To feel sad that my Dd will not really know what it’s like to be British

This. ^ The only embarrassing thing here is that ludicrous comment from @tapaw 🙄

Honestly despair at this negative mindset about being British 🙄. I take it’s from people who have never travelled it’s not perfect here but it’s a damn sight better than most of the world.

I would say it will be important to give your daugjter a sense of her heritage, yes. We are all connected to our culture and ancestors and she may have issues around home and belonging. It will be helpful to have conversations and family traditions.

My (now adult) children spent the majority of their childhood living in different European countries and the States.
I became really interested in the psychology of “third culture kids”. I’d recommend looking at the Wiki entry for it. It does sum up the good and bad points of this phenomenon. It really is fascinating.
Understanding how is affects their adult life can also inform your planning.

The key to acceptance in England is her voice. Make sure that she sounds English when speaking English and everything else will follow

good luck.

I think it all depends on how you raise her. I was talking to a friend over the weekend. His dad is Portuguese and his mother is American. He was born in the US but raised in London from a year old.

He was saying he that he has never felt English. He considers himself Portuguese. He father instilled a strong sense of Portugueseness in him. They visited Portugal often as kept a family home there and he was raised bilingual. Despite never having lived there full time (he’s late 30’s now), he is 100% Portuguese in his eyes.

What are you embarrassed about?

My four kids were each born in a different, non UK, country and we didn’t return to the UK until they were late teens. I’m British and my husband is half British and half from somewhere else. Somehow or other they all look like 100% my husbands non-British side of the family. My kids don’t look like me and they don’t sound like me. They still say trash can and have non-British ‘ways’. People don’t think they are British even though they have now lived here for 12 years.

We’ve chatted about it a lot as I find it interesting. They can’t give a straight answer if you ask them to tell them where they are from and what their heritage is. It genuinely doesn’t bother them at all. I feel British (English) and I like being English. My kids love living here. Thinking that they have to ‘be’ British is irrelevant to them. Their lives and their childhoods in particular couldn’t have been more different to mine.

There are lots of people who have similar stories. It’s very normal for people to move from place to place. The need to want to belong to one place in particular is outdated.

How do your children feel about it? There's probably some nostalgia colouring your feelings, which is understandable. Children find their own identity. My friend has children in Germany, and it's important to him that they are aware of their Irish heritage, but I don't know how important it is to the children.

Speaking as one who raised children in a country thousands of kilometres away from my own, in a different culture, there always will be a bit of wondering what it would have been to have raised them where I was raised, but as PPs have said, it's important to recognize that they will have their own childhoods and their own lives, which were never going to be just like your life anyway. Give your DD as much as you can - she'll always have a British side to her, growing up in a British home.

This is no different than the usual immigrant experience. I speak reasonable Italian as my parents taught me but my child and my cousins children speak very little if any Italian as all of us didn't speak it well enough to pass on to their children.

My sibling and my cousins are in our 60s and 70s now and most of our parents' generation of relatives that we know in Italy have died or are very old now so we tend to viait the country much less often. This makes us all a bit sad as we get older as we can't share that aspect of our lives with our children and grandchildren very easily and that seems to matter to me more as time passes rather thean less.

Passing on our culture and life experience is part and parcel of being a parent. For an immigrant this is fraught with complications, so it is is a sadness but not an overwhelming one. My farher always said this country gave him a lot and he never regretted the move regardless of the fact that it did put a difference between him and his children.

Make sure they speak the language and visit reasonably often in their childhood. If you don't do this they are likely to feel less Britah than if you do. That is just the way it is.

This is true for all emigrants, they do not fully share their parent's culture. Either you go home, or you accept that they have s different culture to you. You can pass on a lot of yours but if they don't live in the UK, they ibis won't have that lived experience. But they are having other experience, no less valuable.

It sounds like you are ambivalent about the country. If you were completely settled and committed to a life there, it wouldn’t be such a problem that your child is Italian (or whatever) not British. Perhaps you feel like an outsider yourself? Or just homesick?

This is a really interesting subject to me. Our British family are living in Canada for 3 years (we are one year in) and in our many discussions about what we want to do next, one of my concerns is that my 8 year old feels a sense of British identity. I don’t want him to spend so long away that he doesn’t relate to the same references as his parents and older brother. His accent has changed the most and has probably assimilated best, but I am aware that if we want to return to the UK, it’s important that the children keep a connection to it.

I'm in a similar situation - living in France and I totally understand where you are coming from.
There's a big rise in basically 'anti foregin' sentiment everywhere at the moment. For my children despite being born here they are not French, hopefully they will be able to become citizens at around age 14/15. But it does mean that they grow up with a sense of being other or not belonging. Yet (although they are British citizens) Britain doesn't really mean anything to them either, it's a country we go on holiday to but there us no sense of belonging.

She's just having a different yet no less valid experience than you did. She's probably going to have childhood memories based on endless sunny days, for a start - and you won't get that at home as climate change seems to have delivered endless gloom.

She would never have the same childhood as you did as time moves on if you'd lived here - likewise, your childhood and that of your parents must have differed. As others have said, you might be romanticising the past a bit - she's got the opportunity to be bilingual, which is really great.

Of course it does. We are very blessed to live in Britain.

The lifestyle itself. The environment and the relaxed way of living. People are happier, more friendly. You live a more outdoorsy lifestyle in the hot weather and beautiful scenery, providing a healthier mindset. England feels so closed in and depressing in comparison.
I don't mean opportunities as in education etc, although learning a second language was obviously a benefit. Just the opportunity to live that way of life.

Where did you move to?