As someone who has studied and worked in several foreign countries, I know firsthand how challenging it can be to immerse yourself in another culture.

I will never forget the first evening I spent with my host family when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan. I didn’t know what to expect or how to act, and I couldn’t communicate more than my most basic needs in the local language.

My host family and I sat at the dinner table, making gestures and laughing awkwardly. It was terrifying and uncomfortable.

Fortunately, persevering through the challenges of intercultural exchange can bring enormous rewards. By the time I left Uzbekistan, my host family and I had become very close, I had learned a new language, and I had a whole new perspective on the world.

When my husband (who was also a Peace Corps Volunteer) and I had children, we made a commitment to expose our kids to intercultural experiences so they could learn to be more open-minded, compassionate, and empathetic.

We feel strongly that it’s important to teach our kids to respect other cultures and be comfortable with people different from themselves.

Although we love to travel abroad, it’s not always possible. Job schedules, commitments to extended family members, and limited time and money can make it difficult or even impossible.

The good news is that you don’t need a lot of time or money – and you don’t need to travel or live abroad – in order to teach your kids to be more open-minded, accepting, and compassionate. Your family can experience the joys and lessons of intercultural exchange without leaving your hometown!

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Piercing screams came from the playroom. Happy screams or hurting screams? My mom ears pricked up.

Those were not happy screams.

Abandoning my work I marched up the stairs. My daughters backed away from each other upon seeing me. I could see that neither of them was hurt, but they were still shooting daggers at each other with their eyes.

Dutifully, I launched into a lecture on the reasons why they should treat each other with respect.

There are many valid reasons, so this was not a short talk.

By the time I wrapped it up, I had bored myself to the point where I was tempted to roll my eyes and say blah, blah, blah.

My girls bolted as soon as they sensed they were allowed. I had a sense I’d missed the mark, but, oh well, at least they’d stopped fighting.

Later on, at dinner, one of my kids made a rude remark about another child. My husband and I reacted in sync, and proceeded to tag team a lecture on empathy and kindness.

While we made several excellent points, dinnertime turned into a sort of ultra lecture where the kids ate in bored silence, probably plotting their escapes from the table.

For parents like myself, ultra lectures are fun in the moment, but as with other over-indulgences, like eating a whole tub of Hagen Daz, I tend to feel worse about myself almost as soon as I finish.

I knew that in each of the scenarios above, my children had not gleaned the wisdom I had hoped to convey; those teaching opportunities had been wasted.

Instead of learning valuable life lessons, they felt like victims and learned to ignore my words.

I felt that I had hit the rock-bottom of lecturing.

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Here I am. Folding laundry. The ball and chain of chores.

I thought it was bad when they were babies and they had multiple outfit changes. I buoyed my spirits by telling myself that when they were older and didn’t spit up so much and were neater eaters things would be better.

Well, let me tell you, people. It’s not better.

They are 12 and 9 now and it still never ends. I do some laundry and then there is always more that appears! Some random white t-shirt when I’d just done all the whites shows up in the basket, mocking me.

And most of it is theirs! Their pants! Their shirts! Their socks and underwear! Without me they’d never leave the house in clean clothes.

OMG. Without me they’d never leave the house in clean clothes!!

What about when they go to college? Who’s going to do their laundry?

What about when they get married? Am I setting some poor person up for a lifetime of no help with laundry duty?

Holy cow, I am!

I had to wonder what other responsibilities I hadn’t taught them about yet, either because they were “too young” or because it was faster to do it myself.

Then I wondered when I was actually going to find the time to teach them things like laundry, cooking, and washing the dishes. And what about bigger responsibilities like managing money? When was I going to get around to that?

This little epiphany hit me in the middle of folding towels. I looked down at them and realized I needed to start immediately. And I could start with towels.

That was my first step on the path to really, thoughtfully teaching my kids the life skills that lead to learning responsibility. The next step was to decide what to teach them next.

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“Mom, I have better things to do now.”

When the conversation is about reading, few words cut a librarian to the quick more efficiently. My 13-year-old son and I had first been talking about screen time limits. He had been expressing his thoughts calmly while I mentally congratulated myself on how I was handling this touchy conversation.

It went downhill when I shared my hopes for better use of his time than first-person shooter games and YouTube.  Then came his comment about reading.

“I have better things to do.”

I stood like Wile E. Coyote who has been hit by an anvil but doesn’t realize it yet – mouth agape, eyes wide and uncomprehending. I must have looked stunned, because he repeated that sentence for me. Slowly.

As I looked into my son’s face, this kid who’s been steeped in the magic of books his entire life, my heart sank. I pictured the decline of his reading as the slamming of all those doors that my husband and I tried so hard to open for him.

Then I woke up and remembered he’s just turned thirteen – the game’s not over yet.

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Do you remember summers when you were a kid? How you’d leave the house in the morning and explore the entire neighborhood on your bike with your friend and come home when the streetlights came on?

I know I do.

During the summer my brother and I would burst out of the house at 9am with a bag of sandwiches for lunch and a “see ya later” to our parents. They never worried about us, knowing that we would come back – alive and well – when we had run out of food.

I love those memories! I think of those as some of the best times of my life.

Parenting is so much different now than when we were kids. In just 30 years smart phones and tablets have taken over. They suck my kids into a void where they remain, unreachable, until my voice reaches a pitch usually heard only by dogs.

And when they aren’t with a screen we are zooming off in the car to attend a carefully curated schedule of athletic practices, music lessons, and language classes.

These days I feel like I’m going to be accused of neglect at any moment because I let my children play unsupervised in the front yard while refusing to give them a smart phone complete with GPS tracking capabilities.

My children think differently. They think they need this stuff or their lives are going to fall apart.

They need to know French.

They have to be in 8 different sports or they won’t have any kind of shot at getting a scholarship.

They must have a smart phone and be on Snap Chat or their social lives will disintegrate into nothingness.

They are entitled to all of it! It is their due in life. It is what they must have. And I’m supposed to give it to them.

The worst part is that I feel helpless to stop it. All that technology and sport and entitlement is like a tsunami coming right for me to sweep me away.

But am I really as helpless as I feel?

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