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

[Nochristmasvibesasofyet]

We live abroad, Dh and I both British, Dd is 6 and was born where we live. We have been ‘Back home’ a couple of times for short holidays, but mainly everyone comes to us.
Ive started to feel sad recently that she won’t experience a British childhood/upbringing, unless we move in the next few years-will it be too late then?
How important is it that we try to keep her informed of her heritage (if that’s the right word!)

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.

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.

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?

Yes 100% this ❤️

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.

I think no matter how much you integrate, you always feel like a bit of an outsider

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.

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.

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.

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.

What are you embarrassed about?

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.

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.

Is he ok with this? Did he feel strange as a child or like he didn’t fit in?

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.

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.

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.

That’s interesting, I will look it up, thank you 🙏
How did your kids fare?

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

I don’t think so. But he was raised in a very international part of London where everyone was from somewhere else. So he just considered himself to be from Portugal.

We were talking about it because I found it fascinating and couldn’t get my head around how you can grow up in a country and live there your whole life and not feel that you’re from that country.

But he was equally as baffled as to why I couldn’t understand! He kept saying “but I’m Portuguese” 😂

She won't miss it in the same way I don't miss the town my mum was born and grew up in. Her childhood is hers and her parents have different accents and languages to the locals. She'll feel completely at home. And, frankly, I'd rather my kids had EU-wide opportunities rather than just be stuck with the limitations of being British.

I totally agree with this.

My child is half and half, also Southern Europe. I compare her childhood to that of her cousins in the UK and I’m glad she grew up here. The British childhood of today bears very little resemblance to the one you describe. I too had a British childhood from about 9 upwards, all conkers and roaming on bikes and rural primary schools yet my experience is far removed from that of my DNs. My child stayed a child for a bit longer where we are, her cousins seemed to be forced to grow up too quickly.

also the idyllic British rural childhood gave way to the utter boredom of the teen years. Lots of peer pressure, bullying if you were a bit different, grim youth clubs, cold weather and grey skies. One thing I never understood from my teen years was this bizarre habit of hanging about on street corners or “outside Top Shop” in the cold for ages, and not going anywhere warm.

My child may not be “British” but she is bicultural and bilingual and able to mix with people from pretty much anywhere. She considers herself to be European, which is an identity she is happy with. You don’t need to be one or the other, your child will be a mix of her experiences. She won’t be rootless if growing up locally, that is her base.

6 and 4. DD remembers our old house and her grandparents place but nothing else really. She doesn’t remember school in the UK at all but remembers every detail of her first day at school here. DS doesn’t remember anything. Both were given the opportunity to study in the UK aged 18 but wanted to stay in this country. I do think it helped that they were in a school with lots of other immigrants and obviously spoke English so didn’t stand out much but that was only at first, they became “locals” very soon after and never looked back.

As I said before, we have always spoken to them about family traditions and British customs but not gone overboard in trying to make them British. We sent them to a US school and didn’t really hang about with other British families.

At the end of the day, your daughter will just be herself, whether British or not or somewhere inbetween

But it will be hers. My friends had their twins born in Spain ( both British parents). The girls were bilingual , used to bidet grandparents in the uk but do consider themselves Spanish, nothing wrong with that ( they are teens)