What Hosting a Teen Exchange Student Was Really Like

Friends, welcoming an exchange student into your home always carries a bit of risk, whether the kid comes for a week-long exchange, for several months, or even for a full year. So much plays into it!

What's family life like in their own home? Lots of rules, or hardly any? How did the child grow up? Is there maybe household help, are kids allowed to cook alongside the grown-ups, are there siblings, and so on.

Then, of course, it matters a lot how well the student fits in at school. Does she click with a few people right away and want to be out and about all the time, or does she have a harder time and spend most of her hours in her room?

It's also really important to look at how phone use is handled. Is the student in contact with home nonstop, so she barely arrives in the new country at all? Or is she open and settles in right away, without needing that tie back home?

And of course personality plays a big role. How much humor is in the mix? Is there a lot of shyness, or, on the flip side, so much exuberance that common sense about safety goes out the window? What are the eating habits like? What gets shared with the host family and what doesn't? Does the student take tests and do homework at school, or is she exempt?

So Many Things Go Into a Good Exchange

You can see there are a ridiculous number of factors when a kid goes abroad. In my own case, I went to live with a single mom and two host sisters. I was 15, and the sisters were 17 and 20.

The mom traveled for work on a regular basis, so we were home alone a lot. Kind of like a little all-girls house share. I thought it was brilliant back then, because it made me so independent. We did our own grocery shopping, cooked for ourselves, and threw parties whenever the house was ours.

I'd see it differently now as a mom, if I heard that my kid was home alone all the time in a foreign country 😉 Times change. Our oldest daughter also felt left alone too much by her first host family during her tenth-grade exchange abroad.

Because of COVID restrictions at the time, she couldn't go to school for the first two weeks. But the family was gone all day and simply left her on her own. So she lay on her bed, and when she once tried to walk to the supermarket a couple of streets away, so many men in delivery vans honked at her that she gave up on that, too.

When the Host Family Isn't a Good Fit

That's obviously not a good start. At some point she switched families and things got much better, but we wanted to do it differently with our guest, of course. We wanted to show her as much as we could. We also figured a 15-year-old Latina girl could easily hang out with our 17-year-old twins every now and then.

Did You Grow Up with Exchange Siblings Too?

My parents took in exchange students again and again when I was growing up. We had all kinds of people living with us, from America, from Denmark, once even from Greenland. So I didn't feel totally new to the business 😉 I was still nervous when the time came.

Having a guest in your house means, at least at the beginning, that you're a little tidier than usual. Glasses get put away faster, you vacuum one more time than you normally would, and you stop lounging around on the couch in your pajamas. For me, it also means having a real cooked meal on the table at lunch and dinner instead of just throwing some toast out there.

And of course we wanted to show our guest a few things. We took her to the Christmas market by the Chocolate Museum and rode the Ferris wheel. We got her tickets to Moulin Rouge at Cologne's Musical Dome, spent her 15th birthday at the Cologne Christmas circus, and around New Year's Eve we went for a day to Phantasialand, a theme park near Cologne.

I took her along to my book readings and choir performances, and out to the barn to see my horse. We chalked up her initial reserve to the language barrier, but the reserve stayed right to the end. In a family that never stops talking, like ours, that stands out, and of course it also throws you off a little.

What It Means to Be a Host Family

From her home country, though, we got feedback: She's doing great with you, she feels right at home. That was true even though she spent a lot of time in her room, didn't go to parties, and didn't make plans with friends. In the end she got to take two shorter trips with the other exchange students from her home school (almost everyone from her class was in Germany at the time), and she had a great time. Around people she's known for a long time, she blossomed.

And then, just like that, the five months were over. There were some challenging stretches, but going through them together also brought our core family closer. In a letter our guest left for us, she finally wrote about everything that must have been going through her head during her time here.

It was a love letter, and in it she thanked each of us individually. We'd sensed all of it, but having it put into words and lying in front of us in beautiful handwriting still hit us right in the heart. A heart of gold that found its way out after all.