Forums Mixed Race Families & ParentingAnyone else dealing with the family side of this after moving back home?

Anyone else dealing with the family side of this after moving back home?

BASIC

12 posts

My husband and I just moved back to Cleveland from Phoenix, mostly because my mom needed help and daycare costs out there were getting ridiculous. We have two kids, 4 and 7, and they’re half Korean and half Black. Out in Arizona people were nosey but mostly polite. Here, family has been loving but also kinda weird in ways I didn’t fully expect. My aunt keeps asking if the kids are “more Korean or more Black,” like she wants a clean answer, and my mom corrected her once but it keeps coming up. The bigger issue is community. My oldest started asking why we don’t have a bunch of friends who “look like us,” which honestly stung because she’s not wrong. We’re trying to get into more family stuff through the Asian services center downtown and a couple parks groups, but it’s slow. How did you all build community when you moved to a place that didn’t really feel set up for your family?

Mar 26

2 replies

Mike Hernandez

#1 · Mar 26

I’m in Chicago and my sister’s kids are Black and Japanese, and she had a rough time after moving closer to her husband’s family in Indiana. What ended up helping was making the kids’ identity visible at home on purpose, not just waiting for school or relatives to do it. She put up photos, got bilingual kids books, played music from both sides of the family, and even started a little Sunday dinner rotation with dishes from each culture. For outside community, she found a lot through Meetup and a local mixed families group on Facebook, which surprised me because I usually think those apps are hit or miss. But meeting other parents who weren’t trying to explain everything away was huge. Sometimes just having one other mom text back “yep, same here” makes the whole week feel less lonely.

connor odeaVIPADMIN

#2 · Mar 26

We moved from Oakland to a smaller town in Georgia and had the exact same feeling, like suddenly everybody was staring and asking questions that sounded innocent but weren’t. What helped us was finding one anchor place first, not trying to solve everything at once. For us it was a Korean church and a kids’ taekwondo class, weird combo maybe, but it gave the kids some consistent faces and made us feel less like we were always explaining ourselves. Also, if family keeps doing the “what are they more of” thing, I’d just start answering it the same way every time: “They’re both, and that’s the point.” It took a while, but repeating it calmly made people back off more than getting into a whole debate.