A One Year Old & Lessons of Raising a Multicultural Child in Korea

It’s been almost one year since I went into labor in Korea and brought another life into this world. When our babe was born just a month after my sister had a baby, my mother told us one of the most important things to do, especially since they were born so close to each other, was not to compare.

Let me tell you, that’s been hard… and not, at the same time. Her cousin was/is a voracious eater while she is a peckish “give me a little now, I’ll ponder for a bit and then give me a little a bit later, please” sort of girl. Has she eaten enough? I hope so. Not only are they worlds apart, us in Korea while they’re in Australia, but they hardly resemble each other one a blond haired blue eyed wonder, the other a dark haired dark eyed mixture of a little Korean this and a little Caucasian that.

While I try not to compare them, hearing what my sister does and thinking about what I’m doing gives me pause. While I would probably raise my child very similarly to my sister if I were married to a fellow westerner, I’m married to a Korean man and so blending our cultures to make us both comfortable is a huge priority around here. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned having a Korean husband is how important compromise is. Having a baby together means constant compromise and questions about which way to do things. Here are a few things we’ve learned.

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When do babies sleep in their own rooms?

Koreans sleep with their children, or co-sleep, much longer than their western counterparts… or so it seems. While I was reading that it was okay to move babies into their own rooms in the first few months, and I did try much like my sister did when her baby was two months old, I found I was much more comfortable bed sharing (keeping the baby in our bed). Were I not in Korea, I might feel pressure to move her out of our room or may have felt silly or embarrassed that she slept right between my husband and I for the first year of her life. (Now it’s 8 years and counting.)

Hearing Korean mothers talk openly though, about how they still bed-share a year on and haven’t even considered moving the baby to a crib or otherwise, I feel completely natural and in a way thankful that my husband is Korean so I could enjoy this aspect of motherhood. Interestingly, when I looked up statistics for bed-sharing and co-sleeping in the US versus Korea, the stats are almost identical with high percentages of families co-sleeping but the difference lies in how we discuss the topic. 

Korean mothers seem to proudly state they sleep with their child, while American mothers proudly state that their child can sleep alone… even if the mother is still sleeping in the same room. It’s a difference in what we deem important and could probably provide a good start to conversation on American individuality versus the Korean collective mind.

When is it right to move your baby to crib or into their own room? I don’t think that’s for me to say but I have learned that whatever you do, co-sleep, bed-share or otherwise is right for you and your child if you think it is.

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What do babies eat in Korea?

Considering we eat three meals a day and babies maybe a couple more snacks in between, of course food is a big topic of discussion in our house. When she ate her first avocado around her sixth month, my husband disclosed that he hadn’t had his first avocado, an import into Korea, until he was probably around the age of 30. When my husband made her some rice porridge and added seaweed, I realized that common Korean delicacy was nowhere on my age appropriate feeding chart.

Really, most of the common Korean foods weren’t on the chart which made sense given I’d Googled in English “age appropriate foods for babies”. When I saw a Korean chart from my friend, quite a few things were different. 

Koreans are also often sharing their food and while at first I was a little concerned given that babies eat different things at different times and not to mention no one else would know my baby’s allergies, it’s broadened her pallet a bit faster. A few months ago, a friend shared her baby’s porridge and our baby had a field day. It had been seasoned with sesame oil and apparently she loved it. I would never have considered putting that on her porridge this early. What should the baby eat? Whatever the person cooking that day feels like making I suppose.

If you’re raising a baby in Korea or have a Korean spouse, be open to what they suggest. Korean kids are eating seaweed, anchovies, and a whole host of foods that aren’t on those western feeding charts. Be open to it. 

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Raising a bilingual child in Korea

Will she speak Korean or English first? I can’t count the number of people that have asked this question. It’s actually difficult to answer anyway. She coos with sounds that are very Korean and then goes into sounds that are much more English. If you’ve heard both languages, you can probably guess which sounds are clearly on one side or the other. What’s difficult is responding appropriately.

I am only speaking English to our babe and my husband is only using Korean so, if she makes a Korean sound towards something while I’m with her and it could be on the way to an appropriate Korean word for that object, I can’t coax it out of her. I have to stick with English to help her attain both languages in the future. She’s clearly working on both right now and “mama” and “abba” (Korean for daddy) have already made their way out.

We’ve heard “I love you” in babyfied terms and “go” as well as “yogiyo” (“here” in Korean) and she seems to have some of the sound structures of Korean. Which was first? I don’t recall, but both are progressing well. Having both parents stick to just one language when addressing our child hasn’t been the easiest and has definitely taken some practice. I’ve learned that we can’t be too hard on ourselves if we slip a word in here or there from the other language accidentally because we are also learning as she goes.

Later addition: If you’re raising a bilingual or multilingual child, just be strict with how you start. Our daughter is now 8 and fluent in both Korean and English. We didn’t have to be strict with her, but we had to be strict with ourselves to stick to OPOL (one parent one language) in order to reinforce her language acquisition. Has it worked for us? Yes and we’re thankful that she can converse with both her families on each side who aren’t bilingual in Korea or English.

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What’s the right way….?

Much of parenting is already a compromise between a husband and a wife, or rather the way the husband’s mother did something and how the mother’s mother did something. My mother-in-law used to stick Q-tips up my husband’s nose and into his ears to clean them out while I declared we were certainly NOT doing that. Considering the packaging for Q-tips specifically says NOT to do that, which my husband didn’t know, it was agreed upon that we wouldn’t. However, that led into a conversation on why she did that and I learned that my earwax is wetter while Koreans have drier clumpy earwax and so they scoop it out. Who knew? I had no idea that people had different kinds of earwax.

Whose mother knows best? Both, and ultimately we’ll discuss and make a compromise on how to best raise our little one with the information that we’ve gathered over time. 

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Are you raising your child in a multicultural household? What have you learned? What have you compromised on?

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