The consideration to date that short-term international assignments are less costly and less complicated than traditional organization-assigned expatriation assignments is questioned. Despite discussions to the contrary in the literature, our research stresses the need for organizational support for the remaining family over the course of the assignment in order to alleviate or mitigate concerns regarding the international assignee, the context of the deployment and the separation. The need for organizational support for remaining families corroborates findings for multinational corporations expatriates in international human resource management literature.