The Honest Truth About Raising A Child Between Cultures
There was a moment, not long after I moved my daughter from her international school to a local Nepali school, when she came home and sat down at the table with a particular kind of quiet. Not the quiet of tiredness. The quiet of someone trying to make sense of something they have no framework for yet.
She told me about something that had happened that day. A rule she did not understand. A way things worked in the classroom that made no sense to her. She wanted me to explain it.
I tried. I told her something about how things are done differently here, about how the culture in Nepal has its own logic, just as Belgium does, just as Europe does. She listened carefully. And then she asked me why. Not why does Nepal do it this way. Why is it right.
I paused. Because the honest answer was that I did not entirely know how to answer that from the inside. I could explain the difference. I could name it, contextualise it, present it as one valid way among many. But what I could not do, quite, was give her the felt sense of why it made sense. The kind of understanding that lives in the body rather than the mind.
And I realised, sitting there, that this was not a gap in my knowledge. It was a gap in my experience. I had been raising my daughter largely within my own cultural framework, the Belgian one, the European one, the one I carried in my body without thinking about it. Her father is Nepali but has been less present in her daily upbringing. The rhythms of our home, the way I responded to things, the values I had transmitted without intending to transmit them, were mine.
She is half Nepali. But she had been raised, in the most intimate daily sense, by a Belgian.
What Living Between Cultures Asks of a Parent
I made the decision to move her to a local school deliberately. The international school was good, in many of the ways that international schools are good. The teaching was strong. The environment was structured and familiar. But it was expensive, and more than that, it was a kind of enclosure. A world within a world, where the children of expatriates and diplomats and international workers lived alongside each other in a setting that looked more like Europe than Nepal.
My daughter was learning about the world in a global sense, but she was not learning about the place where she lives. And the place where she lives is half of who she is. Her father's culture. The language she hears on the street. The festivals she watches from the window. The food, the gestures, the rhythms of daily life that are as much her inheritance as anything I brought from Belgium.
I wanted her to have access to that inheritance. Not just as an observer. As someone who belongs there.
The local school was hard at first. It is still hard sometimes. She comes home with questions I struggle to answer from the inside. She does not always understand why things are the way they are. She finds some of the norms confusing, some of the social expectations unfamiliar. And every day I try to explain, to bridge, to hold both frameworks at once so that she does not have to choose between them.
What I did not fully anticipate was how much that daily explaining would reveal about the limits of my own understanding.
The Framework You Cannot Help But Pass On
When you raise a child between cultures, you inevitably pass on a framework. This is not a choice. It is not something you can opt out of or engineer around. You pass on the framework you carry, because it is the one you live in, the one that shapes how you respond to things before you have time to think about whether you should respond differently.
You pass on your sense of what is fair. Your instinct about what requires an apology and what does not. Your feeling for how much directness is appropriate in a given situation, and what kind of warmth signals genuine connection as opposed to social pleasantry. You pass on your relationship to authority, to punctuality, to physical space, to the expression of emotion in public.
You pass these things on not through instruction but through daily life. Through how you behave at the playground, at the school gate, in a shop when something goes wrong. Through the face you make when your child describes something that happened and you have a reaction before you have words for it.
For my daughter, that framework has been largely mine. Belgian. European. Built from fifteen years of living abroad, yes, shaped by Nepal in real and significant ways, but rooted in something that came before Nepal. Something that is in my body in a way that Nepal is not, not yet, perhaps not ever entirely.
This is uncomfortable to sit with. Not because I think I have done something wrong. But because I wanted more for her. I wanted her to have both cultures available to her in that deep, embodied, automatic way. And I am realising, slowly, that this is not simply a matter of intention or effort. It is a matter of what is present in the daily air of a child's upbringing, and whose presence shapes that air most directly.
What the Daily Explaining Actually Does
And yet. The daily explaining is not nothing.
Every time she comes home with a question about why things are the way they are here, and I try to answer it honestly, something is happening that is not the same as simply growing up inside a culture but is not worthless either. She is building a conscious understanding of both systems. She is learning to hold two frameworks simultaneously, to notice that there are frameworks at all, to ask why rather than simply assuming that the way things are is the way things must be.
This is something that most children who grow up inside a single culture never develop. Not because they are less capable, but because they never have reason to. When the framework you live in is the only one you encounter, it becomes invisible. It is simply the world. You do not question it because there is nothing to prompt the question.
My daughter has something to prompt the question every day. She is growing up in a kind of permanent comparative awareness. Two sets of norms, two sets of expectations, two ways of reading situations and relationships and gestures. This is sometimes exhausting for her, and I recognise that. But it is also giving her something.
She will not grow up assuming that her way of seeing the world is the only way. She will not mistake her framework for the truth. She will know, from the inside and from a very young age, that the world is larger and more various than any single culture can contain.
I did not give her that consciously. It arrived through the circumstances of her life. But it is real, and it is hers, and I have come to think of it as one of the most important things she is growing up with.
What This Reveals About Living Between Cultures as a Parent
I think about other women who are raising children between cultures, often more or less alone in the sense that matters, the daily sense, the breakfast-and-homework-and-playground sense. Women whose partners are from a different culture and less present in the daily rhythm of parenting. Women who are doing most of the cultural transmission themselves, from their own body, their own history, their own instilled sense of how things should go.
The gap between what you want to give your child and what you can actually give them is one of the more quietly difficult experiences of parenting between cultures. You can read about the other culture. You can explain it. You can put your child in environments where she encounters it directly. But you cannot give her the felt sense of belonging to something you do not fully belong to yourself.
What you can give her is your honesty about that. Your willingness to say: I do not know how this feels from the inside, but here is what I understand about it. Your readiness to sit with her questions rather than closing them down with quick answers. Your modelling of a person who holds complexity without needing to resolve it.
That is not nothing. It is, in fact, a great deal. It is the kind of parenting that living between cultures asks for, and that most parenting books, written for people who live within a single culture, do not quite address.
If you are navigating this yourself, the article on the language of emotions and the playground has a related reflection from a specific moment that might resonate. And the free guide explores some of the broader dynamics of living between cultures that sit underneath the parenting experience.
A Closing Thought
My daughter still comes home with questions I cannot fully answer from the inside. She probably always will. There are things about Nepal that she will understand more deeply than I ever will, not because she has studied it or been told about it, but because she will have lived it in a way that I, arriving as an adult with a formed self, could not.
That is not a failure of my parenting. It is the shape of her life. A life that holds more than mine does, in some directions. That will understand things I cannot understand, and feel at home in places I will always be, at some level, a visitor.
I am raising her for a world I cannot fully see. I think that is probably true of all parents, in the end. But living between cultures makes it more visible. More honest. More unavoidable.
And I have come to think that visible, honest, and unavoidable is not the worst place to parent from.
| Reflection questions
If you are raising a child between cultures, whose framework do you find yourself transmitting most naturally in daily life? What does it feel like to notice that? Have you ever tried to explain something about your adopted culture to your child and found that you could not quite explain it from the inside? What did that reveal? What do you think your child is gaining from growing up between cultures that you did not have access to at the same age? What do you think they are carrying that is heavier than it should need to be? How do you hold the gap between what you want to give your child and what you can actually give them? What helps you sit with that honestly? |
