We did not move to Canada for the weather. We moved for language.
When our son was small, we could see he was struggling to communicate, and we were asking him to do it in two languages at once. At home we spoke English. Everywhere else in Taiwan, at school, at restaurants, with his grandparents, the world spoke Mandarin. For a child who already found communication hard, being pulled between two languages made a difficult thing harder. We came to Canada, in large part, to give him one language to hold onto.
What we did not fully reckon with was that the same move would mean flying back across the world to see the people we left. And doing that with an autistic child, on a sixteen-hour flight, to a country where the systems you have learned no longer apply, is its own particular kind of trip. This is what those journeys have taught us.
Why the Trip Home Is Worth the Difficulty
Let me start with the reason any of this is worth it, because in the hard moments you will need to remember it.
Our son is his grandparents’ first grandchild. From the day he was born, he was the center of their universe, doted on, adored, showered with a kind of attention only first grandchildren get. When he was diagnosed, I braced for that to change. Some quiet, fearful part of me thought they might love him less, or love him differently, once there was a word attached to how he was.
Nothing changed. Not one thing. Yes, their grandson was different from what they might have pictured. It did not matter to them in the slightest. He was their first grandson, the one they had loved fiercely from his first breath, and no diagnosis was going to move that. Watching that unconditional love survive the very thing I feared it might not is one of the reasons we keep making the long trip back.
That is the emotional center of these journeys, and it is worth holding onto when you are standing in a foreign airport at hour fourteen wondering why you do this to yourself. You do it for the people on the other end who love your child exactly as he is.
The Long Flight Is a Different Animal
A long-haul international flight is not just a longer version of a short one. Sixteen hours in a metal tube, across a dozen time zones, with meals and darkness and cabin lights on a schedule that has nothing to do with your child’s body, asks something a two-hour hop never does.
Most of what makes a shorter flight survivable still applies, and we cover it in depth in our guide on flying with an autistic child: the window seat, the headphones on before the engines roar, the sensory kit in a reachable bag, the spare change of clothes, the dedicated special-assistance queues that exist precisely for a child like yours. If you read one companion piece to this one, read that.
What the long flight adds is endurance. You are not managing a hard ten minutes at takeoff and then coasting. You are managing hour after hour, through mealtimes and a night that arrives at the wrong time. Pace yourself accordingly. Do not spend all your best tricks in the first three hours. Bring more than you think you need, and ration the novelty, a new small item unwrapped at hour eight lands very differently than everything handed over at once at the start.
The Language Switch at the Other End
Here is something a guide written by someone who never left home would miss entirely. When you land, the language changes.
For us, that means arriving in a country where the announcements, the signs, the airport staff, and the customs officers all speak Mandarin, while our son has spent years now in an English-speaking world. The switch that we made our whole move to spare him is suddenly back, all around him, at the most tired and disoriented moment of the trip.
If your child is sensitive to language, or draws comfort from the predictability of the one he knows, plan for the arrival to be harder than the departure. A few things help. Keep your own communication with him steady in whatever language he is most at home in, so at least the voice he trusts most stays constant even when everything around him shifts. Handle the foreign-language logistics yourself and keep him out of that loop as much as you can, so he is not being asked to process a second language while exhausted. And give him longer than you think to settle after you arrive, because he is not just recovering from a flight, he is landing in a different linguistic world.
You Are Arriving in a System You Do Not Know
By the time you have been in Canada a few years, you learn the machinery. You know what the Ontario Autism Program offers, who to call, how the pieces fit. That hard-won knowledge does not travel with you.
I will be honest that I never fully explored what the Taiwanese government offers children with special needs, because our trips were about family, not services. But it is worth knowing, in a plain and practical way, that whatever supports you rely on at home do not come with you on the plane. If your child has medical needs, carry what you need and do not assume you can access the familiar things abroad. If something goes wrong, you are navigating an unfamiliar system in an unfamiliar language, which is exactly the situation you may have moved away from in the first place.
For most families most of the time, this is not a crisis, just a reason to over-prepare. Bring the medications, the documents, the comfort items, and the routines that work, because you are bringing your own support system in your carry-on.
What Ontario Could Not Give Us
I will say this part gently, because it is tender, and then I will move on.
Ontario gave us a lot. Real programs, real supports, a language that made his world simpler. What it could not give us was family. Here, we are on our own. There are no weekend visits to grandparents. No last-minute, free, loving babysitter if we ever want an evening out. No grandmother’s home cooking that he lights up for. We gained a system and we missed, every day, the people a system cannot replace.
That is part of why the trip home matters so much, and part of why it is worth every hard hour in the air. For a little while, he gets the thing we cannot give him here: a whole family who loves him, in the place they are.
Coming Home Is the Hard Part
One practical, physical truth about these trips: for us, the jet lag is almost entirely one-directional. Flying there, we barely feel it. Coming back to Canada, it takes three to five days to recover, and that is true for all of us, our son included.
Plan for the return, not just the departure. Do not schedule anything important in the first few days back. Expect sleep to be scrambled, moods to be short, and routines to wobble while everyone’s body clock drags itself back into the right time zone. For a child whose stability depends on routine, those few days can be genuinely rough, so build a soft landing: nothing on the calendar, familiar food, early nights attempted even when bodies resist, and patience with the fact that recovery takes as long as it takes.
It helps to think of the trip as three phases, not one: getting there, being there, and getting home. The last phase is the one first-timers forget, and it is often the hardest.
A Few Things That Made the Whole Trip Easier
Beyond everything above, these are the habits we have settled into over years of these journeys.
- Prepare him for the people, not just the places. Photos and videos of the grandparents and the home you will stay in, watched before you go, make the arrival a reunion rather than a surprise.
- Bring a piece of home with you. A familiar blanket, a favorite object, the device loaded with what he loves. Familiar things are anchors when everything else is foreign.
- Keep one or two routines identical no matter where in the world you are. The same bedtime sequence, the same morning first step. A fixed point in an unfamiliar place is worth a great deal.
- Tell the family what helps before you arrive. Grandparents who adore your child still may not know what overwhelms him. A gentle heads-up turns their love into the right kind of help.
- Protect the return week. Come home with a clear calendar and low expectations, and let the jet lag pass without piling anything on top of it.
Where to Go Next
The trip home leans on every travel skill there is, and a few that are specific to doing this as a family far from where you started.