say, “No honey, you are not ugly.”

Kids love to announce that they are not good at something. They usually do it just after they try something new and challenging, and they say it with finality, as if issuing a verdict. I’m not good at math! I’m not good at volleyball. They also like to throw out “I’m ugly” or “I’m fat”  or “I’m not macho”.

At that moment, your parental instinct is to fix the situation.

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Stop ‘disrespect’ in a classroom or at home

respect worldwide

I am often asked how to deal with a child that continues to be disrespectful in a classroom situation. Parents also use ‘disrespect’ when they share their concerns about home life.

Case study and the process

Joe (or Jill) this is not gender specific. It is about being clear about the borderline between respectful and disrespectful interactions.

Step One – decide if the lessons will only involve a few kids or the whole class  I like to use the “can you count them on one hand” policy.  Generally, if more than five students are at times disrespectful the lessons should be for the whole class. If the situation is at home, all members of the family should be present.  It sends the wrong message if you exclude the baby. Everyone deserves respect.

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Let’s compare distances: My twitterology is off the radar

distance from BPN jsimens com

distance from BPN @ jsimens com

Are you in Tweet Heaven?  I am! 

Researchers (University of Vermont) have discovered that the farther you are from home, the happier you are. The BBC reports that social scientists mined data from 37 million geotagged tweets sent by 180,000 people to determine the correlation between happiness and travel, in a science that The New York Times calls “twitterology.”

Are you familiar with the “hedonometer?

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Death and Taxes: But what is just as certain in an Expat’s life?

With USA tax deadline looming, I can only spin it as I know how …the expat way!

repairs abroad
Repairs Abroad – HELP ME!

Benjamin Franklin said, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.”

Taxes Worldwide

I have lived with USA taxes since I started working back in 1972. I was one of the lucky ones to get a summer job working at the local grain elevator. We would weigh the trucks going into the area full of wheat and then weight them after they dumped off the wheat. I got to check for moisture in the wheat which required crawling up into the bed of the truck and taking a random sample of the wheat. I often had wheat in my socks and shoes the rest of the day no matter how hard I tried to clean them off.

Recently, I was at an English class for non-native speakers, and we had five different languages improving their English skills. We were asked, “How many of you have driven a truck?” I was proud to be able to stand up and respond, “I have driven a truck.” This was impressive to many of the ladies in our group.

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Hiding Easter Eggs with Our Kids: Can Parents Play Even if Their Kids are Gone

Playing ‘mommy’ was one of my favorite childhood games, along with traveling on the silver spaceship to far away places.

Silver Tank jsimens com
Traveling in Your Own Backyard – imagination!

My next-door neighbor often had her grandson over. Dwayne and I would play -  hour after hour on this silver spaceship –silver horse – silver car. We’d eat popsicles on the silver yard feature. We’d find Easter eggs hidden on and around it.

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