About the books
Max Hartman writes field guides for two of the hardest things a person can take on: moving your whole life to a country where you can’t read the road signs, and raising kids in a house full of phones, social media and AI. The first he did himself, badly at first, alongside his wife. The second he comes at from the engineering side. He knows how the thing in your pocket is built to pull at you, and what that does to the kids growing up with it.
Both books work the same way: a few routines plain enough to run on a bad day, and an author who’s blunt that a bad day is coming. The relocation book walks the move in the order it happens. The parenting one moves stage by stage, because what works for a four-year-old won’t survive a fourteen-year-old.
He brings in research where it earns its place: Kalervo Oberg’s four stages of culture shock, the studies on kids and attention. Nowhere else. Mostly the books just tell you the truth. This is hard, you’ll do parts of it badly, and the people who got through it did too.
About the author
Max Hartman is an IT specialist who, a few years ago, moved with his wife to a country where neither of them spoke the language. They worked it out the slow way, on the ground. His wife now teaches English to adults: transferred professionals, trailing partners, people seeking asylum. He understands how the phone in your pocket is built, and he writes from what he’s lived through rather than from theory. The systems in The Relocation Companion were tested on his own confusion first.
The two books
The Relocation Companion
Everything Nobody Tells You About Moving to Another Country
A phase-by-phase guide to moving abroad that handles the visa forms and the kitchen-floor breakdown in the same chapter.
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The Digital Parenting Guide — From First Phone to AI Safety, Age by Age
A guide to raising kids through phones, social media and AI. The wager of the book: your relationship with your kid does more to protect them than any screen-time limit.
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