Something I noticed early on in our time on the field was that everyone had an opinion on how to do almost everything: how to budget, how to learn language, how to evangelize, even how to properly wash vegetables! And of course, people have a lot of opinions and advice about how to raise kids. But as Duke Dillard, Mission Frontiers' editor and father of seven, wisely told me, you won’t really know what was good advice and what wasn’t until your kids are all grown up.

My kids are 13, 11, and five, so I won’t offer you any advice yet. But I will offer you an unfiltered look at my experiences with some aspects of raising a family on the field and the blessings, challenges, grief, and joy that have come along the way.

Relationships with Extended Family One thing I did not anticipate was how hard it would be for me to raise my kids away from our extended family. Our oldest kids were two and five when we moved overseas. It was such a precious time of their lives, and I felt an enormous amount of guilt taking them so far away from their grandparents and cousins. I still grieve over the birthdays, Christmases, band concerts, and other family milestones that we’ve missed being so far apart.

That being said, my kids actually have great relationships with their extended families. We go back to the US for furlough every other summer, and my kids spend weeks living practically on top of their cousins. It’s the highlight of their summer! Their grandparents have come for extended visits, and my kids love giving them tours of our house and taking them sightseeing. In some ways, I think they are closer to their extended family members than they would be if we still lived in the US, because the time they do spend together is so rich.

Travel Life on the field requires a lot of traveling. We travel to attend conferences, for furlough, and occasionally for vacation. There were years when we had to leave the country every three months to renew our visas. It was fun at first, but after a while I started to feel like I didn’t have time to unpack all the suitcases and do all the laundry before it was time to pack again.

The upside is that my kids have become excellent travelers! It might have something to do with the unlimited snacks and screentime they get on those trans-Atlantic flights, but I think they’ve also grown in their ability to adapt to changes in plans, to behave respectfully in public, and to patiently endure long lines at passport control! And of course, they’ve benefitted enormously from all the opportunities to see other parts of the world.

Language “Kids are like sponges!” That’s the phrase that gets thrown around when we talk about kids learning new languages. And it’s true—they absorb so much from their interactions with friends and teachers, often without having to be taught. But in my experience, it’s also true that each child learns at their own pace and in their own way.

My older kids attended a local private school for almost all their elementary school years. My daughter is an expressive, chatty extrovert who picked up both the local dialect of Arabic and Standard Arabic quickly. She was still in kindergarten when our friends started to joke that she had become a local!

My middle son, on the other hand, is a sensitive introvert who struggled with the loud, chaotic atmosphere of the local school. He didn’t seem to be growing much in language until, around third grade, I asked a local friend to tutor him at home. She was incredibly calm and patient with him, and it wasn’t long before we started overhearing him tell her long stories about his day in Arabic.

Our youngest son was born in North Africa and started attending local preschool when he was three. He recently asked me to tell him the meaning of a word he heard at school. I told him that it normally means to read or to study. “But mom,” he said, “my teacher used this word when they were singing!” I realized that when locals read the Qur’an, they usually chant it in a way that sounds like singing. It was amazing to watch him work out multiple meanings of a word from context!

School If you’ve heard anything about schooling in the Arab world, you’ll be familiar with the challenges we faced: long days, lots of homework, and learning in three languages simultaneously. The biggest challenge—and probably the hardest for my mama heart—was the way teachers used shame and threats as motivational tools. My kids heard things like, “Your sister speaks better

Arabic than you do.” and “The other second grade class is better than yours.” On one occasion, after his teacher threatened to take away gym class for several weeks because of the students’ rowdy behavior without ever following through, my sweet son got so fed up that he stood up and told his teacher she was lying! She was so shocked by his out-of-character outburst that she didn’t even discipline him!

But sending our kids to local schools also forced us to rely on our local friends in a way that deepened our sense of community and love for them. When we were still early in our language-learning journey and our kids would come home with assignments we couldn’t read, I’d send out a slew of text messages asking for help. Our friends would translate worksheets, send recordings of themselves reading texts, and even offer tutoring sessions in person or over Zoom. Looking back on that time, I remember it as a stressful season, but also a sweet time of being cared for by North Africans.

Friendships While our kids have been blessed by friendships with locals, their closest friendships have been with other “third-culture kids”—kids who spend most of their growing-up years outside of their parents’ culture or cultures. This has been a source of both grief and joy.

Within a few months of moving to the field, we met another American family with kids around our kids’ ages. They ended up joining our team, and our kids became each other’s best friends. But five years later, they had to move back to the US Our older two kids were eight and 11 at the time, and it was one of their first real experiences with grief. They still think of their life in terms of before and after this moment.

But I was recently reminded of the beauty of TCK relationships. In the spring, we attended a regional conference for our sending organization. There are about a zillion kids in our region, and our kids had the time of their lives. They had a near-instant sense of connection with the other kids, which is amazing considering the huge variety of nationalities, cultures, and languages represented in the group. They bonded over their shared experiences of growing up overseas. Seeing them together as they played and worshipped was a beautiful picture of the diversity of the global Body of Christ.

Raising kids overseas is one of the most challenging aspects of my life as a field worker, but it’s also one of the most rewarding. It’s forced me to depend on the Lord and on help from local friends more than I would have if I didn’t have kids, which in turn has grown my faith and my love for North Africans. Growing up abroad hasn’t been easy for my kids, but I’ve watched them grow in resilience, flexibility, and awareness of the world around them, and they’ve experienced the Father’s love and care for them through relationships with locals and other expats. For all these reasons and more, I’m grateful for the opportunity to raise kids on the field.