AIBU to think my parents are ignorant & somewhat racist ???

[ForCyanShaker]

DH and I are both mid 40s. We moved to Dubai nearly 18 years ago for jobs, what was meant to be temporary became permanent, and we’ve built our lives here. We are still British, still expats, but very settled.

Our children were both born in Singapore as we were there for work for a while too. They’re British citizens but have never lived in the UK. We visit 6 or so times a fear. Frequent enough for them to somewhat know England or at least know where DH and I are from/grew up. They’ve done all the sightseeing, London eye, Scotland, Wales, Cotswolds, Cornwall etc they’ve been UK

They attend an international school here which is academically strong and well regarded. It’s also affiliated in various ways with UK private schools and a lot of the teaching staff are British. It follows a fairly rigorous curriculum, and many students go on to UK universities.

But the reality of the school is that it’s very international, as you’d expect. Their friendship group includes children from England, Scotland, America, Barbados, Bermuda, South Africa, Australia, India and many other countries. That’s just their normal.

We recently sent my parents a school class photos because they asked for it. My parents’ reaction really shocked us. They focused entirely on the fact it “doesn’t look English” and that there are “so many non-English children” in the class. My mum said she found it upsetting and that it made her feel sad for my sons.

We’ve also had similar reactions to other things. We sent a photo from my eldest son’s birthday recently around 20 children at a party here. Again, instead of being happy, the comments were about how it must be “just rich international kids” and that this isn’t a normal upbringing, and that we should be coming back to England.

The same narrative keeps coming up: that the children are “barely English anymore”, don’t sound English, don’t understand England properly, and that we’re somehow denying them a “proper British childhood”.
Even the accents get mentioned, they don’t have traditional English accents, more of an ‘international school’ accent despite DH and I having very southern England accents , which apparently is another concern.

What I struggle with is that from our perspective, none of this is negative.
My children are happy, confident, well educated, and very comfortable around people from all backgrounds. They don’t really think in terms of nationality in the way I grew up doing. They just see friends.

They are very well travelled, have lived this international lifestyle all their lives, and are completely at ease in multicultural environments. I actually see that as a strength rather than something missing.

But my parents seem to view it as a loss, like they’ve ended up with grandchildren who are somehow less “British” than they expected, and that this needs correcting by moving back.

They’re also very keen for us to return to the UK permanently, offering to buy us a house in cobham, but we simply don’t want to. I grew up in cobham, I don’t want to live there now. We have a good life here, we feel safe, the children are thriving, and we’re not ready to leave.

I grew up in Surrey and part of me does remember how small and insular things could feel, and I don’t think I want to go back to that for my children.

I feel guilty because I understand they miss us and want us closer, especially as they get older. But I also feel frustrated that everything about our children’s lives here is being framed as “wrong” or “less British”.

First it was ‘when are you two going to have children’ now I don’t think they love our children. They’re not willing to accept them. They’re still young, we can move back to the England and they’ll get an English accent but we don’t want to and also why does it matter. There’s more things my parents have said. Another example that really pissed me off was along the lives of what if one of the boys bring home a girl that isn’t English. Why does it matter??? It’s a disgusting way to view the world.

Your children are growing up in an amazing environment. The only thing they may lack is mixing with kids from different financial backgrounds (although I suspect this isn't a concern to your parents!).
Perhaps tell your parents very firmly why your choices are working and then don't talk about it any more. I don't think you'll persuade them out of their bigoted views.

So do you consider yourself to be British?

I think the changes in how people define themself is interesting. Expressions like British Pakistani are more commonly heard. Its almost as though people have two halves to how they see themselves. Where they live now and their background.

It was traditionally very 'British' for middle class people to move overseas for work - war, the end of Empire & migration controls across the world made all that much harder for a few decades.

(Not just British of course - it's what humans do.)

Many returned to Britain for schooling, or after a crisis in the country where they were living, or when retiring. Often with a sense of not being at home - which was especially sad for those raised elsewhere who missed the country of their childhood.

But - that's also true of many who never move countries - and feel dislocated by how the young behave differently, how the town centre feels so different, new technology etc.

But whether migrants or not, the countries of our childhoods have all gone! For people who live in the same country - we're just fooling ourselves that it's the same. It's only the same in the way Trigger's Broom is the same.

I've lived in lots of places as well and count myself as British now. It's more of a global mindset. (As well as semantics!)
Other languages may use English and British interchangeably (we see Scots getting hot under the collar about this), but I don't think any of my friends below 60 would say they are English, just British. We live in England (geographical fact) but are British.

Your parents live in a Surrey bubble. If they saw my kids' school photo they wouldn't think most of the children were "English". When of course most of them have been born in outer London, a 40 minute drive from your parents enclave.
I don't think anyone here uses the term English unless talking about cream teas and the language.

OP, you’ve indicated in a number of posts that you acknowledge the problems and human rights abuses of the society in which you’ve chosen to live and bring up your children, and you’ve responded very calmly and patiently to the criticism you’ve received here.

But unless I’ve missed it, nowhere do you seem to acknowledge that, benefiting as you and your family do from the way of life enabled by the human rights abuses, you are supremely ill-fitted to criticise your parents for their natural (though old-fashioned) wish that their grandchildren were being brought up in the culture in which they, the grandparents, lived their lives and raised their own children.

You consider your parents' views unacceptable, and I understand why, but they are not actively benefiting in any way from those views (or, as far as I can see, verbally abusing people of colour or different heritage). You, on the other hand, seem to agree that your lifestyle is based on active human rights abuses, but are quite happy to carry on benefiting from that lifestyle until it suits you to move.

Do you understand why some of us feel you are being enormously hypocritical?

I know it’s an American song, but this seems to chime with what some previous posters feel about the term ‘expat’: https://open.spotify.com/track/23ZavKNBduDwOV0zCtxFsv?si=gcO3D_YMScKbfkf-Hz-iYw

I do understand why it can look hypocritical, and I don't think it's an unreasonable question to ask.

The difference, for me, is that I don't see acknowledging the compromises and moral grey areas in my own life as meaning I have to accept everything else without question.

Living somewhere with serious human rights issues is something I've thought about a great deal. I'm not pretending that my family's life exists in a moral vacuum.

That said my issue with my parents isn't that they have old-fashioned views or that they wish the children were closer geographically or culturally. I can understand that sadness. My difficulty is with comments that they make.

I'm certainly not claiming to have clean hands or to be morally superior. None of us lives entirely consistently and I'm happy to acknowledge that. But recognising my own compromises doesn't mean I have to ignore behaviour that I believe is hurtful within my own family. I personally think those two things can coexist. We live here moving back will not change the fact that we’ve lived here. There’s a lot more nuance within my own life choice that I’ve made.

We do not have servants or anything of that sort, we do however like living here DH and I have made an effort to integrate we both speak Arabic, he speaks better than I do but he grew up living all over the world for his fathers work, speaks 5 languages. We are not here actively abusing people but I am not denying that we benefit from the system at all.

People seem to make lots of assumption. Living in America for instance a country that was built on racism and slavery but people would not look sideways at someone for moving to America for a job. Same with Britain, the British empire no one looks at people sideways for moving to Britain for jobs albeit it has the history that it does or for instance Japan or Belgium for that fact. If I said I lived in Belgium no one would even mention oh don’t you feel about about what they did in Congo or King Leopold’s atrocious acts or Nazi Germany. People move to Germany all the time but no one looks at them sideways. Lots of places have terrible history and lots of places are creating terrible histories currently.

The point I am making is lots of countries have atrocious histories or are actively engaging in creating atrocious histories. Dh and I are not perfect we aren’t saying that we are not benefitting we recognise that fact.

I feel all this too. It’s definitely easy to feel a bit rootless, and I’m finding the current rise of intolerance and racism particularly hard to stomach because I think of all the countries I lived in as an immigrant, and how kindly and respectfully people treated each other compared to the simmering aggression and ignorance we are seeing here, and it makes me feel sick.

I tried about 5 different careers and couldn’t settle to anything at first, and didn’t really do long term relationships for many years because to me, normal was for everything to change after a few years.

BUT I think of all the places I’ve seen, and all the people I’ve met, and to be honest how much more common sense I’ve now got thanks to the variety and challenges of my upbringing and I can’t not value that!

That misses the point so spectacularly I think you must have had to duck as it went past you 🤣

Just regarding citizenship. If your children were not born in Uk they cannot pass their British citizenship to their children if they live abroad too- if their partner was not born in the UK either, they must make sure their child is born in the UK in order to automatically get a British passport.

It has a transatlantic sound, so quite American - even if the child/adult in question has never been anywhere near the US.

We are in a EU country and the dc go to a French speaking school, so a lot of these kids are comfortably speaking 3,4 sometime 5 languages, yet when they switch to English they all have the same accent - regardless of local language and the languages they may speak at home.

I was in Madrid recently and overheard a group of teenagers chatting in exactly the same accent, sprinkled with words in Spanish, but the same accent as our dc nonetheless.

I am not a fan of it, but it is a product of their environnment, education and YouTube.

It’s quite hard to live permanently in Dubai.

there’s various visas including a retirement one but you need to continue to meet various conditions and if you don’t you may need to leave.

In the 1960s there was a song about the whole world being a melting pot. I think that is what we should aspire to.

That is true, and it is something we think about regularly. We are raising children who we hope will feel comfortable anywhere, be around all kinds of people, and never feel intimidated by different cultures or environments. There are pros and cons to every way of bringing up children.

DH grew up all over the world and is still close to his friends from international school. They are now scattered across different countries, but they still meet up whenever they can. He looks back on his upbringing very fondly. He learned five languages and still speaks them all fluently. He has friends all over the world and sees himself as a citizen of the world, rather than just a British citizen. I think that's pretty special.

We hope to give our children a similar experience. I haven't lived in England since my early twenties, but I still meet up with my school friends at least once a year. There are eight of us, and we're still incredibly close. Social media has made that much easier. We have a WhatsApp group that we chat in all the time, and I still keep in touch with and see my university friends as well. Different people manage friendships differently, but we certainly won't be raising children who are unable to form lasting relationships.

Some of my cousins didn't grow up in England full time either, yet they still keep in touch with friends they made in Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere, even after more than 20 years. I think it depends far more on the people involved than where they grew up.
Hopefully our children will appreciate the opportunities their upbringing gives them. I never want them to feel tied to one country. I want them to feel confident exploring the world and having the kinds of experiences that I've been lucky enough to have. I wouldn't change my life at all.

It’s sort of a hybrid. A lot of the international school formats, especially in some of the countries that OP is referring to - Hong Kong, Singapore etc - were founded during the peak British Empire invasion days, meaning that lots of aspects are terribly British daaaahling. So you get certain words and sounds that wouldn’t be out of place on a BBC radio announcer in the 1940s. Then a lot of the English language culture that’s more easily accessible is American, so there’s a certain drawl that gets mixed in. The international schools in South Asia often have a higher proportion of Aussies, and the European Union schools have a high rate of Irish students, so that also factors in, as do local language patterns, and in the cases of Mandarin or Arabic for example, those are quite clipped word sounds which can read as South African when speaking English.

Essentially, imagine someone extremely RP trying to do both a slight American, South African and Australian accent all at the same time, and there you have it 🤣

Respectfully, you grew up in England for 20 years. That’s in no way equivalent to growing up somewhere like Dubai where there’s no home ‘culture’ for your children to grow up in, because Emirati-ness is both only a tiny minority of the population, essentially a government fiction, and not available to you or your children to assimilate into. You’re bringing up children who aren’t from anywhere, in a country that regards western expats as a necessary evil and which will not allow them to remain as adults. Sometimes that makes them a citizen of everywhere, sure, but I’ve also seen it cause appalling problems, especially in their ‘passport country’ where no one sees them as local..

No it doesn't, you were presenting Cobham as a parochial village with access to a council-run leisure centre. The fast trains to London for a trip out are only 36/37 minutes to Waterloo and there are a myriad of expensive, some might say exclusive, country clubs and leisure facilities for well-off families in the local area. Many families living in Cobham will have lived and worked overseas, own property abroad (or their parents do), or they holiday all over the world. That is the experience you need to compare with.

You are being remarkably generous with your responses and I hesitate to push it further as it feels rude, but I am really interested in this and feel the need to respond to some of your points as it seems to me you are being thoroughly disingenuous.

We live here moving back will not change the fact that we’ve lived here. That seems to me like a criminal saying "I committed crimes in the past and going straight now will not change that fact so I might as well carry on committing crimes". (Note I am not saying you are committing any crimes, it’s just an analogy.)

The point I am making is lots of countries have atrocious histories or are actively engaging in creating atrocious histories. You give examples of many countries which undoubtedly benefited in the past from dreadful cruelties and injustices. But can you really not see the difference between living in a country that benefited from things past rulers did many, in some cases hundreds of years ago, and consciously choosing to live in, contribute to the success of and enjoy the benefits of a society/country that you know is committing cruelties and injustices right now?

Dh and I are not perfect we aren’t saying that we are not benefitting we recognise that fact. You seem to think that acknowledging that you are benefiting from human rights abuses somehow lets you off the hook and absolves you from any possible "guilt". It doesn’t.

Again, thank you for your patience and willingness so far to engage with challenge and criticism.

The cognitive dissonance on this thread is incredible. To clear some things up:

~ If people express racist views, they aren’t just being “old fashioned” they are being racist.

~ It is racist to consider a multicultural upbringing inferior to a “British” one.

~ If parents are missing their children and grandchildren, they can express that without making comment about the colour of the skin in school photos.

~ Dubai has its issues with exploitation but so does the U.K. You can complain about slavery and profiting from the misery of others, but don’t fool yourselves that the UK’s economy doesn’t have a healthy dollop of that.

All this nonsense about “Third Culture Kids”, a premise based on one bit of research about a small number of American children in the 1950s, is stuff and nonsense. Do some children struggle with it? Probably. Do adults blame their childhood for a failure to launch? Absolutely. Being “rootless” is not the preserve of immigration, and most people just get on with their lives and make it what they want to. The term “identity” is being bandied about as if it can only be related to where you grew up. Lots of people decide they don’t “fit in” for lots of reasons. The middle class kid who went to Oxford, the kid who grew up poor, but now works as a city trader etc. Then there are those who are “othered” by society, who face far bigger challenges of prejudices and exclusion, who do we blame for their problems?

I grew up entirely in the U.K., I moved around a lot. The question of “where are you from” takes a while to answer. Am I Scottish, English, British? I’ve never lived in a house for an extended period of time, I don’t have a childhood home. I moved schools several times and don’t have a big number school friends I keep in touch with. I met my oldest friend on my first day of primary school and we’ve kept in touch for nearly 50 years despite the fact I moved 3 years later. Incidentally, her parents still live in the home she grew up in, she lived locally to there until she was in her 20s, she isn’t in touch with anyone else from our old school either. I don’t struggle with identity because what even does that mean? Why must we be pigeonholed into where we are from? Nobody can even say what “British Culture” is (or Scottish or English or….) Beyond loving a queue, and complaining about the weather, what makes a person “British”?

What matters here is how OP parents her children. That is what will shape their future. She is allowed to make decisions that benefit them. If she is working within the parameters of the law to give them the best advantage she can, why shouldn’t she? Isn’t that what we all do? Would anyone here pay more tax than they need to? If there was a way you could avoid paying uni fees, wouldn’t you? I know a few folk who have moved back to Scotland for their children’s final years at high school so their kids could go to uni for free in Scotland, I’ve seen people advising that on here! Fair play to them. OP is giving her children choices, what’s wrong with that? The taxpayer hasn’t paid for her children’s education, and yet they could come back here to go to university, perhaps they will become doctors and work in the NHS, statistically they are likely to end up being higher rate taxpayers so that’s a net benefit. It also sounds like she is wealthy enough to fund her own retirement and whatever the state pension will be in 30 years time will be negligible income, will likely have private healthcare and a private care home if needed. She may well be taking less off the taxpayer than someone who whilst working has had income support benefits all their lives, no personal pension and needs a funded care home. What those people pay into the system doesn’t even come close to what they take out, and that’s entirely ok. Surely that’s what British values are? Making sure elderly people living in our country are looked after no matter what their life choices have been?

So many of these comments seen to stem from envy, but are dressed up in “concern”.

Sigh. You moved around an actual country. The OP is bringing up her child in an airport. There is no culture into which that child can assimilate.

I understand your point, but I don't think our experience has led me to the same conclusion.

My husband grew up in England until he was seven, then lived in several countries because of his father's work. He came back to England to complete his A levels before university, then moved abroad again afterwards. He's still very close to his school friends in England and sees them regularly. In fact, he was recently with five of his closest friends watching England in the World Cup.
We don't necessarily want our children to have one defined "home culture". We want them to feel comfortable in different countries, around different people, and able to adapt wherever life takes them. My husband often jokes that he's a citizen of the world, but there is some truth in that. His upbringing gave him opportunities that have stayed with him throughout his life. He speaks five languages fluently because he was exposed to them from a young age, and he has lifelong friendships spread across the world.

Our children are growing up in a similar international environment. Many of their classmates speak four or five languages and switch between them effortlessly. I see that as an enormous advantage rather than a disadvantage.

Every upbringing comes with trade-offs. Some children have deep roots in one place, while others grow up with a broader international outlook. Neither is inherently better, they're just different.

As for not being seen as "local" in their passport country, I'm genuinely interested in what problems you've seen that has caused. My own experience hasn't reflected that. Before my children even open their mouths, most people would assume they're English because they're white. The point of my original post was actually about my parents making assumptions about the children my sons spend time with. They saw a photograph of mostly white children and assumed they were all English, when in reality they were Swiss, German, American, Australian, Canadian, French and several other nationalities. It highlighted, to me how easy it is to make assumptions based purely on appearance.

Same way people are always on about immigrants, I know lots of Americans in the uk they’re immigrants. No one bats an eyelid because immigrant is associated with every other skin but white. The same way my children will benefit through the world because of their skin colour. The same reason my mother asks me what will I do if my children bring home someone who isn’t English. By that they mean not white. Because they seem fine with making the assumption that the white children my children are friends with are English when someone of them area. You cannot look at someone and determine if they’re English on not based off of appearance of just being white unless you know the American genotype or the Scottish genotype etc I couldn’t figure it out. I don’t think my children will have local problems but I’d like to know how these problems will manifest? If you looked at my children you would think they were English/British maybe once you speak to them it’s a different story as they’re at international school have a twang of America/southern english RP accent. I’m all for nuance.

Op, your decision to move and stay in Dubai is yours.

my comments have been based on my experiences of teaching at international school.

i would also add that the tricky aspects of this sort of life only come into play when you have a situation where “having a village” is helpful.

for example, international schools don’t always handle kids with SN terribly well and if a family in your sort of situation has a child who is physically disabled or severely autistic or similar it can be very difficult.

obviously if you have enough money this can be dealt with as you can just hire someone or a team of someones to care for them but it’s often very tricky for families in this situation.

equally, elderly parents who require support or when you get to the point you yourself need support. My brother lives in New Zealand and when my dad was dying he got straight onto a 24 hour flight over up the U.K. but he couldn’t and didn’t provide any help at all in the ten years when dad had cancer.

again, if your parents/dh’s parents have enough money this is less of an issue although frankly if you have an elderly parent it really is helpful to have someone in the country.

i have friends who moved to Switzerland twenty years ago and now have Swiss citizenship. She’s flying back for a week a month because her mum needs looking after, refuses carers and has had several hospital admissions due to falls (and I’m sure you’re aware of the state of UK hospitals right now(.

the lifestyle you describe - citizen of the world - can work but you as a family need a lot of money if there are difficult circumstances as you are unlikely to have a local village.

There’s nothing wrong with Cobham, but it’s not the same as seeing the world and it’s just plain daft for you to insist otherwise.

You seem to think that acknowledging that you are benefiting from human rights abuses somehow lets you off the hook and absolves you from any possible "guilt". It doesn’t.

@NamechangedforgoodreasonsWhat, exactly, do you expect OP to do about that? As you sit on your phone/iPad/computer, produced using slave labour of 40,000 children mining minerals which permanently damages their health and puts them at risk every day in order to provide batteries and chips, and the forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in China to produce things like screens, speakers, cases, all shipped to factories in China, India etc which are known to exploit workers, refuse to pay them wages and bonuses, and where bullying, harassment and health and safety violations are common.

Maybe you’ll also use that device to purchase other goods made overseas, at least in part, unsung the same types of exploitation. Perhaps you’ll pop down to to the shops later to pick up some coffee and a new top. The U.K. imports about £20 billion of goods made wholly or in part using slave labour. We can do as much as we can to avoid it, but short of planting all your own food, making your own clothing from wool shorn from your own sheep, and living entirely self sufficiently off grid, you cannot avoid it. To suggest we spend our lives feeling guilty about it (which actually serves no purpose whatsoever to make the situation better, is ridiculous.