Raising Children Between Cultures

There is a photograph I keep coming back to.

Five children on a beach in Portrush, Northern Ireland, at the end of a winter afternoon. The sky behind them is doing something extraordinary in pink and gold. They are standing close together the way children do when they are genuinely fond of each other, arms around shoulders, one of them barefoot in the cold because that is simply who he is. They are laughing.

They are my children. And if you look at them, really look, you will notice something. They are different shades. Different textures of hair. Different ways of carrying themselves. Because their father is Dutch, blond like the sun, and I am Afro Caribbean, Venezuelan, a wonderful mix of French Martinican and Bolivian Spanish and Aymara heritage, and somewhere in the meeting of all of that, these five particular humans came into being.

People sometimes do not know what to make of us. That is fine. We are a lot to take in.

Each of my children navigates the question differently. Ask the oldest where he is from and he will give you an answer that has clearly been road tested. Ask another and you will get something more exploratory, a response that is still finding its shape. Ask the littlest and she will probably just look at you. The question does not land the same way twice, because they are not the same person, and the question means something different depending on who is asking it and why.

What I have tried to give them, all five of them, is not a single answer but something more durable than an answer. A way of understanding themselves that does not depend on anyone else's categories.

I tell them: you are here because many people loved each other across great distances and great differences. You are a wonderful mix of all of that love. Every culture in your blood chose, at some point, to reach toward another culture rather than away from it. You are the result of that reaching. You are not complicated. You are complete.

I tell them they are universal citizens. That they belong anywhere and everywhere. That the world is not divided into places where they fit and places where they do not. That they carry belonging with them, because belonging is not a location. It is a quality of being.

This is also, in part, why we home educate. Not because we are hiding from the world, but because we wanted the freedom to honour every strand of who they are without having to flatten any of it to fit a curriculum that was not designed with them in mind. We teach them Spanish alongside English. We cook Venezuelan food and Dutch food and food from wherever we happen to be curious about that week. We talk about history from more than one direction. We treat their heritage not as a complication to be managed but as a resource to be explored.

Has it always been easy? No. There have been moments, occasional and mostly outnumbered by joy, when the complexity has felt lonely. When I have been the only person in a room who understood exactly what it means to raise children who do not fit a single category. When I have wished for a community of people who simply got it without needing it explained.

That longing is also part of why I do the work I do. Because I know I am not the only one who has felt it. And I know that the children growing up in asylum accommodation in Coleraine, or in direct provision in Dublin, or in a house in Ballymoney where nobody else speaks their language, are feeling a version of it too. Not identical. But recognisable.

What I want for my children is what I want for all children navigating more than one world at once: the knowledge that they are not a problem to be solved. That they are, in fact, exactly what the world needs more of. People who have learned, from the very beginning, that humanity comes in more than one colour, more than one story, more than one way of being alive.

They already know this. They have always known it. They learned it from each other, on a beach in Portrush, at the end of a golden afternoon.

After all, we are all humans. And some of us are lucky enough to be many kinds of human at once.

Contact

Reach out to start meaningful conversations.

Phone

contact@thehumanitasinitiative.org

+44 7342976970

© 2026. All rights reserved.

EMAIL