Raising Bicultural Children Abroad

Reference library · 1048 words

Every migrant family eventually confronts a question that has no correct answer: how much of where we came from should our children carry, and how much are we entitled to ask of them? It arrives in small forms long before it arrives as a crisis. Which language do you speak at the dinner table when the children reply in English. Whether to send a child to Saturday morning language school when their friends are at sport. What to do when a ten-year-old asks to stop bringing home-cooked lunch to school. What name to give a baby, knowing it will be mispronounced for the next seventy years. These decisions accumulate into an identity, and parents make most of them without any framework at all.

The Indian diaspora is now large enough that these questions are being answered at scale in a number of countries. Australia's 2021 census recorded India as the second largest country of birth among the overseas-born population, behind England, and both Punjabi and Hindi were among the fastest-growing languages spoken at home over the preceding five years. Comparable growth has occurred in Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and the Gulf states, while the older communities in Britain, the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, Fiji, Trinidad and Mauritius are into their third, fourth or fifth generation. That range matters, because the experience of a child in a family that arrived last decade is not the experience of a child whose great-grandparents arrived as indentured labourers, and the two are often lumped together as diaspora.

The predictable arithmetic of language loss

Sociolinguists have documented the same pattern across almost every immigrant community studied, and it is worth stating plainly because it saves families from thinking their situation is a personal failure. The first generation speaks the heritage language and acquires the new one with varying fluency. The second generation is typically bilingual but dominant in the country's language, understanding the heritage language well and speaking it less. The third generation typically understands fragments and speaks little. Absent deliberate effort, complete shift takes about three generations. Joshua Fishman, whose work on language shift underpins most of this field, argued that the decisive variable is not schooling but whether the language has a real function in daily life beyond the parents' insistence.

This is why the interventions that work tend to be the ones that give a language a job. Grandparents living in the household or visiting for long periods create a person with whom the child must use the language. Extended visits to India, where cousins do not switch to English, do more in six weeks than a year of lessons. Devotional and cultural settings supply another function: Punjabi classes at gurdwaras, Tamil and Telugu classes attached to temples, Gujarati and Hindi taught through community associations, and children's programmes run by organisations across the Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Jain and Christian Indian communities. Formal support also exists in several countries. Australian states fund community languages schools that operate on weekends, and Hindi and Punjabi are available in some school systems and as senior secondary examination subjects; British complementary schools have played a comparable role for decades.

The evidence on cost is fairly clear and often misunderstood by anxious parents. Maintaining a home language does not slow a child's acquisition of English or damage school performance. Children raised bilingually sometimes reach vocabulary milestones in each language slightly later while their combined vocabulary is comparable, and the gap closes. What is contested is the broader claim that bilingualism confers general cognitive advantages; early findings on executive function have proved hard to replicate consistently, and the field is more cautious now than it was fifteen years ago. The defensible case for the heritage language is not that it makes children cleverer. It is that it lets them speak to their grandmother.

Two cultures, and the space between

Language is only the visible part. The deeper negotiation concerns values that differ in emphasis rather than in kind: how much authority parents retain over adult children's decisions, how family obligation weighs against individual choice, how dating and marriage are discussed or not discussed, what career paths count as legitimate, how emotion is expressed. Research on second-generation identity, particularly the extensive American work on children of immigrants, describes a range of outcomes rather than a single one. Some children move fluently between contexts, behaving differently at home and outside it without experiencing that as fracture. Some reject the heritage culture in adolescence and return to it in their twenties, often when they have children of their own. Some reject the host culture instead. And some describe a persistent sense of being fully at home in neither place, which is genuinely painful and should not be dismissed as a phase.

Two pressures deserve explicit mention because they are rarely discussed openly. The first is the academic and professional expectation that many Indian families place on children, sometimes reinforced by the fact that the parents migrated on skilled visas and understand education as the mechanism that made their own life possible. That expectation can be a resource and can also be a source of serious adolescent distress, and the mental health of second-generation young people is now the subject of active concern among community organisations in Australia, Britain and North America. The second is racism, which children encounter in playgrounds long before they have the vocabulary to describe it, and which parents who experienced a different form of it in a different country are not always equipped to help with.

What emerges from the literature and from community practice is not a formula but a few consistent findings. Children fare better when the heritage culture is presented as something valuable in itself rather than as a set of prohibitions. They fare better when they have peers in the same position, which is why community networks matter beyond the specific activity they organise. They fare better when parents are willing to explain reasons rather than assert authority, because a child growing up in a society that expects negotiation will apply that expectation at home. And it helps enormously if the parents can accept that the culture their children build will be a third thing, not a copy of either original, and that this is what successful transmission actually looks like.

Back to the library