Children develop their relationship with their cultural background slowly, often without anyone noticing. The food they enjoy. The language they speak with grandparents. The traditions they take for granted. The pride or embarrassment they feel about all of these. Helping a child embrace their cultural heritage, rather than drift away from it, takes deliberate but light-touch effort across the years.
Live It, Do Not Just Talk About It
Children absorb culture from lived experience, not from explanations. The single most powerful thing you can do is keep cultural practices alive in the daily life of your family. Cook the food. Speak the language. Mark the holidays. Listen to the music. Tell the stories.
A child raised inside a vibrant cultural life will treat that culture as part of who they are. A child whose culture is talked about but rarely practised will find it harder to claim later in life, even if they want to.
Visit the Places
Wherever possible, take your child to the places that form part of their cultural background. International schools with multicultural communities often weave this kind of cross-cultural experience directly into the school year through trips, exchanges and partnerships. JFK and similar international schools, with their diverse pupil populations, give children a head start in seeing their own culture as one of many valid ways of living.
Family trips to ancestral home countries, family gatherings with relatives still living in those countries, and visits to cultural sites all give children a tangible sense of where they come from. The trip to a great-grandmother’s village means more than a thousand explanations.
Language as Heritage
For many families, language is the most concrete carrier of cultural heritage. A child who loses the family language often, decades later, regrets it. Protect the language even when it is inconvenient.
- Keep at least one parent speaking the family language at home.
- Read bedtime stories in the family language regularly.
- Encourage regular phone calls with relatives in the family language.
- Send the child to language classes or summer schools if formal schooling is not available in the language.
Even imperfect, accented, conversational fluency is far better than total loss of the language. Children almost always thank their parents in adulthood for the linguistic gift.
Honour the Difficult Parts
Almost every cultural heritage carries some difficult parts. Periods of persecution, displacement, war, prejudice or hardship. As your child grows, share the harder history alongside the easier celebrations. A culture is not just festivals and food. It is also the experiences that shaped a community across generations.
Children who know the full story tend to feel a deeper connection than those who have only seen the highlights. The hard parts, age-appropriately shared, become part of how a child understands their own resilience and identity.
Friendships in Both Worlds
Help your child build friendships that span their cultural heritage and their daily life. Children of the same background often find each other through community events, language schools, religious centres and family networks. Encourage these connections without forcing them.
At the same time, ensure your child has friendships across the broader culture they live in. The point is not to live in a bubble, but to be at home in more than one community. That kind of comfortable plurality is one of the great gifts of a multicultural childhood.
Many bicultural teenagers go through a phase of cultural distance. They may reject the family language for a while, dismiss certain traditions, prefer not to be associated with the heritage publicly. This phase is almost always temporary, and the strongest predictor of how it resolves is how the family responded to it.
Resist the urge to push back hard. A teenager who is forced to embrace their culture will typically distance themselves further. A teenager who is allowed to move away gently, while the culture remains visible and warm in the family home, usually returns of their own accord in their twenties.
The Long Return
Across many migrant and bicultural families, there is a consistent pattern. Children in adolescence often distance themselves from their heritage. Young adults often return to it, with new appreciation. By the time they are raising their own children, they often want to pass on much of what they once tried to shed.
Your job in childhood is not to lock the culture in. It is to keep it alive, warm and available, so that when your child is ready to claim it fully, the culture is still there waiting. For more on international and multicultural education, visit https://jfk.ch/.
About the Author
This article was contributed by JFK School, a leading international school in Switzerland with a strong bilingual, multicultural ethos and a global community of pupils and families.
Learn more: https://jfk.ch/
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