Husband & I grew up in Canada, moved to Uk prior to having children. Went back to Canada to give birth but kids grew up in Uk & Greece (husband a greek national also) . Kids were there until 18 then one went to Canada & other now in Uk. Their Greek isn’t fluent as they attended an English school

I’m American and live with my Japanese husband and daughter in Japan. It’s very challenging.

1. I find it difficult not having my family nearby, and visiting is such a lengthy and expensive process. We are always busy and don’t ever get a break…except once every couple months we spring for a babysitter 😂

2. My husbands family lives nearby but because they provide no help/support and create additional time commitments/stress, I sometimes feel resentment that we need to invest so much time in keeping his family happy but not mine.

3. Japanese culture still has pretty ingrained gender roles, and mothers are expected to be pretty self sacrificial. That’s just not who I am or how I was raised so I feel like I’m going against the grain every single day. (For example trying to work with small kids here can be challenging due to work culture not being conducive to kids, or the ingrained expectation that there will be a wife at home doing the heavy childcare lifting).

4. My daughter is picking up both English and Japanese. Her Japanese is of course stronger, but that’s fine and to be expected. As long as she can communicate in English I don’t mind.

5. It does make me sad sometimes that she feels more distant to me than she would if I were raising her in America. My husband can understand and bond with her about things that I will never understand because I grew up differently. I sometimes feel a bit jealous about that!

So yes it absolutely has been difficult! But I know having children always is, so…I cannot say I have experience raising kids in my own country either, so maybe it isn’t much easier really…? 😂

I can’t answer this but it’s fairly likley I won’t have them due to cost of living and housing.

So I’m American and my wife is Austrian, w Eli e in Austria and have two younger kids aged 7 and 3 years old. To answer your questions:

• challenging, not really. My wife’s family lives close by and they are awesome and super helpful, but It would still be nice to have another group we could ask to help watch the kids as both my wife and I work full time. It‘s more a bit sad that we don‘t get to see each other that often.

• bilingual comes naturally with kids as they are absolute sponges when it comes to learning language. We just do it that my wife only speaks German to the kids and I speak English. It took a bit longer for my kids to start taking in English, but they understood it from very early on.

• it can be tough, they are definitely more Austrian than American and there isn‘t much I can do to change that. We visit the US every year and we celebrate American holidays to try to get them familiar with the culture, but it‘s still foreign for them.

I am German/American, my mother is from the US. From what she has told me, it was pretty challenging. For one, my dad’s family never liked her, and her own was too far away. So she was on her own a lot. She handled the language aspect pretty well. I grew up speaking English with her, German with my paternal grandmother, who lived in the same house. I spoke a jumbled mess of german-english for a while, but it got better quickly and the second language was always an advantage. My mom made sure to teach me to read and write in English, and also some american history. She had me reading “To kill a Mockingbird” by the time I was 12🤣. She had my grandma send school books, magazines etc. for me to read and study with. She recorded American family TV shows, which were aired in German TV at weird times, for us to watch. We celebrated American holidays like Christmas Presents on the 25th (additionally to the 24th, which is the German custom) and Thanksgiving, and she made American food for us, like pumpkin pie, turkey,… and also had relatives send other American treats like Candy Cane’s, Hershey Kisses, Peanut Butter cups… We spoke English around the house, and watched movies in English (if we had the video cassettes in that language). She made sure we send cards to relatives and talk to them on the phone a lot. That was all in the early 2000s, nowadays you have many more ways to bring your culture to your children than back then, of course (FaceTime, Netflix offers many languages, you can buy books in your language on Amazon…).

All in all I can say, that I do know my heritage, and the USA doesn’t feel completely foreign to me, but it will never be my home. Mostly because I didn’t grow up there, but also for socio-economical reasons (I like the place, I like the people, I don’t like… everything else).

But from my mom’s side and her efforts to make us feel like Americans, she did a good job. If the country were in a better state, I totally feel like I could live there without feeling like a foreigner.

French/American living in Korea with Korean spouse. It sucks being away from my family yes, but my mother in law is close by and helps a lot. Son hasn’t started talking yet but I only speak English to him and wife only speaks Korean. I plan on adding French into the mix a little later. I make sure he has plenty of books with characters from American and French TV shows and history so he knows there is a world beyond Korea.

Best of luck to you

I’m Finnish and I met my Brazilian husband in Canada where we’ve lived for the past 14 years. Life before kids was a breeze but after having kids (both during Covid) it has been SO hard. At least the people who have a local partner can normally get help from their family but we don’t have anyone. Raising our kids to speak 4 languages (our languages + 2 local ones) has been the easiest part of this whole ordeal. I feel like they identify with both our home countries because they speak the languages fluently and consume a fair bit of music, literature and tv from there too. They see themselves as Canadians but feel totally at ease in both of our home countries. I feel like knowing the language and having access to your culture and people (family and friends) is key.

Husband and I are both American, and we’ve lived in Australia for almost six years. We moved just after our daughter turned one.

The separation from family hasn’t been that bad, but I think it’s because 1) my family is spaced out all over the US, and 2) his family is concentrated in the Philly area and we lived in the PNW. So, we didn’t see family all that often anyway.

Technology makes it’s so much easier to keep in touch (we FaceTime/Skype with people much more regularly now than we ever did in the US). I miss my friends, of course, but it forced us to be more social in our new community (not a bad thing), because emergencies have come up when I need someone to pick-up my kid from school, etc.

We obviously don’t have to deal with a language barrier, and there is a lot of cultural overlap between the US and Australia; our transition has been very easy.

My husband is local. His family lived some distance away so I did not have family close by.

I was stay a home mom with 3 kids and I did not find it particularly difficult raising them in my husband’s country

When I migrated my goal was to assimilate as close as possible. 20 years later I feel at home here. My kids identify themselves similarly to what local kids identify themselves as.

Do you find it hard for them to identify with your country, and how to help them

… this reminds me often mentioned on Reddit issue, lol:

Apparently, European Redditors don’t like it when Americans identity themselves anything other than Americans, even those with roots in another country.

I’ve had two kids in Australia. Both my wife and I are American.

I don’t care if they identify as American. I don’t particularly identify with it either, aside from an anxiety about its political future.

Not having family around has been brutal. They still visit, but it’s been a rough few years. We never get a break unless we pay through the nose for a babysitter and our house is always a tip because we can’t keep up with chores.

I’m German / Senegalese, my wife is Chinese and we live in Hong Kong. It’s been not been a problem to not have a family network around us but mainly because we are fortunate to have nanny’s and also because our own families aren’t a really supportive to begin with. Our kids are trilingual (Mandarin, German and English). They speak all languages fluently but it was much harder than I thought it would be. German is my mother tongue and yet it took a lot of effort from my side to get the kids to speak it natively. We go to Germany around 1-2 months a year and I speak and read to them in German only. My wife did the same with mandarin and it was just as hard because English is so so dominant. with regards to identification it’s also not easy. We saw that being half Chinese “only”, the Chinese always consider them to be foreigners and always make comments how good their Chinese is as foreigners. In Germany my kids are simply “German” and my kids identify pretty strongly as German. They also identify as Hong Kongers though and also hold the passport. I recommend to travel as much as possible to your home country and read lots of stories in your target language. That helped a lot for us.

I’m American, my husband is German and we live in Germany. Our kids are 7 and 4.

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• We have tremendous support from my husband’s family. My family is not generally super helpful anyway, so even if they lived near us I doubt they would help in any significant manner.
• Our kids are technically bilingual, but their German is much stronger than their English. I speak English to them at home, but that’s basically the extent of their English exposure. They understand English perfectly, but strongly prefer to speak German.
• Our kids are dual citizens, but they don’t identify with America and that’s honestly fine with me. My oldest has visited the US twice and my youngest only once. I’ve been gone so long that America doesn’t even really feel like home to me, so I’m ok with them feeling German rather than American. They see America as a far away place where their grandparents live, which is honestly pretty accurate. It will be interesting to see how they identify as they get older.

Scottish married to a French living in France. It’s hard at times. My kids are bilingual so far but still young, I want to make sure they can natively read and write English with a high level, I’m not sure how at the moment because most bilingual schools are way too expensive. All my family now lives in the US too (and I spent a lot of time there), so it’s a bit mixed in terms of cultures

My Son is English , his partner Dutch and they live in Norway . My 18 month old granddaughter has just started to say a few words in a mixture of 3 languages . My other English son’s partner is Czech and my 2 year old grandson is speaking a mixture of Czech and English . I think with children it just comes naturally and the younger they are the easier it is .

Had my daughter abroad and raised in another country, still abroad. My partner was never a local in any of these countries. She comes from an Asian country and me a European.

It’s definitely challenging, especially when the kid starts going to school. So many things to learn and so much stress. Also, absolutely zero help from either of our families. But we manage.

Regarding languages, I only use mine and my wife hers, which makes my daughter perfectly trilingual. It was never a huge challenge to her and now she can learn new languages very easily. She’s also way more flexible than other kids when it comes to new cultures, as she grew up in a very international environment. It’s a massive advantage to her.