A book can help with
For the child starting again where nothing sounds familiar.
Moving country asks an enormous amount of a child. A new language, new food, new rules nobody explains, and a sudden loss of the easy fluency they had at home. Some children go quiet for months. Others are cheerful in the day and homesick at night. All of it is normal, and all of it takes longer than adults expect.
Books help by showing a child that others have done this. The best of them are written by people who lived it, and they don’t pretend it’s straightforward. They also let a child hold both places at once, the one they came from and the one they’re in, which is exactly what settling actually requires.
One thing worth saying about the very youngest. Books on this start at about four, because they work by helping a child understand an experience, and a toddler has not got there yet. What helps a one or two year old who has just moved is hearing the language you speak at home, so board books in that language, or bilingual ones, do more at that age than anything on this page would.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Everything is different
For little ones it’s the strangeness of it all, and the frustration of not being understood.
Unhei has just arrived from Korea and, worried nobody can say her name, considers choosing an easier one, until her classmates help her keep it. It’s lovely on the small daily business of not fitting, and on the value of holding onto who you are. A gentle, much-loved book.
or on Bookshop.org
Hassan has come from Somalia and, on his first day at a new school, paints the home he’s left behind, war and all, and slowly begins to find colour in the new place. It’s honest about what some children carry with them. Handled with real care, and good for a class as well as a family.
or on Bookshop.org
Finding your feet
Older children face the harder social work of fitting in, and often the job of translating for their parents.
A mother and small son arrive in a new country with almost nothing, and it is the public library and its books that give them a language and a footing. Based on the author’s own arrival in the United States, and the artwork is stunning. Hopeful, and true.
or on Bookshop.org
Mia runs a motel front desk while her immigrant parents clean the rooms, translating for them and hiding a good deal from her classmates. Drawn from the author’s own childhood, it captures the particular load a child of new arrivals carries. Warm, brave and completely readable.
or on Bookshop.org
Two homes in your head
An older child can take a full novel about belonging to two places at once, and about what gets left behind.
A group of children set out to help Ahmet, a refugee boy who has arrived speaking no English and is picked on for it. It’s told with warmth and humour, and it turns the focus to what other children can do to make an arrival easier. Heartwarming and quietly powerful.
or on Bookshop.org
Told in short poems, this follows a ten-year-old girl fleeing Vietnam and starting again in America, where she is fluent in her head and mute at school. The verse form makes it quick to read and unusually vivid. Based on the author’s own childhood, and widely honoured.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page for holding both places at once: what you miss about the old country, and one new thing you’ve found here that’s good. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Settling takes longer than anyone expects, and a child who seems fine at school may still be homesick at bedtime for a year. Both can be true at once.
So keep the old language and the old traditions alive at home rather than dropping them to fit in, let the sadness be spoken, and tell their teacher what they’re managing. Children usually find the new language faster than their parents, which brings its own quiet pressures worth watching for.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.