Hey there, I don't post on Reddit very often anymore because I'm a lot busier than I used to be, but I decided I'd ask on Reddit rather than try to sift through the absolute dreck that Google turns up these days since this is pretty important.
I (father, in my 20s) have four children (we planned for three, but the last set born this year ended up being twins), with the eldest being three (female) at the moment. Still, my spouse and I got the heads up from the company we work for earlier this year that we should move to Japan (currently residing in Australia, where my [not yet at the time] wife and I got a scholarship, and we stuck around afterwards) before spring 2026.
My wife and I have a pretty good overall grasp of the language (though I can get lost in a particularly busy or very fast-moving conversation, and I'm better at reading than writing Japanese script) so we're not too worried about ourselves despite being the dictionary definition of "the whitest kids you know" as two northeastern Europeans with myself being an Ashkenazim Jew on top of that. We're largely set with dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts, writ, having a place to stay, and getting our paperwork in order, and anything that still needs to be done has smooth sailing ahead of it.
However, it's our kids that I'm most concerned with. We don't wish to, and even if we did, it'd eat far too much of our budget to the point where we'd have to ask family to chip in to send all four kids to international school. While our parents and my elder siblings will help, I'd like to not rely on them for that much money perpetually. Especially since this move is likely to be more or less permanent. So we're planning to send them to public school. They're very young; the oldest will be a few months away from turning five by the time we move and they're making decent progress with the prep we're already doing so I'm not too worried about language learning.
What I want to know mostly is what to expect as a parent and how to best prepare myself for their school life. Before I had children, I was never really the sort to plan very far ahead. The long-term future was something I considered mostly in an abstract, academic "general trends in human history" sense, but three years on and I'm finding myself mentally preparing for things more than a decade down the line; everything from my kids bringing home their first date to how to help with their academics to how to avoid being a nosy helicopter parent.
I know this sounds like very typical young parent stuff, but as the day of moving gets closer and closer, I'm getting more and more worried about how they'll handle things and cope. I guess what I really want is to know what to prepare myself for and what I can do to be the best parent I can be for them. Anything from knowing how much will be expected of me in parent-teacher relations to helping them socialise to how to emotionally prepare for letting my eldest daughter leave the house for kindergarten and first grade.
If I seem rambly and incoherent, it's because I am, in fact, very nervous. I want to do this right, and my self-doubt habits are cropping up again as I try to fight off the urge to catastrophise. Genuinely, this is a significant source of anxiety for me. I know I'm probably putting the cart before the horse by worrying about Junior and Senior High School rites of passage a decade or more away as much as I do about elementary school issues due within this decade, but I can't stop myself from being nervous.
by Mental_Omega