Dear all, taking a guest child into your family always involves a certain amount of risk – regardless of whether the child is coming for a week to exchange for a week, for several months or even a year. There are so many factors to consider!
What is the atmosphere like in your own family at home? Are there many or few rules? How did the child grow up? Is there staff to look after the household? Are children allowed to help with cooking? Are there siblings, etc.?
Of course, it also makes a big difference how well they fit into the class community – whether they immediately bond with a few people and want to be out and about a lot, or whether they struggle a bit and therefore spend a lot of time in their own room.
It is also very important to look at how mobile phone use is managed: whether they are in constant contact with home and therefore struggle to settle into the new country, or whether they are open and settle in straight away and don’t really need that contact with home.
Then, of course, character also plays a major role: what role does humour play? Are they particularly shy, or do they lack a sense of danger due to being overconfident? What are their eating habits? What do they share with their host parents, and what do they keep to themselves? Do they sit exams at school and have to do homework, or are they kept out of the loop?
Many factors for a successful exchange
As you can see, there are an awful lot of factors that come into play when a child goes abroad. In my own case, I went to live with a single mother and her two daughters – I was 15, and the sisters were 17 and 20.
The mother was regularly away on business trips, which meant we were often left on our own. It was like a little girls’ flat share. I thought it was brilliant at the time, because it made me so independent; we did the shopping ourselves, cooked for ourselves, and threw wild parties.
As a mother now, I’d see it differently if I heard that my child was constantly left alone abroad 😉 Times change. Our eldest daughter also felt she was left too much on her own by her first host family during her stay abroad in Year 10.
She wasn’t able to go to school for the first two weeks abroad – unfortunately, this was still due to Covid at the time – but the family was out all day and simply left her on her own. So she just lay on her bed, and when she once tried to walk to the supermarket two streets away, so many men in delivery vans honked at her that she gave up straight away.
When things don’t work out with the host family
That’s obviously not a good start, and eventually they changed families and things got much better, but of course they wanted to do things differently with our host child. We wanted to show her as much as possible, and we also felt that a 15-year-old Latina could naturally go out on the town with our 17-year-old twins from time to time.
Did you grow up with foster siblings yourself?
My parents took in host children time and again during my childhood and teenage years; we had all sorts of people staying with us – from America, from Denmark, once even from Greenland. So I didn’t feel entirely new to the business 😉 But I was still excited when the time came.
Having a guest child in your own home means, at least to begin with: perhaps being a bit tidier than usual, putting glasses away more quickly, giving the flat an extra hoover and, for the time being, not lounging around on the sofa in your pyjamas. Having a proper cooked meal on the table at lunchtime and in the evening, rather than just serving up toast, is simply part of the deal for me.
And of course we wanted to show our guest child a few things too: we took them to the Christmas market at the Chocolate Museum and had a go on the Ferris wheel, organised Moulin Rouge tickets for them at Cologne’s Musical Dome, spent their 15th birthday at Cologne’s Christmas Circus, and went to Phantasialand for a day around New Year’s Eve.
I took it with me to my readings and choir performances, and to the horse in the stable. We put our initial reserve down to the language barrier, but that actually remained right until the end, which is particularly noticeable – and naturally unsettling – in a family like ours that communicates constantly.
What it means to be a host family
However, we received feedback from back home: She’s doing great with you, she feels right at home. Even though she spent a lot of time in her room, didn’t go to parties or meet up with friends. In the end, she was able to go on two short trips with the other exchange students from her school back home (almost everyone from her class was in Germany at the time), which she really enjoyed. She really came into her own with people she’d known for a long time.
And then, at some point, the five months were actually over. There were certainly challenging times too, but these shared experiences allowed our immediate family to grow closer together once again. In a letter our host child left us, they finally wrote about everything that had been going through their mind during their time here.
It was a love letter in which she thanked each of us individually. We had suspected as much, but seeing it put into words and laid out before us in beautiful handwriting really hit home. A heart of gold that eventually found its way out.
