Malayali Parents Living Abroad: The Biggest Challenges of Raising Young Children (And What Works)
It’s 10 a.m. at the community park in West Windsor, New Jersey, last Saturday. I’m wiping mango sticky juice off my 5-year-old Aiden’s shirt when my phone rings—it’s my amma in Kochi on video call. I hold the phone out to Aiden, and he ducks behind my back, mumbles that he doesn’t want to talk. “Tell her I’m playing,” he says, and takes off after a soccer ball kicked by one of his American classmates. I laugh awkwardly into the camera, and I can see the faint disappointment softening my amma’s smile.
Priya, a fellow Malayali mom sitting next to me on our checkered picnic blanket, nods as I end the call. She’s unpacking a container of salted banana chips her cousin sent from Kochi last week, and her 4-year-old is picking out cheese crackers from a communal snack box instead. She says her son did the exact same thing last Diwali, when her brother called from Trivandrum. He refused to say anything but a quick “hi” and ran off to play, and her brother commented that kids born here don’t care about their roots—what a shame.
No one talks much about how heavy that small comment feels, when you’re already carrying twice the load of most parents here. Raj, Priya’s husband, points out the first gaping hole we all feel: we don’t have the safety net we grew up with. Back home, if you have to work late, you drop your kid at the neighbor’s house down the lane. She’ll feed them sambar rice, ask them about their day, and speak Malayalam the whole time without even thinking about it. Here, the only available last-minute babysitter is the 16-year-old from down the street who thinks idli is “a weird fluffy pancake” and defaults to chicken nuggets for dinner every time. Last month I had a last-minute work deadline, couldn’t find anyone available, and ended up bringing Aiden to my office with a tablet and a pack of biscuits. That never would have happened back home.
Then there’s the double expectation we can never seem to outrun. We’re supposed to raise kids that fit in here, right? They need to speak perfect English, keep up with their classmates, join soccer and art club, not stand out as the “different kids.” But we’re also supposed to turn them into perfect little Malayalis: fluent in the language, able to recite the Onam prayers, love sadya more than pizza, get top grades like the kids back home. I scroll through Instagram and see my cousin’s 7-year-old, who goes to school in Kochi, already goes to tutoring three times a week and just won a state-level math competition. My Aiden can’t even remember his 5 times tables yet, and I’m over here letting him spend afternoons digging for worms in the backyard. I get texts from my uncle that say I’m too lenient, that kids here get spoiled, that I’ll regret it later. It feels like you can’t win. If your kid doesn’t know Malayalam, you’re a bad Malayali parent. If you push them too hard on culture and grades, they’re the weird kid at school that doesn’t fit in.
Over the past three years, we’ve tested small, low-effort things that work better than the big, overwhelming advice we get from relatives back home. For language, we stopped forcing Aiden to speak Malayalam on the spot during video calls. When he was little, we’d scold him if he answered in English, and that just made him hate speaking it altogether. Now, I just speak Malayalam to him at home all the time, no matter what language he answers in. If he says “Can I have a glass of water?” in English, I answer back “Aadyoru hand wash cheythu va” in Malayalam. He understands almost everything now, even if he doesn’t speak it every day. For calls with his grandma, we send a 60-second voice note every Sunday of him saying what he did that week, instead of putting him on the spot for a 20-minute video call. My amma gets to hear him speak Malayalam, he doesn’t have to perform when he’d rather be playing. That works for both sides.
For food, we started a monthly tiffin swap with the five Malayali families in our area. Each of us brings one traditional snack—puttu, unni appam, elaneer payasam, whatever—and all the kids run around and grab what they want. Aiden never ate puttu at home until he saw Rohan, Priya’s kid, piling sugar on it and eating it like it was cookies. Now he asks for puttu for breakfast every Saturday. Kids copy other kids way faster than they copy us, that’s just how it is.
For the constant pressure around achievement, we made one simple rule in our parent group chat: no comparing our kids to kids back in Kerala. We don’t post test scores, we don’t talk about tutoring before third grade. If someone is stressed about a call from a relative back home complaining they’re not doing enough, we just let them vent—no unsolicited advice. Last month when Priya got a 45-minute call from her mother-in-law saying her 4-year-old can’t read Malayalam yet, we all sent her pictures of our own kids who also can’t read Malayalam yet, and that made her feel better enough to get through the week.
Last week, Aiden had show and tell at school. He brought a small pookalam we made together out of dyed rice and dried marigolds from our backyard. He stood up in front of his whole class, explained that Onam is our big harvest festival, we eat sadya on banana leaves, and he taught everyone how to say “onnashamsakal.” That night, he called my amma all by himself, said “Happy Onam, grandma” in clear Malayalam, and hung up to go back to his puzzle. I stood in the hallway, and it felt like a small win.
Some days are still hard. He still answers me in English most of the time, he still says he’d rather have pizza than sambar for dinner, I still get the occasional comment from relatives back home that I’m not doing enough. It’s not perfect. We don’t have it all figured out. But we’re taking it one tiffin swap, one 60-second voice note, one pookalam at a time. That’s enough for now.
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