Raising an Expat
by Adrian Leeds

I didn't set out to raise a teenage daughter in Paris all by myself. It just happened that way. When we (a family unit of three) moved to Paris in 1994, our daughter was just-turned-nine-years-old and very reluctant to start a new life in a strange place. We reassured her with words like: "It's not prison, you know . . . ," "If you don't like it after 90 days we'll leave . . . ," and "You'll thank us when you're older. . . " She didn't buy any of it and it wasn't until just recently that she actually admitted to liking it here.

Like most U.S. expat parents, we worried about how our child would acclimate to this new world, new language, new friends, new rules, new everything. So, we enrolled her in a well-known bilingual school where she met kids from around the world who were in the same boat as she, learned French from the get-go and slowly discovered that doing things differently wasn't necessarily all that bad . . . or that great, either.

The transition from her Los Angeles liberal thinking chartered public school to a traditional French academic environment was even more a shock for me as it was for her. Day one, we were given a lengthy laundry list of specific school supplies to buy which cost about $200 at the local "papeterie." Week two, her English teacher told us about their weekly "dictés," something I had never heard of and couldn't imagine how taking dictation to be graded for perfect spelling and punctuation could possibly benefit my child when creativity is what I was seeking. And then at the end of the first month, we heard about kids crying in class because the teacher of the "adaptation" class regularly used humiliation and intimidation as a way of "motivating" the kids.

The following year, we moved her to one of Paris' few international public schools where 25% of her classes were given in English. At the end of her second year there, our family divided, and she and I moved to another part of the city. She found herself, once again, in another school, this time in an all French public school where she was the only "double American" (both parents American) among a class of three hundred.

Then twelve-years-old, bilingual and acclimated fully to Parisian life, she still hated living here and longed for sunny blue California skies, soccer for girls and afternoons at the beach. At least once a week she'd blame me for bringing her here against her will and every week I'd tell her that one of these days she'd thank me for broadening her life experience and giving her the gift of a second and ultimately a third language (starting with Junior High, French kids study French, English and a third elected language).

The teenage years, being the toughest for most kids and parents, is an even more frightening proposition as a single parent, especially with very little financial security and no familial support. When it came time to decide if we were going to stay in Paris or head back to the States, where finding work would be easier and friends and family were waiting in the wings, I chose to stay in Paris because, in many ways, it is much more ideal for a single parent than living in the U.S.

First of all, public junior high schools in Los Angeles weren't ideal – 40 kids to a class, no foreign language until high school, metal detectors at the doors and of course, rampant with drugs. I had also read that American kids have sex for the first time one and one-half years earlier than their French counterparts and in Europe, France has one quarter of the teenage pregnancies as Britain!

The only real solution to that was to enroll her in a private school and pay $10,000 a year or more for a quality education she could get here in France for nothing.

Secondly, until she could drive legally, I could envision 30% of my time spent behind the wheel of a car, carpooling or "schlepping" her from one activity to another. Then, the reality of a sixteen-year-old behind the wheel of a car (and who's car??) was terrifying. As a teenager in Paris, she has complete freedom thanks to the public transportation system and that gives me freedom, too, especially knowing that Paris is a very safe city, compared to most.

Thirdly, if she should decide to attend college in the U.S., academically I could guess she would be about two years ahead of her U.S. counterparts. With a baccalaureate degree and a foreign language, she'd have a better chance of acceptance than most, too.

So, I chose to stay in Paris, gather my wits and resources and make the best of a tough situation in the interest of my daughter's well being. She didn't agree with me, but she had no choice but to do the same and make the best of it.

Now after six-plus years in Paris, my daughter is perfectly bilingual with no discernable accent in either French or English. She has a third language under her belt (Spanish) and when we travel to Italy or Greece or Germany, she quickly picks up the lingo, which I attribute to her exposure to so many languages and cultures. Traveling and adapting to different cultures is second nature. She expresses desire to travel to every part of the globe and would do it without hesitation. Her friends are as eclectic as a Benetton ad and her viewpoint on the world is entirely global. Was I this way at the age of fifteen living in New Orleans, Louisiana? No way! So would I ever regret raising my child as an expat? Never!