Ways to Teach Your Kids About Your Cultural Heritage

Parents from immigrant and multicultural families may suffer from anxiety about their children not being able to connect with their cultural heritage. This is especially true if the children grow up away from relatives or cultural enclaves. Children who don’t understand their heritage may also become confused about their own identity, especially if they stand out from other people in the local population in some way.

Fortunately, children have a capacity to learn and master languages using online language tutors and different cultural cues in a way most adults would find difficult. However, children may develop an aversion to your home culture if you impose it too strictly in your household. The key is to teach your children about your home culture in a way that is both engaging and natural. Here are a few ways you can teach your children about your heritage that ticks off both those boxes.

1.) Introduce them to food from your culture

Cuisine strikes at the very gut of what makes a culture unique. Each culture and family has a specific combination of ingredients, techniques, and flavors that help define it. If you’re raising your children in a country different from where you grew up in, cuisine may be the only way they could really connect with your heritage.

Children can be picky, but it’s better to start feeding them a variety of different foods from both your own culture and the country they’re growing up in as soon as possible. You shouldn’t force them to like certain foods from your culture if they don’t respond positively to it. However, you can make sure that they’re familiar with it and understand that you find it important.

2.) Talk to them in your native language

A unique language or dialect is at the very core of most cultures, and parents who want their children to understand their heritage may want to teach their native language in order to help facilitate that knowledge.

Fortunately, young children are natural sponges for different languages.  Research indicates that for children under 6 years of age, learning a second language is just as easy as learning their first. This can easily be confirmed by countless people who grew up in multilingual households and cultures. Parents who wish their children to grow up speaking more than one language or the language of their home culture should speak to their children in that language as much as possible during this period.

3.) Print out fun educational coloring sheets

Coloring is an ideal way for small children to learn about virtually any topic – even their own heritage. Coloring books have been shown to help improve motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and attention spans in children. The hands-on experience of coloring sheets can also serve to reinforce learning and open up avenues for creativity.

This educational flags of East and Southeast Asia activity book by Carrot Ink is just one of many free resources online that can help young children understand their own culture as well as that of other countries in a fun and productive way. This set will help your child learn about the costumes, foods, and flags, and other basic facts about different countries in the region.

4.) Teach them your culture’s etiquette

Some practices that we do in our home country may not be acceptable in our new country and vice versa. For instance, touching a person’s head is taboo in Thailand, where in much of the world, it’s acceptable to gently tease kids or show your appreciation by patting them on the head. Using the left hand for handling food or money is also unacceptable in many countries in the world, and if your child is left-handed they may need to know this if you’re planning on visiting a country where this is the case.

You will get plenty of opportunities to practice your culture’s etiquette with your child during meals and when you meet relatives. Be sure to be instructive and fair with your child if they do something that is frowned upon, especially if they’re not in constant contact with your culture.

5.) Take them shopping when you travel back to the old country

Shopping experiences can be totally different in each country. If you have the opportunity to take your kids to your home country, make sure to take them to a marketplace. Your kids will likely learn a lot about your culture and they’ll be excited to see interesting stuff they may not find in local shopping malls. Even if you don’t have the opportunity to take them abroad, your children can still learn a lot through photos, articles, and YouTube videos of street markets in your home country.