It's not our culture. It's our family story.

Identity is often shaped as much by what is said as by what is left out. As someone with a bi-cultural background, I heard it often: "That's just our culture. We don't talk about those things."

I understand why we hold onto that explanation. Labeling silence as "culture" gives it a sense of value and tradition. Also, it's much easier to say, "This is just how we are," than "I don't have the words for what happened to me." It simplifies a complex history into a manageable identity.

And I don't believe it's true anymore. At least not entirely.

I've written before about how becoming a parent forced me to re-assess my own roots and confront the behavioral patterns I'd inherited. Similar to that journey, I realized that while we often focus on our cultural values for answers, we should also be looking at the other roots of our behavior.

The silence that characterizes so many migrant families has little to do with culture, and everything to do with necessity.

The logic behind the quiet

First-generation parents who share little rarely do so out of indifference. The same patterns show up across communities, backgrounds and cultures.

It's a survival strategy. The emphasized messages some first-generation parents pass on - "work hard", "you have to prove yourself", "adapt" - are not a lack of emotional depth. They're a survival strategy. A deliberate focus to prepare children for the hardships of life.

Memories are too painful to revisit. Traumatic experiences - violence, loss, displacement - often go unshared because they're simply too heavy to open up again. This is sometimes described as emotional compartmentalization: a psychological mechanism where painful experiences are mentally separated from everyday life in order to function. Not a choice, but again a way of surviving. Parents who've lived through trauma sometimes process it through emotional withdrawal - not out of coldness, but out of self-protection.

They never learned it themselves. Sharing emotions is something you learn from your parents. If they didn't do it - because of their own upbringing, their own circumstances - the tools are simply absent. Emotions that were never named can't be passed on in words. So they get passed on in other ways.

Language falls short. Even when the will is there, the language barrier could limit deep conversations. How do you talk about trauma, identity and grief in a language that doesn't feel yours - with a child who isn't fluent in your native tongue.

When survival becomes a tradition

That said, culture is not irrelevant. In more hierarchical cultures, where parents hold an authority role and children are less positioned to ask questions, the threshold for these kinds of conversations becomes higher. The dynamic itself already makes it harder to begin.

Culture can amplify silence. But I don't believe it's the cause.

What I think actually happens over time: when necessity shapes behavior across enough generations, it starts to look like culture. The silence becomes a norm. The emotional distance becomes "how we are." But if you trace it back far enough, you find the circumstances that created it - survival, trauma, loss. Culture didn't cause the silence. The silence, repeated long enough, became part of the culture.

Circumstances create necessity, and necessity impacts culture. Not the other way around.

What is left unnamed

And when silence becomes the default, it doesn't disappear - it just changes form. The perspective of family constellations suggests what goes unnamed in one generation tends to be carried, unconsciously, by the next. Not through words, but through patterns, fears and loyalties that children absorb without knowing where they come from.

The silence in migrant families is not a choice, and not a cultural quirk. It's an understandable human response to extraordinary circumstances - passed from generation to generation, not because no one wanted it differently, but because no one knew how.

Turning silence into connection

In my own parenting journey, I've seen how my children's questions act as a mirror, forcing me to confront unconscious patterns. And questions are where the healing begins.

Because this silence was born out of necessity - not a lack of love or an inherited cultural trait - it is something we can shift. We can build the tools that previous generations didn't have the luxury to carry.

*Van Daar Naar Hier conversation cards were created as a tool for taking that first step - and my way of turning silence into connection.*

Start the conversation you have been putting off.