If your drive starts in Chicago and your destination is in Indiana, should you take the freeway branch toward Milwaukee or Cincinnati? How was I supposed to know? This was before GPS, and I was on my first solo road trip as a repatriated TCK. So, I guessed and then focused on not crashing. After an hour of success in that realm, I relaxed enough to notice I was headed North, which I did know was wrong. Too bad parents don’t pass on their home-area mental maps genetically. Instead, I had to take an exit, park, and consult a map every single time the freeway branched. GPS has been nice.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a cultural GPS? You could type in, “I want to look like a polite, friendly, competent 16-year-old American,” and it would tell you how to host a culturally appropriate birthday party. When small challenges accumulate—or when you have a particularly bad experience, like my Milwaukee detour turning a five-hour trip into an eleven-hour ordeal—you can get anxious.

“Common sense is only common to those with similar experiences.” – Unknown

I first heard this quote about six years into my transition to the U.S. after growing up in Papua New Guinea. It was a relief—finally, a way to describe the real reason why I was guessing wrong so often. Another term for this experience is being a hidden immigrant. For example, fresh off the plane at 18, I took driver’s ed. At intersections, I kept looking for cars in places that baffled my instructor. But my expectations would have made good sense in Papua New Guinea, where they drive on the opposite side of the road. 

How traffic flows and where cities are located are just two examples of local knowledge. In a new culture, you may suddenly find that your instincts fail you. You’ve literally lost your common sense. If you look or sound different, people often extend grace for these missteps. Foreigners aren’t expected to “get it” all the time. But when a TCK returns to a country where they look and sound like they belong, they don’t often receive that same patience. Even if no one is unkind, repeated failures to display common sense can feel isolating.

Expat adults, you know this feeling of culture shock well. It’s stressful, and the challenge is constant. But imagine this: You move somewhere new, speak the language fluently, and look like you belong, but you don’t know how to handle basic adult tasks. Will people assume, “Oh, they must be a TCK,” or will they think, “Something is wrong with this person?” At best, you miss out on the help that’s often extended to foreigners. At worst, people question your intelligence or find you odd and avoid you. It’s much easier when your language skills and cultural newness match.

This expectations mistake is not just for strangers. Just like people expect tall or highly verbal children to act older, it’s easy for parents to forget that their culturally adept child is still a beginner in this country. Young people may also fail to give themselves the patience they would offer a foreigner. When “normal” things feel disproportionately difficult, parents might think, Why is this so hard? Are they just an anxious kid? Meanwhile, TCKs might wonder, What’s wrong with me? Why am I so anxious and overwhelmed?

So how can parents help their TCKs adjust? First, let’s not assume anxiety is the issue. Maybe their anxiety management skills are fine. Maybe the real problem is too much hard stuff all at once. Learning to manage anxiety in tough situations is important, but anxiety is a normal response to a challenge. Here’s a key distinction: Are you at a 10/10 anxiety level because of one hard thing, or because ten hard things are happening at once? The latter is a common experience for repatriating TCKs.

Sometimes, we don’t need better anxiety management, we just need the challenge to be easier. I don’t mean avoiding things that are hard. I’m talking about facing the challenges by means of breaking it into smaller steps. For example, learn to order at a drive-through from the passenger seat before attempting it from the driver’s seat.

Before deciding how difficult something “should” be for your TCK, ask these two questions:

1. How new is this situation?

2. What is making it so hard?

At 26, I entered a bank for the first time. My parents and I had always done banking by mail or online, so I had never seen in-person banking in action. The experience was completely new. What made it stressful wasn’t just that I didn’t know where to go or what to do—it was also my embarrassment at how anxious and lost I felt over something that seemed so basic.

Advice for TCKs and ATCKs: When something is hard, admit to someone you trust that it’s new and unfamiliar. Getting help is a relief. Use your friends and parents as cultural GPS. Pro tip: Your parents’ friends are often the best to ask—they’ve been in the home country while your parents were just as out-of-it as you. (This is why we sometimes call them Third Culture Adults.)

Advice for parents: When you expect common sense from your TCK, pause. If they seem anxious about something, ask, How new is this situation? and What are the hard parts? Breaking challenges into smaller pieces and tackling them one at a time makes all the difference. And whenever possible, have a buddy for long road trips.