Roots & Wings: How an NRI Parenting Community on Instagram Helps Raise Grounded Kids Abroad
The floor is sticky under my knees. My four-year-old is sitting cross-legged in front of her plate, staring at the rice like it has personally offended her. I asked her to eat with her fingers, the way I did at her age in Mumbai. She asked for a fork. Then she asked for pasta. Then she started crying because the rice was “too sticky,” which really meant she was tired and hungry and I was tired and hungry, and we were both stuck in a small apartment in Munich with no grandmother to smooth things over.
I pulled out my phone while she sulked. That’s when I saw a post from Roots & Wings, an Instagram community for NRI parents. The post was a simple question: “When your child corrects your English pronunciation, what do you say?” The comments were a flood of parents sharing stories. One mother wrote, “My son tells me it’s ‘zee’ not ‘zed’ and I just smile because at least he’s learning.” Another said, “I pretended not to hear the first time. Now we laugh about it.” I laughed too, for the first time that evening.
Roots & Wings is exactly what its name suggests. It’s a space for parents raising children far from their own childhoods, trying to give them both a sense of where they come from and the confidence to belong where they are. It is not a polished parenting advice page. There are no infographics with five easy steps to raise a bicultural child. Instead, there are messy, honest snippets from daily life: a photo of a child painting a diya on a paper plate, a story about a toddler who calls his grandmother “Dadi” only on video calls and refuses to say it in front of his playgroup friends, a poll asking “What do you do when your child doesn’t want to speak your mother tongue at the dinner table?”
I joined the community about a year ago, after a particularly bad evening. We were getting ready for Diwali. I had spent two hours making besan ladoo using a YouTube recipe that turned out too dry. My husband was trying to string lights along the window, but our daughter kept pulling them down because she wanted to play with the plastic elephants we had set up near the tea light. I remember thinking, this is not the Diwali I grew up with. Back home, there was noise and chaos and cousins and the smell of ghee everywhere. Here, it was just the three of us, and the silence after her bedtime felt heavier than the festival.
That night, I searched for something—I don’t know what—and found Roots & Wings. The first post I scrolled to was from a mother in Texas. She had written about how her daughter asked if they could have “normal Christmas” instead of Diwali. The comments were gentle. No one said she was a bad parent. Several people shared their own versions of that hurt. One father suggested she let her daughter invite a friend over for Diwali. Another mother said she had started calling it “the festival of lights” in English and that helped the kids connect. I didn’t respond that night. I just read, and it felt a little less quiet.
The practical side of NRI parenting is rarely about the big rituals. It’s about the small, unglamorous moments: packing a lunchbox with parathas and feeling a tiny pang when your child trades them for a sandwich; explaining why we touch the feet of elders, and then having no elders around to touch; hearing your child use your native language with an accent that doesn’t match yours. Roots & Wings doesn’t pretend to have a solution for all of that. But it offers a kind of steady, non-judgmental company that is hard to find elsewhere.
I started reading the community’s posts during my daughter’s afternoon nap, mostly for the comments. A mother in Singapore shared a trick: she gives her kids a choice between two Indian snacks after school, not as a way to push the culture, but simply as an everyday option. Another parent in the UK said she started a weekly “radio hour” where they listen to old Hindi songs during dinner, and her son now requests a particular song because it reminds him of his grandfather. These are not grand strategies. They are small, repeatable actions that quietly build a bridge between generations.
One post that stayed with me was about language. The community moderator wrote something like, “We can’t force fluency. But we can make sure the language is present in the room—through music, through phone calls, through the way we say goodnight.” That changed how I think about it. I used to worry because my daughter answered me in English most of the time. I would correct her, and she would simply ignore me. Then I started leaving the TV on a Hindi cartoon while I cooked. I didn’t say anything about it. After a week, she asked, “What does that fox say?” I told her, and she repeated the word, experimenting with the sound. It wasn’t a breakthrough. But it was a moment of curiosity, and that felt enough.
Another thing the community does well is normalizing the awkwardness. There was a post about how to talk to children about race when you’re a brown parent in a mostly white school. The comments were raw. Many parents admitted they didn’t know how to explain why their skin color was different from their teacher’s without making it a big deal. One mother wrote about her son coming home and asking if he could “be white for a day” so he could “look like everyone else.” The responses were not preachy. People shared what they actually did: reading picture books with brown characters, cooking lunchbox food that is unapologetically spicy, inviting the class over for a pongal celebration. The idea was not to fight the awkwardness, but to let it sit there and be recognized.
I’ve used a few of those ideas myself. Last month, my daughter’s playgroup did a “family traditions” day. Usually, I would have made something easy like cupcakes. Instead, I remembered a comment from Roots & Wings about letting kids be the ambassador of their own culture. So I suggested we make a simple sweet dish together—just rice, milk, sugar, and cardamom. She poured the milk, stirred the pot, and told her classmates, “We eat this for Diwali.” She got it a little wrong—she said “Deepali” and the kheer was more like soup—but she was proud. The teacher told me later that my daughter talked about it for the rest of the day.
I’m not writing this to say Roots & Wings is the answer to every problem. It isn’t. There are days when I scroll through the feed and feel worse, because someone else is managing to do a full Bharatanatyam performance for their kid’s school assembly while I can barely remember the words to “Twinkle Twinkle” in my own mother tongue. There are also days when the algorithm shows me posts that feel too simple, like “10 ways to teach kids about Indian festivals,” and I think, that’s not really how it works. Raising a child abroad is not a checklist. It is a constant negotiation between what you know and what they are growing into.
What the community does well, though, is hold the middle ground. It doesn’t tell you to preserve everything exactly as it was, because that’s impossible. It doesn’t tell you to let go of everything and assimilate, because that loses something too. Instead, it encourages you to notice the small moments: your child using a Hindi word in the middle of a German sentence, the way she claps during aarti even if she doesn’t understand the words, the silent nod she gives you when you tell a story about your childhood and she actually listens. Those moments are not the full answer. But they are evidence that both roots and wings can grow in the same pot.
The other evening, my daughter came into the kitchen while I was rolling out chapatis. She watched for a minute, then said, “When I grow up, I’m going to make these for my kids too.” I didn’t say anything. I just kept rolling. The dough was sticky again, but the floor felt a little less sticky. Or maybe I just didn’t mind it so much.
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