Anyone raising English kids/kids in England and finding some bits a bit odd?

[HolyShmoly]

Long time, no mumsnet but I'm hoping I'll find some sympathisers. DH and I are both Irish, from Donegal and are living in England for a number of years. We have kids born in England who are now school age and much more aware of their Englishness. Its really weird.
We were home recently and driving through the North she was excited because she saw her flags. The same areas that we'd be praying not to have to stop in, she thought looked welcoming. The women's world cup I was encouraging her to celebrate England. She'll be starting history this year and the burden to ensure she doesn't see just one side of the story feels large.

I dont want them to feel like they can't celebrate where they come from, but celebrating England feels like I'm breaking a lifetime of conditioning.

What a daft thing to say. The OP is just reflecting on how strange it is to experience your children being, and identifying with, a different nationality to your own. In the OP's case, it's perhaps complicated a little bit further by recent conflict between the two. There is no mention of racism or of her disliking the English. Can you really not imagine for yourself how it might feel strange sometimes for your own children to be of a different nationality and have different school experiences to you and all your family?

OP, I get it, I've experienced this in reverse. English parents who raised me in a different country, but eventually we all moved to England when I was a teenager. They did such a good job of integrating me (as it sounds like you have too with your son) that England felt like a completely foreign country to me. That must have been strange for my parents. As an adult I still do not at all identify with English football or nationality, while my mum has always considered herself very English. I now am having the interesting experience of raising my own DC in England, and feeling some of that strangeness myself.

Yeah that well known Irishman with pale skin, Frederick O'Douglass.

You will struggle to find anywhere else on the planet where you could go into any village or town in an entire country and be welcomed as well as here.

I remember being in Liverpool and within a day thought "the friendliness here is very reminiscent of home".

@DeeCee77 I don’t want to keep derailing the thread with this. But the Somerset case only meant that an enslaved person couldn’t be forcibly removed. In Somerset’s case it was in relation to his being sent to Jamaica. Mansfield later reflected that this was the deliberately-narrow interpretation he intended. Later cases continued the ambiguity around enslaved persons in England, such as the Thames Ditton case of poor relief for an enslaved woman.
If anyone is interested, Holly Brewer’s scholarship on this is excellent.

It’s very convenient that you’re only talking about England and that apparently the same moral and enlightened standards didn’t apply to English/British people in their colonies.

You also appear to have ignored people calling you out for your offensive comments on Irishness.

The OP isn't from NI though.
Donegal is very close, it's a border county and OP obviously drives through NI to have seen the flags etc, but it's not exactly the same as having been brought up there. Donegal is in the Republic of Ireland.

Another absurd comment. She didn't say that she had been conditioned to hate the English. She said: celebrating England feels like I'm breaking a lifetime of conditioning. Conditioning to interpret celebration of England as celebration of an opposing side in a recent conflict (recent war), perhaps even as an active intention to violence. Putting up England flags in parts of northern Ireland is a deeply political action. When you grow up around that you automatically interpret them as political. It takes "unconditioning" to see them as just normal flags waved at football.

Your comparisons are completely irrelevant to this situation because there is no history in this county of Pakistan using their flag to symbolise a side in a deep and recent conflict. A better (although of course still imperfect) comparison would be someone from Palestine saying "it's sometimes strange watching my kids wave Israeli flags when Israel are winning the football".

Yes he couldn't be deported to a colonial outpost where slavery was legal as slavery was unsupported by the common law in England thus he was freed.

William Cowper in the 1780s;

We have no slaves at home.—Then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried o'er the wave
That parts us, are emancipate and loos'd.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free,
They touch our country and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through ev'ry vein
Of all your empire. That where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.

You are speaking very immaturely. You're basically saying I'm Irish I'm saying there is no racism at all in ireland.

I can do a quick Google search and show you hundreds of stories about people who moved to Ireland and who received extreme racist abuse in Ireland.

The fact you don’t even recognise this as casual racism is very worrying and speaks volumes.

Discussing the dual nationality of a child and its challenges is one thing, saying that the very ‘Englishness’ of the place is a problem for you is quite another. That flags and other people’s national symbols are somehow offensive to you. That is pure racism. It’s not okay,

It’s not difficult to see why there is an enormous racism issue in Ireland if you think it’s okay.

I'm commenting to the thread as a whole not the op specifically and some of the posts are more racist than discussing cultural differences between generations.

Don't be ridiculous. Of course many countries are just as hospitable as Ireland, and Irish hospitality can be seen as rude to others (see countless threads on here about Irish people not taking no for an answer when offered tea or a biscuit). Frederick O'Douglass may have had a great experience in the 1800s, but stick Rhasidat Adeleke's name into Twitter and it won't take long to uncover less savoury attitudes.

No country or culture is perfect - and this thread isn't about better, it's about different, and how jarring it is when your children's identities are different to your own.

The anti English sentiment is overplayed.

Are there some among us Irish people who hold such backward views? Certainly, especially some of the older generation. In the north it would be more with the nationalist side, obviously, but so much of that would be ignorance (to a small extent I was guilty of it myself). Recall watching In the Name of the Father and being wound up by it (we were still in the Troubles when it came out, so feelings would have been heightened).

To dislike a nationality is backward. It's not a monolithic group.

To spout nonsense about hospitality across a whole country is equally ridiculous.

I have seen very bad racism and abuse to foreigners in both England and Ireland.

Is this directed at me? Of course there are racist incidents in Ireland.

I witnessed one aged 6, 1986 All Ireland Final (Tyrone vs Kerry) at Croke Park, Dublin before the game...I won't quote what was said but I knew what it meant. No place in the world is squeaky clean when it comes to bigotry.

Tell me somewhere else as hospitable as here.

I was asked about the cultural differences between Ireland and america.

Frederick Douglass being welcomed in Ireland (bare in the mind this was the mid 1800s) was used as an example of how one place is more tolerant than another.

"Build that wall, build that wall".

Or, the race based white only immigration prior to the 1965 immigration act. Hitler in Mein Kampf; "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/american-laws-against-coloreds-influenced-nazi-racial-planners/

That flags and other people’s national symbols are somehow offensive to you. That is pure racism. It’s not okay,

But she didn't say they were offensive to her @Lastchancechica. That's your own interpretation of what she's saying (and not, I believe, an accurate one).
She said it felt 'weird' that her daughter viewed those symbols as welcoming, as celebratory, as home. It feels strange that her daughter sees them so differently, that home is a different country/nationality for her DD - particularly because it's a country that has had a troubled relationship with her own in the past.
That doesn't mean she finds the symbols of England 'offensive'.

OP came onto an Irish thread to ask other Irish people of their experiences raising kids as English, given our complicated historical relationship with England. This is a very reasonable topic to raise on an Irish board and has nothing to do with racism - in fact the OP explicitly states she encourages her kids to embrace their English identity.

OP I can totally understand there would be a discomfort seeing your children interpret things so differently to you, simply because you've done such a good job assimilating them to their English culture. My parents had to do similar in the 80s when we emigrated from Ireland to England - though it was somewhat harder then as we were subjected to fairly overt anti-Irish sentiment at that time.

In Ireland we so often see ourselves as the underdog up against the English - it's impossible to get away from our very recent history at the hands of historic English administrations. Our country is still very much in its infancy following centuries of struggles for suffrage, religious and property rights, and eventually independence. Our recent culture - poetry, music, literature, art - often recalls this struggle and it's something we've all grown up with in our psyche. To then have our own kids be completely unaware of this history is alien and I can imagine feels jarring as our history is so very important to how we collectively see ourselves in the world (not just Irish people, but all nations).

I think all you can do is give an age appropriate history lesson to help give your kids some context and a general understanding of the wider complications in political and cultural life. It’ll also be important to point out that important distinction between historic English administrations and individual English people; when we sang our songs we sang about the governments of the day, not the regular people in England going about their own lives. And of course why the flags and painted kerbs in NI make you uncomfortable. I know many friends and family who’ve done this very successfully without alienating their kids from either of their cultures.

Beautifully put!

“We have kids born in England who are now school age and much more aware of their Englishness. Its really weird.”

This is the passage that is openly racist.
Let’s talk about why.
”much more aware of their ‘Englishness’ it’s really weird

Weird is a strong word, and used to describe Englishness IS racist.

Let me tweak it to show you:

”much more aware of their africanness. It’s really weird”

Using the word: weird to describe anyone’s culture is offensive.

Can you see that now?

It’s not okay. Honestly it’s not. Your history and difficulties really can not, and should not be used as a green light to allow racism and bigotry. Stop making excuses.

"...saying that the very ‘Englishness’ of the place is a problem for you is quite another. That flags and other people’s national symbols are somehow offensive to you. That is pure racism. It’s not okay"

@Lastchancechica she was referring to passing through overtly unionist areas in the north, areas that are incredibly intimidating to an Irish person (as they are very often intended. Is the phrase "kill all taigs" familiar to you?). It must be jarring to see your child interpret these areas as familiar and welcoming and have no innate discomfort of not being welcome, or indeed any knowledge of why they're even there. It's not like OP is walking up to the gates of Buckingham Palace and raging at the sight of the Union Jack.

I think that you've misread what "it" refers to in that sentence you quote. She isn't saying that their englishness is weird. She's saying that she personally finds the experience of raising children who are English, and aware of their englishness, really weird. She finds this weird due to the clash in contexts: for them, englishness is an important part of their identity (something OP has tried to encourage, by the sounds of it). For the OP raised in NI displays of englishness like the flag are politically laden. Navigating this difference is what she finds weird.

You very conveniently leave out the explanation she gives about why she finds it weird. If you include it, I think it's obvious that she means this. The examples of "it" being weird that she gives are: her daughter seeing as welcoming flags that are put up in a context of hostility (the DD has no experience of the flag meaning anything other than an innocent celebration of her country. To the OP and her husband, it means something different in the specific context of being displayed in NI). She also gives the example of them learning history at school, and very sensibly asks how she can balance the view without making them anti-english.

It's nothing like saying that it's weird that your children are becoming aware of their "africanness" (which obviously no parent would ever say, they'd specify the country or region their children are from). Unless of course you yourself were raised in a very specific context of seeing symbols of that country used for political stances in a tense conflict.

If my husband and I (both Irish) moved to an African country and our children were born and raised there and identified as, I don't know, Kenyan or Nigerian, I would find that weird, as in strange...because we are Irish kids would be broight up in a culture that we werent. Same if they grew up in Japan or Germany or France or Jordan or literally anywhere in the world. It is not racist to struggle to get your head around the fact that your child is growing up with a different cultural identity to you.

As it happens, my children are Irish but have been raised in a continental European country. I find it weird that their upbringing is so different to ours, that their accents are a strange sort of mixture of Irish and the locals' 'speaking in English' accent. Sometimes my kids have habits and mannerisms that are very specific to where we live and I always find it fascinating. Its different to when one parent is from that country.

It's strange to be Irish, have an Irish husband and have (Irish) kids and bring them up outside of Ireland! Yes it's weird!

I also forgot to mention how incredibly patronising and condescending this post was.

Actually, yes - @Topofthemornintoya is completely correct, even outside of the particular context that the OP is talking in, having children with a different nationality to you is weird. Of course it is! It doesn't mean that the nationality itself is weird.

The last I will say on this as I didn't Intend to derail OP's thread.

I've worded this very clumsily ("must be born/reared in Ireland to be Irish"). That's wrong.

My initial response on nationality was in regards to this;

"Irish are a diaspora. Hence Irish-American, London Irish, etc."

Think the annoyance stems from when "Irish" people in america inflicted horrific racism on black people. They werent Irish, they were americansed with the all consuming racism that is deeply embedded in the culture there. In the same century Frederick Douglass was welcomed throughout Ireland.

I've seen black people in videos comment "Irish" people did this, "Irish" people did that, when referring to what was done to black people in 19th century america. These are not Irish people.

That's basically all I should have said. Dont lump us in with the acts of people 5000 miles away.