This spring we celebrate 10 years of international family partnerships.
​For ten years we've added strengths and weaknesses, talents and handicaps, dreams and concerns, multiplied them by fair cooperation and got new chances and opportunities, wider horizons and a new generation of global citizens.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED in these ten years:
The key to a great family is sincerity.
​The key to a great family-partnership is sincerity.
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Self-branding is toxic in relationships. We want the real thing: Online profiles without photo-shopped pictures, without whitewashed information and misleading statements, no deliberate omissions. Apparent perfection and coolness inevitably lead to disappointment.

For the first five years we asked for truthfulness in self-presentation and straight-forward dialogue. 2014 we evaluated and decided to turn it into our default setting. Not surprisingly, lots of people found it quite challenging to rigorously "cut the crap". Everyone is used to self-branding online, it is the done thing. The vicious circle can only be stopped if everyone within a community is committed. We are.
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Beauty and intellect, health and wealth - they do not make a family great.
Sincerity, respect and affection are the pillars that make a family stand firm in all weathers.
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We've just published the first story "What handicap?"
Our goal is to demonstrate what family partnerships can achieve. They have the power to turn challenges into personal victories and to find solutions where nobody would have looked for them.

93% in Germany, 92% in the UK, 88% in Chile, 78% in Japan, 86% in France, 96% in Sweden ... These are the percentages of children naming President Trump first when asked what they associated with "bla bla and bullshit". This was a first intermediate result looking at a total of 12.000 entries. 
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The picture most often sent in by kids is all over Facebook by now ...​

Millions of families in the UK are seriously worried about leaving the EU.
Parents who voted to remain now fear for their kids' opportunities in international education. However, this turns out to be an advantage for students in the German-speaking world. For them, there is a greater choice of language partners to practice their English than ever before!

160.000 families in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are currently in active language partnerships. English is their first and most important second language. Until June 2016 there was more demand than supply for English native speakers. The referendum has changed that. Today, German is one of the most popular languages for kids in the UK.

What's more, the new situation has kicked off a strong trend of families on both sides using the combination of language holidays and holiday child care. Among other advantages this answers the question "Why on earth would I need to learn this?" for every kid.

Global Natives co-founder Alan Ashton, responsible for the future lab,  says "Currently politics drive people apart. All the more families world wide feel the need to connect."

As Brexit drives Brits to actively connect across borders, statistics show a similar effect for the US: The 2016 election has significantly increased the number of American families in international partnerships. Nationalism may give part of the population a stronger sense of security, others feel it is suffocating their minds.
International family partnerships are a growing challenge to commercial language holiday agencies and to private language tutors because they come with minimal costs and maximum choice.

Around Xmas 2018 the Global Natives network will reach one million member families.

We need competitors. With powerful ideas.
We are a unique family network. So unique, there is no other network like it.

Which is not ideal. A shop is just a shop. It takes quite a few shops to make a mall.
We would love to see some serious competition! Of course, lots of people think that there is about a zillion family networks on the internet anyhow. And there is, but they work in different ways. Our approach is guided by trust, commitment, a love of education and a strong sense of responsibility - both for the kids we raise and for the world they will live in.

Kids are artists and scientists, entrepreneurs and philosophers, pioneers and poets.
But if they can't even try, how will they ever know? Family-partnerships should be every family's default option for new opportunities to learn languages, to discover other cultures, to truly understand other ways of thinking and living. Forget limited family budgets, make friends across borders instead! 

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Early this morning we reached the one million Global Native kids' threshold!
​The birth of triplets in Kopenhagen, Denmark, at 4 am, Oct 25 2017, marked this historic moment. A longtime member family of four became a family of seven and switched our kids' number to a seven digit figure.

The three boys will of course be honorary members for life! We congratulate the proud parents and both sisters as well as the great Global Natives community of Denmark!
​Thank you so much for making us one million.

Learn more about facts and figures at Global Natives!

Please read the article here: 
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/02/how-being-bilingual-rewires-your-brain

The Guardian's article from this morning is more than worth a place of honour here:

"Studying abroad is a fun way to grow up. You travel. You meet new people. You get out of your comfort zone. It shows you’re willing to get out, leave your home town, and go see the world." ... please follow the link below for the full article!

www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/08/the-best-places-to-study-for-a-degree-in-europe

The outcome of Tuesday's election brought our servers to their limits. We have never before experienced such traffic from the United States. Wherever global minded people fear for their future reach beyond national borders they go looking for alternatives. Grassroot alternatives ... and how much more grassroot can you get than family to family?

We cordially welcome our new members!

Learning a familiar language seems a lot more attractive than learning a foreign one, right? 
Well, kids certainly feel this way. For them it means that crucial difference between wanting to know and having to learn, between "you can" and "you must".

So what does it take to become familiar with a language?
Very little, in fact. Here is what thousands of families do:
they start with rethinking their family holiday strategy.

Kids who will begin to learn French at school when they're ten could spend their first holiday in France at four or five. Not as mere tourists of course, but in close contact with a French family. Ideally with a family whose kids intend to learn their language!

Naturally they will only pick up a few words in the beginning, there is no rush and no pressure for results anyway. Familiarity is the goal: familiarity with the sounds and the melody of the language. Familiarity with the way people live, work and socialize, with the games kids play and the songs they sing, with the taste of their food and the fragrances of their gardens.

Synergy Parenting lets our families build longterm relationships, gives them the framework for short stays and for longer visits, for entire summers even, getting into the swing of each other's culture, language and lifestyle. A kid who has been to France a few times, who has enjoyed visits from the French partner family and has often listened to adults and other kids talk is more than ready to learn French in school, is eager to understand and speak himself and has no problems with pronounciation from the start.

The domino effect is tremendous. Familiarity with life in other countries increases the readiness to dive into other subjects too, geography and history lessons become more relevant, politics and global awareness take on a new meaning - even for ten year olds. 

Very popular: hosting teenage students for a language holiday who speak their language with your kids and your language with you. Thousands of our member families are raising kids who speak two, three or even more languages with no or hardly any accent. They're making the most of their kids' most formative years. 
They don't need a lot of money, just an open mind, curiosity and a genuine willingness to cooperate on a give-and-take basis.

Why is it so hard to find female superhero merchandise?
​In this passionate, sparkling talk, media studies scholar (and father of a Star Wars-obsessed daughter) Christopher Bell addresses the alarming lack of female superheroes in the toys and products marketed to kids — and what it means for how we teach them about the world.