The Foreign Service Journal, May 2011

26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A Y 2 0 1 1 No matter how much help they get, however, the challenges For- eign Service parents face are very real. They struggle to give their children a sense of home and a feel- ing of being grounded when they really have neither. It’s hard, of course, for children to leave friends behind every few years when the family moves on to a new post. Even worse, when a parent is assigned to an unaccompanied post, children can feel a sense of abandonment. The dif- ficulties are all the worse for single parents who have no spouse to fall back on. State has tried to ease the burden by increasing the separate maintenance allowance to ease the financial pressures on families living apart. It also allows families overseas to remain at post while the Foreign Service em- ployee does a temporary, unaccompanied assignment. And the Family Liaison Office has tried to help, too, by creating a listserv to bring families together, hosting events for families, giving children awards and providing their parents with literature on how to handle the sepa- ration. Still, it’s an issue that weighs heavily on Foreign Serv- ice employees, especially since the number of unac- companied assignments — which has nearly quintupled in the last decade — shows no signs of abating. Many say the issue could come to a head if employees are asked to accept repeated unaccompanied tours. In May 2010, AFSA found that 21 percent of Foreign Service employ- ees had done an unaccompanied tour in the previous six years. Nearly eight in 10 had served at a hardship post. In an AFSA member survey released two years ago, only 15 percent of employees said the State Department did enough to help separated families; 71 percent said State should allow employees to extend tours to allow a child to finish high school; and 64 percent said that fam- ily concerns might cause them to leave the Foreign Serv- ice early. “It can happen that children feel unrooted,” says Hirsch. “It can happen they feel different than fellow Americans. It can happen that they are being torn away from their friends and being denied the right to make long-lasting friendships.” And unhappy children make for unhappy parents. But most parents who responded to AFSA’s survey said they wouldn’t have traded their children’s experience for a regular life in the United States. While Foreign Service kids may lack a strong peer group, the lifestyle often contributes to a closer family life, they said. “Our children see and feel that we are doing this together as a family. That’s the other advantage of living overseas: we depend on each other a lot more,” says Barnes. “The children be- come very adaptable and are open-minded about the fact that there are many wonderful-but-different people in the world, whom they can have as their friends.” She adds: “The Internet makes keeping in touch with friends and family members around the world so much easier than when we first started in the Foreign Service in 1993. Our children see the world as a much smaller, less scary place than, I would imagine, some- one who has never left America or the one or two neighborhoods where they have lived their entire life until college age.” A Model Workplace? Five times in the last 10 years, the Partnership for Public Service has ranked government agencies on em- ployee satisfaction. In the most recent edition of the study — which is based on employee responses to ques- tions about agency leadership, work/life balance, and pay and benefits — State finished seventh. It was a small comedown from two years before, when State finished fifth. But State’s overall score has improved with each of the five studies. In the first one, in 2003, State finished 19th, so, overall, the department has done well. State was particularly successful, survey respondents said, in matching the skills of its workers to the depart- ment’s mission, in grooming leaders and in supporting di- versity. In all of those areas, the department finished among the top five of 28 government agencies surveyed. But the two areas in which the department fared worst were work-life balance (17th) and family-friendliness (25th). For most Foreign Service employees, having a job they love trumps the difficulties it brings. But the ques- tion remains: Are those low scores a necessary function of a diplomat’s life in a competitive culture? Or could State, and the other foreign affairs agencies, do more to address these issues? F O C U S The challenges Foreign Service parents face are very real.