This article was written by Dr. Jeff Devens, high school personal academic counselor.

“This is where it all begins,” Jerry said...and I knew we weren’t going to like hearing the rest of the news. Nanette, my wife and better half, and I had completed our first year working overseas and were on vacation in North Dakota, USA, our home. With money saved from our first year of work at the International School of Beijing, we were looking to purchase a lake cabin.

Our friend Jerry, a salt-of-the-earth cross between a lone cowboy and Mr. Fix-it, had different thoughts than we did about the cabin we were looking at. By trade, Jerry was a cement worker, laying home foundations for well over thirty years. He took us to the basement of the home and, pulling back the carpet, revealed several jagged cracks in the concrete from one side of the floor to the other. Scratching his head and sounding apologetic, he said, “This house looks beautiful from upstairs, but it’s down here that matters most.” Pointing to the ceiling above, he went on, “What happens with the foundation will ultimately reveal itself up there.” He was right. The kitchen above had a slope in the floor, one I had overlooked as cosmetic until Jerry confirmed otherwise. It mattered not what the bedroom, kitchen, or bathrooms looked like when the foundation of the home wasn’t secure, stable, or dependable. “It’s from here,” Jerry said, pointing to the foundation, “that the rest of the house is built.”

Jerry’s sage advice saved us from making a costly mistake. His pearls of wisdom spoken some twenty years ago still ring true as I work with families in crisis. Listening to their stories of heartache, I often wonder what went into their foundation. When the proverbial winds howl, rains fall, and the storm of life occurs—and they will—foundations must provide stability and security. Solid foundations preserve and protect. From the moment your child arrived, you’ve laid the foundational stones upon which their life and learning are built. So, what are the stones forming the bedrock of your family? As you parent your kids through the early childhood years, teens years, and young adulthood, I want to be very clear about one point: foundations are crucial to the social-emotional wellness of your children.

I write these words respectfully as a psychologist, counselor, educator, parent, and SAS employee of 20 years. While schools commonly have a set of guiding principles, sometimes termed values or cornerstones, how these principles are implemented varies markedly. In school settings, much of the implementation is left to individual teachers. In most cases, your children will be fortunate to work with excellent educators who are kind, caring, and compassionate. However, when it comes to questions regarding foundations, I assure you, teachers struggle with what this means—even in their own lives. Foundations must be laid in the home. This is difficult but necessary work if parents are to raise healthy, responsible, independent kids.

George Barna, pollster and author of more than forty books regarding American culture, notes that in the past twenty years, the ignoring or deemphasizing of foundations has produced five outcomes in culture:

1. the absence of a shared vision of the future;
2. confusion regarding appropriate values for decision making;
3. the elimination of a sense of the common good;
4. the deterioration of respectful dialogue and the fruitful exchange of competing ideas; and
5. the abandonment of moral character and personal decency.

In many respects, what is happening in the United States is a microcosm of what is taking place internationally. When parents abdicate these responsibilities, it doesn’t mean their child’s foundation won’t be laid. It will. The question is, what will go into it? The answers to building a healthy foundation aren’t as simple as “spend time with your kids,” but that’s the starting point. Foundations are formed in the day-to-day. What are you doing to instill values in the lives of your children on a daily basis? On the other side of the coin, what are your long-term parenting goals for supporting and sustaining your child’s foundation?

For example, in our home, one of our foundation stones is modeling to our kids what realistic love in the form of our marriage looks like, through the not-so-good and good seasons of life. Sadly, the word “love” has been bastardized by the media and culture so much that it’s viewed primarily as emotional, sexual, or both. Yet love entails so much more. Our children won’t understand the differences between genuine love and entertainment-style love unless our marriage models otherwise. If we fail to cultivate or if we violate love, the cost will be a marring or distortion of what it means to love another. The outworking of our marriage provides a framework for our children to help them understand what to look for in a potential mate seventy years from now when they are allowed to marry. (Okay, maybe forty). Contrast this type of love with the media’s version, namely a teenage girl and a 104-year-old vampire, and you begin to understand just what parents are up against. Love is but one of many foundational stones in our family.

Schools will do their best to model foundational beliefs or core values; however, how beliefs and values work themselves out is a function of the home. Some readers may be wondering how these foundational experiences differ for international kids compared to the kids they know in the culture back home? The answer comes in the experiences they’ll have. In many cases, these will be markedly different from peers who don’t experience life abroad. If you choose to raise kids overseas, they will be exposed to worldviews that may differ radically from what you’re accustomed to. This is a unique and fantastic feature of raising kids overseas; it is also a potential pitfall.

Your children need your guidance to understand what they ought to believe or, at minimum, what you desire of them. Don’t leave this task to others. I cannot overstate that point! This includes your children’s teachers. Your kids are depending on you to help them sort out what is right and wrong regarding morals, values, cultural practices, and beliefs—aka, foundations.