Raising children abroad: how to keep your own culture

Why does it hurt when my child turns Danish?

Because the parts of you that needed no explanation back home are the parts your child no longer shares.

• They are fluent where you are still translating. Your child reads a Danish room in a second, and you are working out afterwards what happened in it.
• Culture sits in the small defaults. Volume at the table, how directness lands, what counts as rude: the settings your child is acquiring are being made somewhere other than in you.
• It arrives as loss rather than as growth. The same changes would read as ordinary development if the whole family were in the country you came from.

What aches here is recognition rather than love. You expected to be the adult your child most resembles, and in a mixed-culture family that stops being true while everyone is busy with school runs. The relief is that your child is not being asked to choose: holding both cultures together, rather than switching between them, goes with coming across as more the same person from one room to the next¹. That work is correlational and was done with bicultural adults in Canada, so I would treat it as a reason not to put your child in the middle rather than as a prediction about them.

Why do I push them towards Denmark and then mind that it worked?

You arranged most of it, and the part you did not want came in the same parcel.

You pushed for the Danish kindergarten rather than the international one. You asked the neighbours to speak Danish to your child. You were pleased the first time your child corrected your pronunciation at the bus stop, and you told people about it. Then one evening your child says something in Danish to your partner, your partner laughs, and you follow the words but not the joke. There is a small drop behind the ribs, gone in a second, and what comes out of your mouth is a question about whether anybody has done their reading.

None of that needs explaining away. You wanted your child to have here what you did not have, and you also wanted to stay the adult they most resemble. The second wish is the one that goes unsaid, because out loud it sounds like wanting your child to be less at home. So it comes out in a smaller register instead: a correction of an accent, a remark about the food, a short answer about whose house they are going to on Saturday.

Why is my Danish partner not worried about this?

Because their culture arrives free, so nothing about it looks like a decision anyone made.

School, friends, screens and the street hand your partner’s culture to your child at no cost to either of them. Yours has to be carried in by hand, every day, which makes it look like a preference, and a preference is the sort of thing a reasonable person lets go when the week gets crowded. That imbalance is doing more of the work in your arguments than either of you is.

I would not read your partner as defending Denmark on purpose. They are standing in the one spot in the house where nothing has to be chosen, and from there your effort looks optional rather than load-bearing. The argument you keep having is also not really about whether your child says tak or thank you. It is about whose world the family lives in, and your child is where that question turns into something you can point at. Saying that out loud, once, gets further than another round about Saturday.

What actually keeps a child’s other language and culture?

Input at home, in quantity, from the adults the child lives with.

Parents ask me which rule to follow. One parent one language, Danish outside and home language inside, your language at weekends. The rule matters less than how many hours of your language your child hears from people who love them, and that number is set in the kitchen rather than on the fridge.

A survey of 1,899 families with children aged 6 to 10 found the best chance of a child actively using the minority language where both parents used it at home and at most one of them also used the majority language, and found one parent one language to be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition². In immigrant families studied separately, parents more oriented to their heritage culture gave more of that language at home, and the amount given predicted the child’s vocabulary in it, while the whole chain from a parent’s orientation through to the child’s words did not hold up statistically³. That second study followed preschool children in California and neither was run in Denmark, so what they point at is the volume of input rather than the elegance of the rule.

How do I stop the fight about how Danish the children are?

Decide what you want kept, make it ordinary, and stop testing your child on it.

• Name 3 things, not everything. Pick the language, one food habit and one occasion in the year, and let the rest go without mourning it.
• Speak your language because it is yours. Use it as the way you talk to your child rather than as a lesson with a mark at the end.
• Give it a place in the week. A fixed evening, a fixed call, a fixed meal: a culture that is nowhere in the diary ends up nowhere in the house.
• Let your child be Danish in front of you. A child who has to leave half of themselves outside the front door learns to leave it there.
• Say the split out loud with your partner. Agree which of you carries what, so neither is quietly correcting the other in front of the children.
• Keep the people, not only the customs. Children hold on to relatives they actually know and let go of traditions attached to nobody, and a weekly call with a grandparent who speaks only your language does more than one long trip a year. I offer that as a suggestion from my practice rather than a measured finding.

These are offers rather than a measure of whether you are doing it right, and a household that keeps 2 of the 6 is not failing. They assume 2 parents who are still able to discuss it. Where every conversation about the children turns back into the argument about the move, or where one of you has stopped raising it because of how the last few attempts went, the subject is no longer the children. They are also the wrong tools where a child is struggling in a way that reaches past language and belonging, because then the child needs attention in their own right rather than a better household policy. Mixed-nationality couples therapy is built for the stuck point between 2 parents, and the free 30-minute call is a sensible way to find out whether it fits before you book a session.

Questions people ask

Should I bring this to couples therapy or work on it on my own first?

Couples therapy fits when the 2 of you keep having the same argument about the children; working on your own fits when what hurts is mostly about your own place in the family. If you are unsure which it is, say which of those sounds closer and I will tell you which I think fits.

Should the children come to the sessions?

Usually not, because this work sits between the 2 adults who set what happens at home. I see the parents, and I would say so plainly if I thought a child needed a space of their own to talk.

What happens in a first session if the 2 of us disagree about the children?

I ask each of you what you are afraid your child will lose, and the answers are rarely the ones either of you expected. Most of that hour goes on getting both fears said out loud without either being argued with.

Will a therapist in Copenhagen take the Danish side?

That is a fair thing to ask before booking, and the answer should be that neither culture gets treated as the problem. I work in English with mixed-culture families, and the job is to keep both halves of the household in the room.

How long does this kind of work usually take?

I would not put a number on it, because what is being settled is how a family runs rather than one problem being fixed. Some couples settle the question in a handful of sessions and others need longer, and I would rather say that than promise a timeline.

If you worry about passing on your culture far from home, I offer psychotherapy for parents as space to think about the family you want.

Sources

1. Zhang, R., Noels, K. A., Lalonde, R. N. and Salas, S. J., Self-consistency in Bicultural Persons: Dialectical Self-beliefs Mediate the Relation between Identity Integration and Self-consistency, Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
2. De Houwer, A., Parental Language Input Patterns and Children’s Bilingual Use, Applied Psycholinguistics, 2007
3. Buttiler, M. B., Zhou, Q. and Uchikoshi, Y., Reasons for Migration, Parental Acculturation, and Language: The Case of Chinese American and Mexican American Parents and Dual Language Learners, Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.