Malayali Parents Living Abroad: Biggest Challenges Raising Young Children and What We’ve Learned
Last Saturday I was over at Divya’s ground-floor flat in South London, helping her wrap homemade achappam to send back to her parents in Kochi. Her 5-year-old son Nihaal dragged a tattered library book about Indian festivals over to the couch, plopped it between our rolls of brown wrapping paper, and pointed to a photo of a full sadya laid out on a banana leaf. “Is this what Grandma eats every day?” he asked.
Divya paused, her hand sticky with rice flour from the cookies, and nodded. “We eat that too, when we go visit, remember? We had it last summer for Onam at the community hall.” Nihaal frowned, screwing up his nose. “All that food on a leaf? That’s weird. My teacher says we use plates for snack time.”
I’m a primary school teacher working with more than 20 Malayali families across southwest London, and moments like this come up in almost every parent check-in I do. Divya and her husband Arun moved to the UK for work 7 years ago, and they’re like most of the parents I talk to: they want their kids to grow up holding onto the language, food, and traditions they grew up with, while also fitting in comfortably with life here. The challenges don’t get talked about as much as the excitement of raising kids abroad, but they come up over and over.
The first one that almost every parent mentions is holding onto Malayalam without turning it into a fight. When Nihaal was smaller, Divya and Arun made a rule: anyone who speaks English at home gets a small time-out from screen time. If Nihaal answered a question in English, they’d make him repeat it in Malayalam before they answered. It backfired fast. By age 4, Nihaal would just go silent when they asked him anything, or leave the room rather than struggle to find the right words. Last summer when they visited Kerala, Nihaal couldn’t ask his grandma for an extra mango without panicking and crying, because he couldn’t remember the word. Divya told me she sat in the kitchen after that and cried too, convinced she’d already messed up.
One of the first things I suggest to parents in this spot is to drop the rule that kids have to speak Malayalam to you, as long as you keep speaking it to them. Divya started doing that a year ago: if Nihaal asks “Can I have a biscuit?” in English, she answers “Nee biskeet veno? Okay, take one from the jar” in Malayalam, no correction, no demand to repeat it. She still labels fruit and snacks around the kitchen with Malayalam words, and they listen to Malayalam nursery rhymes on the drive to school every morning, but there’s no pressure. Last month, Nihaal spontaneously told his grandma over video call “Ammadeivam made this cake” in Malayalam, no prompting. It’s not perfect, he still mixes more English than not, but the fight is gone. That’s enough for now.
The second big challenge is navigating conflicting ideas around schooling and what kids “should” be doing at what age. Divya gets on a weekly video call with her parents and her brother’s family back in Trivandrum, and almost every call turns to what Nihaal isn’t learning yet. His cousin the same age is already doing two-digit addition and reading Malayalam chapter books, and Divya’s uncle often comments that the British school system is “too easy” and that Nihaal will fall behind. Divya grew up going to tuition classes after school every day starting in first grade, so the guilt sticks. She told me a few months ago she almost signed Nihaal up for a weekly math tutoring class, even though his teacher said he was right on track for his age.
What’s worked for Divya, and a few other parents I know, is small, regular updates. She started sending a 10-second clip to the family WhatsApp group every Sunday: it’s usually Nihaal building a Lego spaceship, reading his English picture book out loud, or growing beans in a paper cup for a school project. It doesn’t stop all the comments about tutoring, but it gives her family a clear picture of what he’s actually learning every week, instead of just comparing him to kids back home. She also set a loose rule: any video call can only have 10 minutes of talk about school progress, after that we have to talk about something else—like the new mango tree in grandma’s backyard, or Nihaal’s new bike. It cuts down on the hour-long guilt trips that used to leave her stressed for days.
The third challenge, the one that’s the most messy, is building that connection to culture when so much of it is tied to places and people 5,000 miles away. A few months ago, Divya dragged Nihaal to the Onam celebration at the local Malayali association, and she was really upset when he refused to join the traditional Thiruvathira dance with the other kids his age. He just wanted to bounce on the bouncy castle they’d set up. She thought that meant he didn’t care about Onam at all. But later that day, when he was doing show and tell at school, he brought the small flower he picked from the pookalam and told his class “My amma and I made this big flower carpet for our holiday this weekend”. That’s when Divya realized he doesn’t need to participate in every tradition the same way she did to feel connected.
Most of the things that work are small: Friday snack time where they watch a 2-minute clip of grandma making unni appam while they eat it, keeping the bronze lamp Divya got as a wedding gift on the dining table instead of tucked away in a cupboard, letting Nihaal mix jam on his puttu if that’s what makes him want to eat it. It’s not the seamless, deep connection Divya thought she’d give him when she moved here. Some weeks she still worries that he’ll never feel as at home in Kerala as she does. But last week, he told her he wants to be both “London boy” and “Kochi boy”, and that’s enough. It’s still a work in progress, always will be.
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