I was wondering what are people’s experiences of having and raising children in a different country from your own, specially if your partner is a local. Did you find it challenging not having your family to support you? Did you manage to have them be bilingual? Do you find it’s hard for them to identify with your country, and if so, what are good ways to help with this?
I’m American and live with my Japanese husband and daughter in Japan. It’s very challenging.
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I find it difficult not having my family nearby, and visiting is such a lengthy and expensive process. We are always busy and don’t ever get a break…except once every couple months we spring for a babysitter 😂
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My husbands family lives nearby but because they provide no help/support and create additional time commitments/stress, I sometimes feel resentment that we need to invest so much time in keeping his family happy but not mine.
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Japanese culture still has pretty ingrained gender roles, and mothers are expected to be pretty self sacrificial. That’s just not who I am or how I was raised so I feel like I’m going against the grain every single day. (For example trying to work with small kids here can be challenging due to work culture not being conducive to kids, or the ingrained expectation that there will be a wife at home doing the heavy childcare lifting).
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My daughter is picking up both English and Japanese. Her Japanese is of course stronger, but that’s fine and to be expected. As long as she can communicate in English I don’t mind.
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It does make me sad sometimes that she feels more distant to me than she would if I were raising her in America. My husband can understand and bond with her about things that I will never understand because I grew up differently. I sometimes feel a bit jealous about that!
So yes it absolutely has been difficult! But I know having children always is, so…I cannot say I have experience raising kids in my own country either, so maybe it isn’t much easier really…? 😂
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I’ve had two kids in Australia. Both my wife and I are American.
I don’t care if they identify as American. I don’t particularly identify with it either, aside from an anxiety about its political future.
Not having family around has been brutal. They still visit, but it’s been a rough few years. We never get a break unless we pay through the nose for a babysitter and our house is always a tip because we can’t keep up with chores.
That last paragraph could have been written by me. Solidarity
I can’t answer this but it’s fairly likley I won’t have them due to cost of living and housing.
So I’m American and my wife is Austrian, w Eli e in Austria and have two younger kids aged 7 and 3 years old. To answer your questions:
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challenging, not really. My wife’s family lives close by and they are awesome and super helpful, but It would still be nice to have another group we could ask to help watch the kids as both my wife and I work full time. It‘s more a bit sad that we don‘t get to see each other that often.
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bilingual comes naturally with kids as they are absolute sponges when it comes to learning language. We just do it that my wife only speaks German to the kids and I speak English. It took a bit longer for my kids to start taking in English, but they understood it from very early on.
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it can be tough, they are definitely more Austrian than American and there isn‘t much I can do to change that. We visit the US every year and we celebrate American holidays to try to get them familiar with the culture, but it‘s still foreign for them.
On the last point, It must mean they like Austria. I hated growing up in bumfuck nowhere Italy and absorbed way more of the American culture than the Italian one in certain aspects of my life, I knew it would have allowed me to gtf out of there.
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I’m American, my wife is Japanese and we live in Switzerland. Neither of us are locals but our son definitely is. He’s been speaking/learning English, Japanese, Hochdeutsch and the local Swiss German dialect since birth.
It was a little tough having both our families 12-14 hrs away but we survived.
We make long visits to both California and Japan every year so he has a good idea about these places but he is Swiss and I don’t think he needs to identify with our countries; he needs to feel at home in his.
We are binational family living in CH as well and, besides the fact that identifying with a country is ultimately up to the child, I absolutely think it is emotionally and socially beneficial for immigrant children to identify with the parent’s home countries.
I guess it depends on what we mean by “identify”. I meant like “strongly associate with” in the sense that the grow up in CH but ultimately feel that they are Japanese or American or that they are not Swiss. This reminds me of all the posts about TCKs (third culture kids) in r/TCK for example; I don’t think this is terribly healthy, it’s rather a feeling of not really belonging anywhere. I want him to feel fully integrated into the place he was born and raised.
On the other hand I totally agree with the idea of ensuring that he has access to our countries and speaks our languages. Like I said we spend 4-5 weeks every year in Japan and California so he knows those places and has relationships with his family there. We’ve made sure he can speak read and write English and Japanese natively in addition to German / Swiss German. We’ve made sure he has passports for all three places too so he can choose to go wherever he wants when he grows up.
Of course by doing this I think we maybe also leave him with a bunch more to cogitate on as he grows up, but I hope he sees it as a net positive as an adult.
I’ve seen some posts here from both kids and parents about: a) the child being born and raised in country X but never learning the local language due to parental choices, and b) parents choosing to not teach their kids their own mother tongue or deliberately not pass on citizenship - those are the kinds of things I find really disappointing and shocking.
As someone with an American mother and Japanese father who never learned Japanese, good on you. I’ve learned French but learning Japanese sounds like the biggest pain in the ass. I wish I had learned the language young. Granted, I’ve got three siblings and my parents are divorced.
FYI- people that grow up here in CH rarely leave. I’m also an expat raising my kid in ch.
I mean the same is true of the US and Japan! I don’t know what he’ll do or what he’ll want to do - we just believe that the best thing we can do is give him these skills and options.
Even if he never leaves being fluent in a couple extra languages and having some familiarity with their cultures wont hurt.
You’re right. But there’s something about Switzerland that creates particularly … close-minded people, dare I say it? Alas, they will probably be multilingual and relatively well off and well educated so that’s good.
I agree with your final paragraph, of course, and after hearing about how you’re raising them (linguistically capable in both languages and visiting both countries every year), I think we actually have a lot in common. I was just saying it is a shame when children lose their roots because of assimilation.
I think this is an amazing way to raise a child.
I’m also American (and turkish) living in Switzerland but my ex-husband is Swiss. My experiences have been similar. My son is definitely Swiss. But he’s multi-lingual and visits the US and turkey relatively often. It’s not easy for me at all as a single parent here but he’s very happy and that’s the most important thing once you have kids I think.
Hey, apologies, if I am intruding. May I please know, what is you and your wife’s profession?
French/American living in Korea with Korean spouse. It sucks being away from my family yes, but my mother in law is close by and helps a lot. Son hasn’t started talking yet but I only speak English to him and wife only speaks Korean. I plan on adding French into the mix a little later. I make sure he has plenty of books with characters from American and French TV shows and history so he knows there is a world beyond Korea.
Best of luck to you
Husband and I are both American, and we’ve lived in Australia for almost six years. We moved just after our daughter turned one.
The separation from family hasn’t been that bad, but I think it’s because 1) my family is spaced out all over the US, and 2) his family is concentrated in the Philly area and we lived in the PNW. So, we didn’t see family all that often anyway.
Technology makes it’s so much easier to keep in touch (we FaceTime/Skype with people much more regularly now than we ever did in the US). I miss my friends, of course, but it forced us to be more social in our new community (not a bad thing), because emergencies have come up when I need someone to pick-up my kid from school, etc.
We obviously don’t have to deal with a language barrier, and there is a lot of cultural overlap between the US and Australia; our transition has been very easy.
My husband is local. His family lived some distance away so I did not have family close by.
I was stay a home mom with 3 kids and I did not find it particularly difficult raising them in my husband’s country
When I migrated my goal was to assimilate as close as possible. 20 years later I feel at home here. My kids identify themselves similarly to what local kids identify themselves as.
Do you find it hard for them to identify with your country, and how to help them
… this reminds me often mentioned on Reddit issue, lol:
Apparently, European Redditors don’t like it when Americans identity themselves anything other than Americans, even those with roots in another country.
I’m Finnish and I met my Brazilian husband in Canada where we’ve lived for the past 14 years. Life before kids was a breeze but after having kids (both during Covid) it has been SO hard. At least the people who have a local partner can normally get help from their family but we don’t have anyone. Raising our kids to speak 4 languages (our languages + 2 local ones) has been the easiest part of this whole ordeal. I feel like they identify with both our home countries because they speak the languages fluently and consume a fair bit of music, literature and tv from there too. They see themselves as Canadians but feel totally at ease in both of our home countries. I feel like knowing the language and having access to your culture and people (family and friends) is key.
I’m German / Senegalese, my wife is Chinese and we live in Hong Kong. It’s been not been a problem to not have a family network around us but mainly because we are fortunate to have nanny’s and also because our own families aren’t a really supportive to begin with. Our kids are trilingual (Mandarin, German and English). They speak all languages fluently but it was much harder than I thought it would be. German is my mother tongue and yet it took a lot of effort from my side to get the kids to speak it natively. We go to Germany around 1-2 months a year and I speak and read to them in German only. My wife did the same with mandarin and it was just as hard because English is so so dominant. with regards to identification it’s also not easy. We saw that being half Chinese “only”, the Chinese always consider them to be foreigners and always make comments how good their Chinese is as foreigners. In Germany my kids are simply “German” and my kids identify pretty strongly as German. They also identify as Hong Kongers though and also hold the passport. I recommend to travel as much as possible to your home country and read lots of stories in your target language. That helped a lot for us.
Scottish married to a French living in France. It’s hard at times. My kids are bilingual so far but still young, I want to make sure they can natively read and write English with a high level, I’m not sure how at the moment because most bilingual schools are way too expensive. All my family now lives in the US too (and I spent a lot of time there), so it’s a bit mixed in terms of cultures
I’m central asian living in Germany and gave birth here. It was amazing, the health care is far superior here and I was treated amazingly well even if ny german is not so good yet.
I only have positive things to say about it tbh.
I’m American, my husband is German and we live in Germany. Our kids are 7 and 4.
- We have tremendous support from my husband’s family. My family is not generally super helpful anyway, so even if they lived near us I doubt they would help in any significant manner.
- Our kids are technically bilingual, but their German is much stronger than their English. I speak English to them at home, but that’s basically the extent of their English exposure. They understand English perfectly, but strongly prefer to speak German.
- Our kids are dual citizens, but they don’t identify with America and that’s honestly fine with me. My oldest has visited the US twice and my youngest only once. I’ve been gone so long that America doesn’t even really feel like home to me, so I’m ok with them feeling German rather than American. They see America as a far away place where their grandparents live, which is honestly pretty accurate. It will be interesting to see how they identify as they get older.
My Son is English , his partner Dutch and they live in Norway . My 18 month old granddaughter has just started to say a few words in a mixture of 3 languages . My other English son’s partner is Czech and my 2 year old grandson is speaking a mixture of Czech and English . I think with children it just comes naturally and the younger they are the easier it is .
I’m Japanese who married to American in the US. I moved to the US 3 year ago, married 2 years ago. We had our baby last year and it’s been definitely challenging for me as his family is older and not as easy to ask for help. I wish my mom was here to help me. I just want to go home when I’m tired and ask my family to take care of the baby for a couple of hours… I don’t know about the language or identity part yet but I imagine that my daughter will point out my English pronunciation in the future :( At the same time I hope my daughter will be a kind and open minded person who can understand the situation like me and not judgemental.