Overview
When Iranian-Canadian parents come to us about their children, the conversations often share a particular shape. The presenting concern might be the daughter who refuses to speak Farsi at home anymore. The son who is being teased at school for his lunch. The teenager who is angry that you won't let her sleep over at non-Iranian friends' houses. The young adult who has chosen a partner the family does not approve of.
The seven-year-old whose teacher has flagged behaviour you don't recognize as a problem because he doesn't have it at home. Underneath each of these, almost always, is the same larger question: how do we raise children between two cultures-
Evidence summary
What do we hold onto, what do we let go of, what do we not yet know we will lose, what do we negotiate together as a family — and how do we do this without breaking the children or ourselves in the process- This article is a guide for the parents asking these questions. The ground truth Bicultural children are not half-Iranian, half-Canadian.
They are something genuinely third — neither what their parents are, nor what their non-immigrant peers are, but a particular hybrid being whose identity is built from both sources and is its own thing. This third identity is real. It is not a deficit. It is not pathological. It is also not easy.
Care considerations
Bicultural children typically navigate, throughout childhood and adolescence and often into adulthood:
- The constant translation between the cultural rules at home and the cultural rules at school, with friends, in public
- The realization, somewhere around age six or seven, that their family is different from most of their friends' families
- The negotiation between the language that holds their parents' deepest emotions and the language they think and dream in
- The relationship to a homeland they may have never visited
- The pressure (sometimes spoken, often silent) to vindicate the family's immigration choice
- The complicated love-and-frustration relationship with each culture