Growing Up Global Raising Children to Be At Home in the World

by Tavangar, Homa Sabet

• ISBN13: 9780345506542
• ISBN10: 0345506545
• Edition: Original
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-25
• Publisher: Ballantine Books

Summary

In today's increasingly interconnected world, how do we prepare our children to succeed and to become happy, informed global citizens? A mother of three, Homa Sabet Tavangar has spent her career helping governments develop globally oriented programs and advising businesses on how to thrive abroad. InGrowing Up Global, Tavangar shares with all of us her "parenting toolbox" to help give our children a vital global perspective. Whether you're mastering a greeting in ten different languages, throwing an internationally themed birthday party, or celebrating a newfound holiday, Growing Up Global provides parents and children with a rich, exciting background for exploring and connecting with far-flung nations they may have only heard about on television. Inside you'll discover fun activities, games, and suggestions for movies, music, books, magazines, service activities, and websites for expanding your family's worldview simple explanations that will help your children grasp the diversity of world faiths creative ways to gain geography literacy handy lists of celebrations and customs that offer a fascinating look at how people from different cultures around the world live everyday life Growing Up Globalis a book that parents, grandparents, and teachers can turn to again and again for inspiration and motivation as they strive to open the minds of children everywhere.

Author Biography

Homa Tavangar has 20 years’ experience working with governments, businesses, international organizations and non-profit agencies in global competitiveness, organizational and business development and cross-cultural issues.
She has lived in the Middle East, East and West Africa, South America, and throughout the United States. In addition to English, she speaks Persian (Farsi), Spanish, Portuguese, and rudimentary French and Swahili. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in International Economics, and International Development and Public Affairs from UCLA and Princeton University. Her religious heritage includes four of the world’s major faiths, and she has family living on every continent.
Homa has been researching Growing Up Global since spending the first anniversary of 9/11/01 in China, while she served as Special Advisor on International Business Development for the City of Philadelphia. From January through April 2007 she lived in West Africa with her children, where they spent a school term and she blogged their experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She is married and the mother of three girls, ranging in age from 5 to 15. She is active with their public schools in suburban Philadelphia and serves on the Boards of several international organizations. This is her first book.

Excerpts

Introduction


Make Yourself at Home . . . in the World
Why I Wrote This Book and
Why You Need to Read It


My family and I spent the first three months of 2007 living in West Africa. As our days in The Gambia passed like a blur and the pace of our busy North American schedules acquiesced to life in a foreign land, it seemed that the reason for our long journey changed almost every day: to experience life in a different culture and environment during my eldest daughter's last year before high school; for the kids to attend an international school-so different from their homogenous, well-equipped American public school; to spend meaningful time with their cousins who have been raised in Africa; to be engaged in service where it was desperately needed; to get back in touch with my own heritage of pioneers and travelers to exotic lands; and so that I could write. Ultimately, though, I think it boiled down, for me, to a challenge I set up in my mind: It was to see “could we really do it; and what woulditdo to us?” A motivating principle in my life has revolved around belief in humanity's oneness. By exposing my children to such a different human experience, I was putting that belief to the test.

The unusual trip required a good deal of preparation and sacrifice-not the least of which was from my husband, who stayed home to work, visited us for one week, and returned at the height of winter to a quiet house. Once we got the idea into our heads that we could make adjustments in our lives to realize this dream, there seemed to be no reason important enough to prevent the trip. This was a precious window in our lives where we could take a sabbatical from our routine and be welcomed to experience firsthand a little-known corner of the world. The entire financial expenditure still amounted to less than a single year of private school tuition, I adjusted my work schedule, and the ordeal of putting my daughters through numerous vaccinations just made them stronger. After our public school administrators gave their support and our calendars were cleared for three months, the biggest challenge was what gifts to buy-mostly for people we had yet to meet-that would be both useful and fit within the strict forty-pound per person luggage limit.

Three things shaped my experience the most during our stay in The Gambia: volunteering in a local public school, where only about twenty percent of the sixth-graders were functionally literate; seeing what life in a relatively peaceful African country was like through the lens of my children; and condensing our experiences into a daily blog I wrote for thePhiladelphia Inquirer.

As I helped my twelve-year-old daughter make sense of African children in frayed, American cast-off T-shirts approaching her shouting“Two-bob, two-bob”(white person, white person) to her face and then saying “Sponsor me” (for school fees or other expenses), while mansions stood nearby behind fortified gates and European tourists ambled the streets in a Muslim country wearing nothing but a bikini, I realized that our experience of traveling from suburban American life to a tiny African country could help inform other families about raising their children to become global citizens, too. So many people wanted us to share our experience with them. They didn't think they'd be going farther away than Disney World, but they did want to know what impact I'd seen on my kids and then share some of our stories with their own children. And, of course, we're not the only family with helpful experiences. There are millions out there from whom I-and my friends- would like to learn. Global social, political, and economic forces are crashing in around us and parents in my generation are grasping at straws to find ways to prepare our children for this unknown new world they will need to navigate.

If I ever d

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Excerpted from Growing up Global: Raising Children to Be at Home in the World by Homa Sabet Tavangar
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.