When Your Child's Best Friend Leaves Dubai: Third Culture Kids and the Grief of Staying
Clinically reviewed by Dr Shishodia
The last week of June has a particular sound in Dubai schools. Signed shirts, half-empty classrooms, a teacher packing her own boxes. Then September arrives, and a child who stayed walks back into a school where the friend who sat beside them for three years simply isn’t there.
For some children, the absence becomes more noticeable several weeks into the term. Parents may wonder whether to speak to a child psychologist in Dubai when a child’s mood or behaviour shifts without an obvious cause. A child who loved school drags their feet at the gate. Sleep gets patchy. An easy-going eight-year-old snaps at a sibling over nothing.
The Child Who Stays Is Grieving Too
Nobody has died and nothing has technically gone wrong. The friend still exists, on a video call on Saturdays, three time zones away, gradually talking about people your child has never met.
The idea of ambiguous loss can help describe this experience: the person is physically absent but remains part of the child’s life, so there may be no clear ending to grieve. A child of seven or ten rarely has words for it, so it comes out sideways. Stomach aches on Sunday nights. A flat refusal to try with anyone new.
What Being a Third Culture Kid Adds
Third culture kids (TCKs), often defined as children who spend a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture, are part of many international-school communities in Dubai. Plenty of them are very good at arriving. Staying is a different skill. David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken’s writing on TCKs discusses recurring losses and unresolved grief as experiences that can affect some internationally mobile children. Not one big loss. A steady build-up of small ones:
a best friend at the end of Year 3, and another at the end of Year 5
a favourite teacher whose contract wasn’t renewed
a nanny who returned home, often the loss parents underestimate most
Stacked across a primary school career, they can teach a child that getting close to people is a bad bet.
Signs a Child Psychologist in Dubai Would Want to Hear About
Sadness after a friend leaves can be a normal response, and children vary in how long they take to adjust. Consider seeking advice if distress persists, intensifies, or begins to affect everyday life:
pulling back from new friendships, often with “there’s no point, they’ll just leave”
physical complaints before school with no medical explanation
regression in younger children, with clinginess or separation worries that had settled coming back
a drop in school engagement that hasn’t lifted by half-term
A statement such as “there’s no point” may reflect self-protection, though it is not possible to infer a child’s motives from one comment alone. It is worth exploring gently if the pattern persists.
What Actually Helps at Home
Naming the loss does more than reassurance. “You really miss Leo, and it makes sense that school feels different without him” lands better than “You’ll make new friends soon,” which can tell a child their grief is a problem to be fixed.
Keep the old friendship going in a realistic form, like a scheduled call or a shared online game. When a goodbye is coming, mark it properly. A child who says goodbye in June usually copes better than one who finds out in August. If your own family has a move ahead, our earlier piece on how to talk to your kids about leaving Dubai covers the other side of this.
When to Bring in Professional Support
If these signs persist for several weeks, worsen, or interfere with school, sleep, relationships or daily functioning, a child therapist can help assess what support may be useful. With younger children, sessions often work through play and art, which suits a child who can’t yet put the loss into words. With older children and teens, sessions tend to focus on how they approach new relationships after so many goodbyes.
A child who has stopped expecting people to stay hasn’t stopped needing them to. If that sounds like your child this term, book an initial consultation with Thrive’s DHA-licensed child psychologists and talk it through.
