You wake up, and like every morning you have a cup of coffee. If everything goes well, you make it in time to drop your children at daycare. Waving them goodbye you have this feeling again that something feels off. You cannot point out what is actually wrong, but somehow you are also unable to shake it off.
This is the life of many expat parents across the globe. Every single day.
This unnamed feeling, this shadow of worry. Everything is fine, but somehow you don't feel like you fully belong.
The reality is, that you are experiencing different versions of your world every day, depending on the situation. There is a wonderful framework of Erin Meyer where we see how different societies interact and perceive the world around them:
- Northern/Central European culture tends to value structure, direct communication, explicit responsibilities, and a strong separation between personal and professional life.
- A Hispanic/Latino-like culture tends to place more weight on relationships, warmth and personal connection. Communication is expressive and family plays a big role in the establishment of identity.
The Cultural Gap
And that explains part of the feeling. Parents who grew up in warm, familiar environments hand their children over to institutions defined by rigid rules, and strict individual autonomy. At home they try to keep the warmth, affection is expressive, time is fluid, and belonging is implicit. The system outside is a structured institutional machine where rules are explicit, and independence is expected early. The friction between these two ecosystems exists by construction.
Are my kids fitting in? Are we losing them? Why does this feel like such an uphill battle?
It is a complex beast, the mind of expat parents. However, the feeling of “not quite fitting in” is something that every expat has experienced at some point in their life. However, when you examine this dynamic through the lens of data we can see that this friction is not a personal failure. It is a systems gap.
When a child raised in a warm, expressive culture enters a highly structured host society that goes straight to the point (sometimes at the point of rudeness) there is a mismatch in the child's brain. Two different answers and two different behaviours are ready to step into the spot light.
Culture shock is often posed as a problem of resilience. One just need to resist and play by the rules. Here is a big confusion, assimilation does not mean to erase the set of beliefs one has at home just to fit in.
The other way around, resistance will result in a failed integration. Then where is the sweet spot?
Killing the heritage language
Parents are sometimes encouraged to remove parts of their heritage for the sake of assimilation. The clearest example is the language. Health and education professionals are still advising families against using more than one language with their children, warning of potential speech delays and adaptation at school.
In 2026, where is this coming from? It has been shown that young children are remarkably good at learning languages, and bilingual children can reach early language milestones at similar ages to children growing up with one language. I find that incredible. They are not just learning words. They are building a whole mapping in their brain with context from different languages. They have the ability to see and understand the world in multiple ways.
That should be seen as an advantage, not a problem. And yet, families can still find themselves in environments where anything outside the norm raises eyebrows. This is where the question becomes bigger than language development. A home language is often tied to grandparents, jokes, affection, memories, traditions, and the way a family feels like a family.
So when parents are asked to give that up, they are not simply making a practical language choice. They may also be giving up one of the ways their child connects to where they come from. Language is a powerful emotional anchor, and we are not protecting this.
Instead of asking whether the home language is getting in the way, perhaps we should ask ourselves what a child loses when we remove one of the languages through which they know their family, their culture, and themselves.
The answer is not to reject the culture around us or to live inside a cultural bubble. Children need to understand the world they are growing up in. But they should not have to lose one part of themselves in order to function in another.
The goal is not to force assimilation, nor is it to retreat into isolated cultural bubbles. The goal is integration by design: equipping children with robust internal emotional anchors while simultaneously helping them find themselves in both worlds
How to brigde both worlds?
We cannot remove every cultural clash, nor should we try to make every environment feel the same. But we can make those differences easier to understand. We can protect the language of home, explain the rules of the world outside, and give children space to build an identity that does not require them to cut themselves in half.
Maybe belonging is not something a place simply gives us.
Maybe it is something we can help build.
If belonging is affected by the gap between the safety bubble of home and the world outside, then we need to look more closely at what happens inside that gap: language, identity, school, relationships, code-switching, and the small everyday choices families make without even realizing it. That is what I want to explore next.
Not with the promise of a perfect formula, but with a simple question: if we understand the forces shaping belonging better, can we give families better tools to navigate them?
This article is the beginning of that work.
Sources reviewed
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Meyer, E. (2014).
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business.
PublicAffairs.
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Hay, I., Tsourtos, G., & Bickford, J. (2021).
A qualitative inquiry of professionals' perceptions of bilingualism for children with language delay.
International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 23(5), 497–507.
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Feldman, H. M. (2019).
How Young Children Learn Language and Speech.
Pediatrics in Review, 40(8), 398–411.
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Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., & Luk, G. (2012).
Bilingualism: Consequences for mind and brain.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(4), 240–250.
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Byers-Heinlein, K., & Lew-Williams, C. (2013).
Bilingualism in the Early Years: What the Science Says.
Learning Landscapes, 7(1), 95–112.
View source ↗
About Dr. Isabel Cristina Pérez Verona
Dr. Isabel is an Enterprise Data Platform Leader at Munich Re and a PhD-trained technologist living near Munich. Operating at the intersection of AI, complex data systems, and cross-cultural psychology, she writes on leveraging systems thinking to navigate identity and parenting in a globalized world.