I Need to Sit Down for a Second.

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Parenting Unpacked just received an endorsement from Ruth E. Van Reken. The Ruth Van Reken. I am going to need a moment.

Let me tell you what just happened. Because I have been walking around with this information for a few minutes and I still cannot say it casually. There is no casual version of this.

Ruth E. Van Reken read Parenting Unpacked. And then she wrote me an endorsement.

Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds Book Cover

📚 WHO RUTH E. VAN REKEN IS

Co-author, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, 1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th editions · Co-founder, Families in Global Transition

Ruth Van Reken co-authored Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, the book that is widely considered the definitive text in the field of cross-cultural child development. It is known in those circles simply as the TCK Bible. It has been through four editions. She has been working with globally mobile families, educators, and researchers for over thirty-five years. She co-founded Families in Global Transition in 1998.

This is not a person on the periphery of the field. This is someone who built the frameworkthrough which most of us understand what it means to grow up between cultures. And she read my book. And she wrote about it.

"While much has been written about the impact of global mobility on children, Jessica invites us into a deeper look at what this experience is like for the adults who raise them. Many who have lived this life will find themselves swept into her story, recognizing it as their own. I know I did! We are not alone. We simply didn’t have words for it before." - Ruth Van Reken

That is the sentence that gets me every time I read it. Because that is the whole reason I wrote the book. Not to have a book. Not to say something clever. But because I kept meeting parents who were living something they had no language for, and I thought: someone needs to write this down. Someone needs to name it.

And now the person who spent thirty-five years naming what children experience in cross-cultural life just said that I did that for the parents. I genuinely do not have words for how that feels. Which is ironic, given the book.

THE PART I KEEP COMING BACK TO

"I know I did!" She wrote.

Ruth Van Reken, who has spent decades understanding the cross-cultural experience at its deepest level, read Parenting Unpacked and said: I found myself in this story too. If I ever doubted whether this book was for the right people — I don't anymore.

Ruth: thank you!!! For reading it with such care. For writing about it the way you did. And for thirty-five years of work that gave so many of us the vocabulary to understand our own lives.

Parenting Unpacked is available on Amazon soon. And now it has Ruth Van Reken's name on it. I am going to go be quietly overwhelmed for the rest of the day.

Over the moon and still processing,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ PARENTING UNPACKED · ENDORSED BY RUTH E. VAN REKEN · AVAILABLE JUNE 24TH ON AMAZON ✦

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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