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Well-Intentioned Compliments Appalled My Gen-Alpha Children
We propagate implicit bias through everyday language
Raising cross-cultural children with fluid identities who could code-switch on-demand should be a smooth sail for a mother who’d grown up as a Third Culture Kid herself. Or so I presumed.
I’d imagined that together, the kids and I would tame the tricks of any local tongue we encounter, put on indigenous customs like new pieces of clothing, and laugh at ourselves as we inevitably fall through the cracks of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
So I prepared my progeny for neither the content nor the style of the series of compliments they were to receive upon their post-pandemic visit to East Asia, where extended family and acquaintances from an older generation showered them with copious Asian-style TLC.
The first culture shock they experienced in a physical manner was when nearly every adult they met for the first time, including a relative who was exhibiting full-on symptoms of the flu, stroked either the top of their head, their cheeks, shoulders, or another part of their upper body.
Such displays of affection came on the heels of an “informed consent” workshop my children had just completed at school prior to our departure. Consequently, their reactions…