When Your Child Says ‘We’re Moving to Europe’ - And You’re Not Ready to Hear It
- Olga Brouwer
- Apr 17
- 7 min read
A life coaching perspective on one of the hardest phone calls a parent can get
What do you actually say to a worried mother you’ve never met, whose adult child has just announced they’re packing up and moving to another continent?
That’s not a hypothetical. That was my Wednesday.
A friend connected me with a woman - let’s call her Mom - whose adult son, his partner, and their 7-year-old were in the middle of planning a move from the United States to the Netherlands. She’d been given my number because I’m originally from the Netherlands, had made my own transatlantic moves, and have spent years working as a life coach. She called me full of worry, full of questions, and honestly, full of a kind of grief she didn’t quite have words for yet.
I want to share what came out of that conversation, because I suspect it might resonate with a lot of parents, and maybe even with a lot of adult children, too.
The Call Nobody Prepares You For
Here’s the thing that struck me right away: Mom hadn’t been told until her son’s family had already been preparing for a full year. Not browsing, not daydreaming - actively working with an immigration attorney, researching neighborhoods, pulling their lives together toward this move. She found out when the plan was already well underway.
I’m not going to tell you what that says about the family dynamic, because I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that it colored everything that came after. She wasn’t just worried about the move. She was also sitting with the feeling of having been left out of something enormous.
Her son’s reason for leaving? Fear. Specifically, fear of being detained or harmed by authorities because of the color of his skin, which she described as “not quite white.” He was born and raised in the US, has never been in trouble, lives an entirely ordinary life. And yet this fear is real and present for him every day.
Mom couldn’t understand it. From her vantage point, he was safe. He was fine. There was nothing to worry about.
And this is where the coaching instincts kicked in.
The Thing About Feelings: You Don’t Have to Agree With Them to Respect Them
Here’s the plot twist that I don’t think Mom was expecting: I wasn’t going to help her talk her son out of this.
The first thing I gently pointed out, and I say gently, because this woman was clearly coming from a place of deep love, is that her son’s fear is real. Not “real” as in objectively provable, not “real” as in she has to share it, but real as in: it’s what he feels, and feelings don’t need to pass a fact-check to be valid.
You can look at the same world through completely different lenses and arrive at completely different emotional conclusions. That’s not dysfunction. That’s being human. When you dismiss a feeling, even with the best intentions, even because you genuinely see no danger, you don’t make the feeling go away. You just make the person holding it feel unseen.
I could hear something shift a little in Mom when I said that. Not agreement, exactly, but a kind of softening. “OK. Maybe I don’t understand why he feels that way, but he does feel it.”
That’s not a small thing. That’s actually the door opening.
Then I pointed out something else she hadn’t quite named yet: underneath all the “what about citizenship?” and “where will the child go to school?”, there was something much simpler and much more human going on. She was going to miss them. Terribly. And that’s allowed. That’s not an argument against the move. It’s just a true thing that deserves to be said out loud, without being wrapped in logistics or dressed up as practical concern.
In my coaching work (I hold an ICF ACC accreditation, and bring an MBA background to the more practical sides of transition), I find this happens constantly: people in the middle of big life decisions spend so much energy debating the facts that they never actually name the feelings. And unnamed feelings don’t disappear. They just quietly run the show.
Let’s Talk About the Actual Questions. Because There Were Many
Once some of the emotional charge had settled, the practical questions came pouring out. Where will they live? What about the language? What about the grandchild’s schooling? What about citizenship? Will they ever come back?
I could answer some of these from personal experience, and I want to share what I told her, because you might be in a similar position. Either as a parent or as someone considering a move yourself.
On language:
Dutch is not the easiest language to learn, but here’s something interesting about the Netherlands: the Dutch speak excellent English and they will happily switch the moment they detect an accent. That’s lovely at first. Over time, it makes it harder to improve your Dutch, because you never quite get the immersion you need. (I speak from experience here.) Learning the basics: road signs, daily navigation, essential phrases, is genuinely useful and worth the effort. Fluency will come slowly, and that’s fine.
On the grandchild:
I moved to the US with young children, and I watched them absorb English from their classmates and teachers in a way I will frankly never match. Children adapt. They pick up language from their peers, they absorb culture through osmosis, they make friends and find their footing with a resilience that adults tend to underestimate. A 7-year-old given time, a good school environment, and stable parents will almost certainly be fine. Probably better than fine.
On citizenship:
This one comes up immediately in almost every conversation about moving abroad, and it’s usually a bit of a red herring at the beginning. You don’t arrive in a new country and apply for citizenship. You build toward permanent residency first, which can take a few years and requires meeting various legal conditions. Citizenship, if it comes at all, comes much later. The family can build a full life in the Netherlands on a residency basis: work, school, healthcare, all of it. Citizenship is a milestone down the road, not a prerequisite.
On “forever”:
This might be the most important reframe of the whole conversation. Mom was treating this as an irreversible, permanent exile. And it might be, but it might not. Circumstances change. People change. What feels like the right life in your 40s may feel different in your 60s. The Netherlands might turn out to be home for the rest of their lives, or they might eventually find their way back, or they might land somewhere else entirely. “Forever” is a very long time to assume.
I didn’t tell her they’d definitely come back. I have no idea. But I did gently suggest that holding the plan a little more lightly, as an adventure rather than an abandonment, might make it easier to stay connected, stay curious, and actually enjoy the visits to Europe that had already been mentioned.
The Bigger Question Underneath All of It
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Mom something I ask in my coaching sessions, because it tends to cut through a lot of noise: Imagine you’re 95 years old, looking back at how your life unfolded. What do you hope you can say?
I wasn’t asking her to answer for herself, though that’s always worth sitting with. I was asking her to apply that question to her son.
Does he hope to say: I had this dream, I was scared, I could have tried, but it felt too risky to shake things up. So I stayed, and I was safe? Or does he hope to say: I wanted something different, I took the leap, it was hard and imperfect and occasionally terrifying, and it was mine?
For me, personally, that answer is obvious. But I can’t give it to someone else, and neither can you. What I can say is that we have been raised, most of us, across generations, to prioritize security above almost everything else. Financial security, geographic stability, the comfort of the familiar. And security matters. It’s not nothing.
But there’s a generational shift happening. Adults, particularly millennials and gen-z’ers who watched the ‘secure path’ disappear under previous generations, are asking a different question alongside it: What is this life actually for? They want security and quality of life, security and purpose, security and a sense of feeling genuinely at home somewhere.
Mom found that a little hard to argue with. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I guess if that’s really what they want, they have to try.”
That’s not nothing, either.
What This Is Really About
I want to be clear: I didn’t solve anything in that phone call. I don’t know this family, and I certainly can’t tell anyone where they should live their life. What I could do - what I tried to do - was create a little space for Mom to feel heard, and then gently offer a few different ways of looking at things.
Because here’s what I kept coming back to: this wasn’t really a conversation about the Netherlands. It was a conversation about love, and fear, and the hardest part of parenting adult children is that at some point, their life genuinely isn’t yours to manage.
Whether you’re the parent watching your child pack for another country, or the adult child trying to figure out how to have that conversation, or somewhere in between. I’d invite you to try one thing: before you reach for the logistics, ask about the feelings. Say the thing you’re actually feeling. Allow the other person to say theirs.
It doesn’t fix the distance. But it changes what the distance means.
Are you navigating a big life transition - a move, a career change, a relationship shift - and finding the emotional side as complicated to manage than the practical side? That’s exactly the territory I work in. Feel free to reach out, or share this article with someone who might need it.
This article is also available on my Substack channel: https://olgabrouwer.substack.com/p/when-your-child-says-were-moving
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