Malayali Parents Living Abroad: The Biggest Challenges of Raising Young Children (and Real Solutions That Work)
Last month, I showed up at my friend Devi’s Chicago apartment for Sunday dosa brunch, right on time, and found her leaning against the kitchen counter staring at a silent Zoom screen. Her 7-year-old son Arjun was curled behind the couch, half-hidden by a pile of Lego bricks, and her 5-year-old daughter Mia was shoveling coconut chutney onto her dosa like nothing had happened. “Amma just called from Kochi,” Devi said, wiping a smudge of sambar off her apron. “Arjun was supposed to show her his new spaceship. He refused to speak a word of Malayali to her. Said he ‘forgot how.’”
Devi and her husband Raj moved to the US 8 years ago, both working in tech, and their kids were born here. Over the last year of meeting for coffee and playdates, we’ve talked through the small, constant tensions that don’t come up for most local parents raising kids here. The first and most common one, almost every Malayali parent I know mentions it, is holding onto language without pushing kids away.
Devi grew up speaking only Malayali at home, and she always assumed she’d do the same for her kids. But between English preschool, playdates with neighbors, and every kids’ show on Netflix being in English, it felt like the language was slipping away before she noticed. If she corrected every English sentence at dinner, the kids would stop talking altogether. If she let it slide, they couldn’t hold a 5-minute conversation with their grandparents, who never learned English. She tried formal after-school Malayali classes for a term, but Arjun came home every week complaining it was boring and just memorizing words for tests.
What ended up working far better was a small change a grandma from the local Malayali association suggested: 15 minutes of “Malayali only” snack time every day after school. No phones, no homework, no English allowed. They make unni appam or ela ada together, and if the kids speak English, Devi just blinks and says “Sorry, I don’t understand that. Can you try again?” It’s playful, not punitive, and they get an extra piece of jaggery if they get through the whole 15 minutes without slipping. She also started taking them to a monthly community story time where older grandmas act out stories of Mahabali instead of teaching grammar. After six months, Arjun can now tell his grandma all about his Lego sets in Malayali, which is enough for right now.
The next big challenge we talked about was helping kids feel connected to their culture without making them feel like outsiders at school. A few weeks before that brunch, Arjun’s school hosted an international day, and Devi packed puttu for him to share with his class. He came home crying, threw his lunchbox on the floor, and said the other kids asked why his breakfast looked like wet sawdust. No one wanted to try it, and he said he never wanted to bring “weird Kerala food” to school again.
Devi told me she stood by the sink and cried a little after he went to his room. Food was how she stayed connected to home when she lived thousands of miles away, and she thought she was passing that on to her kids. Instead, it just made Arjun feel different. She didn’t force him to bring Malayali food to school after that. Instead, she packs one thing he knows all the other kids eat — usually a turkey sandwich or a pack of Goldfish — and keeps a small container of whatever she made that week in her bag for them to share together when he gets home. For the next year’s international day, they made fried banana fritters with jaggery together, cut into small bite-sized pieces, and all the kids asked for seconds. She also doesn’t fuss when Arjun asks for cheeseburgers at the weekly community potluck — he gets a cheeseburger and a little of her avial, no shame attached.
The third challenge that comes up over and over is balancing the academic expectations most Malayali parents grow up with the slower, more play-focused school system here. Devi grew up in Kerala, where straight A’s are expected, and engineering or medicine are seen as the only successful career paths. Back home, her mom still asks every week why Arjun isn’t in after-school math tutoring, why he spends two hours a day drawing instead of doing extra work. When Arjun brought home a B on his second-grade math test a few months ago, Devi stayed up half the night panicking, convinced she was being too lax. Then Arjun’s teacher pulled her aside and said Arjun is one of the only kids in the class who can explain how he solves a word problem out loud — he just rushed through the last question to get to art class.
Devi set a small, clear rule for herself after that: only grades below a C get a sit-down conversation. Any grade higher than that, the first question she asks when Arjun gets home is “What was the funniest thing that happened today?” not “What did you get on your test?” She also sends her mom a photo of Arjun’s latest drawing every week along with his test grades, so her mom can see that art matters here, too. She has a group chat with four other Malayali moms raising little kids in the US, and they vent about grandparent expectations every night, so no one feels like they’re the only one messing it up.
Last week, I ran into Devi at the grocery store. Arjun was with her, and when his grandma called, he answered and told her, in halting but clear Malayali, all about his new Lego dinosaur. After he hung up, Devi whispered that some days are still hard. Some days Mia refuses to speak anything but English, some days Arjun says he hates that he can’t keep up with his cousins on group calls, some days she still lies awake feeling like she’s doing it all wrong. There’s no perfect balance, no way to make them fully one thing or the other. Right now, 15 minutes of Malayali snack time a day, banana fritters for international day, and no more panicking over B’s is enough.
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