Catherine Aygen
Consultante Formatrice & Coach en Prise de Parole en Anglais | Dirigeante d’A Star Formation (Qualiopi) | Top 3 européen de discours improvisé | Appli IA d’analyse de discours
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April 22, 2022
These are my kids. Normally I would never post about them here on LinkedIn, but this is important.
My son arrived in France when he was 8 months old. My daughter was born here. They have been only to French school. They speak French like every other French kid.
But they’re not French.
They have Swiss passports. They speak mostly English, but sometimes French and occasionally Turkish at home. They visit their family in England, Turkey and Switzerland. Their parents have two different religious backgrounds.
Their parents - who are British and Swiss Turkish - came to France, like so many other immigrants, for work. (Also thanks to the EU freedom of movement - it was pre-brexit.)
And we stayed because France is a beautiful country with an excellent healthcare system, amongst many other reasons. We set up our life here and our children don’t know anything else. We chose to be here and we love it.
It makes me so sad that a lot of people don’t want us, or our children, in France. Why? Because we are not native-born French. We haven’t chosen to renounce our original nationalities and customs. Yet that doesn’t mean that we can’t contribute to this beautiful country.
And what about my children and all the other hundreds of thousands of children whose parents came here as immigrants, looking for a better life, or because job opportunities brought them here and they didn’t want to leave?
The outcome of the #elections on Sunday might force my husband and I to make some tough decisions. But where do our children and all the others like them belong when they’ve spent all their lives here?
#thirdculturekids #france
April 22, 2022
