Malayali Parents Living Abroad: Biggest Challenges Raising Young Kids (And What Actually Works)
The pizza grease was already seeping through the paper plates at Arjun’s fifth birthday party when he held up the wrapped parcel from his grandma in Kochi, ripped it open, and looked up at my friend Divya, confused. “Why does grandma talk so weird on the note?” he asked, loud enough for half the parents on the basement couch to turn around. “All my friends’ grandmas write in English.”
Divya laughed it off, passing around a plate of murukku she’d spent three hours frying the night before, and changed the subject to the bounce house out front. But when everyone left and we were picking up popped balloon bits off the carpet, she crumpled a napkin into a tight ball and said, “I don’t know how to do this anymore. I moved here for college, met Ajay, built our life here. But I didn’t think about how hard it would be to give Arjun that part of me.”
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Malayali friends raising young kids here in Chicago, most of them first-generation expats who left Kerala for work or school. The challenges aren’t the generic expat stuff you read about, like finding good curry powder or remembering daylight savings. They’re small, daily things that add up to a quiet kind of worry most people don’t talk about.
The biggest one I see is holding onto Malayalam language. Divya and Ajay made a rule years ago: only Malayalam spoken at home. But Arjun and his 3-year-old sister Maya almost always answer back in English. Last month, Divya pulled out the alphabet flashcards she ordered from a small shop in Trivandrum, and Arjun pushed them off the table, saying they were “dumb baby words” because none of his classmates at preschool know what a kodi or a pappadam is. He’s right, of course. Outside of the monthly Kerala association picnic, there’s nowhere for him to use the language. No playground conversations, no TV shows he watches with friends, so it feels like a useless, awkward thing to him.
The next big one is fitting in at school without letting go of family traditions. Divya told me about the weekly snack share at Arjun’s preschool. The first week she sent puttu steamed with coconut and a ripe banana, just like she ate growing up. One kid bit off a tiny piece and said it tasted like wet playdoh, and the whole table laughed. Arjun came home and told her he would only take goldfish crackers to snack share after that, no “Indian food.” Divya said she stood at the kitchen sink that night upset, because she felt like she was either making Arjun an outcast or erasing the part of him that’s Malayali, no middle ground.
Then there’s the distance from extended family. Most families can only afford to go back to Kerala once every two or three years, between work vacation limits and the cost of four plane tickets. Arjun has six cousins he’s only met once, and he can’t keep their names straight. Video calls feel awkward most of the time: Arjun will hide behind the couch when it’s time to say hi, because he can’t follow the fast back-and-forth between his parents and grandma, and he doesn’t know what to say.
But over the past year, I’ve watched Divya and other parents try small, low-effort things that actually move the needle, no big life changes required. For language, they stopped quizzing Arjun on flashcards and started doing “Malayalam Cartoon Saturday” every week. Divya found old episodes of the kids’ show Pattampoochi that she watched as a kid on YouTube, and they watch one 20-minute episode after breakfast every week. No homework, no pop quizzes. Arjun started picking up silly phrases from the show without trying, and now he randomly says them during dinner just to make Maya laugh. They also swapped one bedtime story a week for a recording Ajay’s mom made of all the old fairy tales she told Divya when she was pregnant, so Arjun gets used to the sound of her voice and the flow of the language.
For snack time and school, Divya started packing a tiny portion of whatever traditional food she wants to send, plus a 3-sentence note Arjun can read to his class. It says, “This is a food my family makes in Kerala, India. You can have a tiny bite if you want.” Most kids say yes, and now Arjun’s favorite thing to bring to class parties is his grandma’s banana chips, which all the kids beg for. He doesn’t get teased anymore, because he gets to be the kid who brings the cool, tasty snack instead of the weird one.
For family connection, they turned the monthly awkward 10-minute “say hi to grandma” call into a monthly shared activity. Last month, Ajay’s mom walked Arjun through making pazham pori, step by step, over Zoom. Arjun got to mash the bananas and drop them in the oil, and he was so proud of the finished fritters he held them up to the screen for ten minutes. Now he asks to call grandma every Sunday to show her whatever Lego he built that week, instead of hiding. He doesn’t say much in Malayalam yet, but they have a shared thing to talk about that doesn’t feel forced.
It’s still not perfect. Last week, Arjun told Divya he doesn’t want to go to the weekly Malayalam summer school the association runs, because his soccer clinic is at the same time. Divya let him skip, and she still lies awake some nights worrying that when they go back to Kerala next year, he won’t be able to talk to his great grandma, who’s 92 and has never spoken a word of English. Some days she still feels like she’s failing at giving him the childhood she had, the one that was full of Malayalam songs and big family weddings and puttu for breakfast every Saturday.
But last week when I stopped by for dinner, Arjun ran up to me holding a drawing he made for grandma, and said, slow and a little wobbly, “Etha njaan varacha.” Divya leaned against the kitchen counter, sipping her chai, and smiled. It’s not fluency, it’s not perfect, but it’s something. Some days that’s all you get, and that’s enough.
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