AsuraKiller203
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My thoughts are that the parents are partly to blame because they send mixed messages which causes identity issues in their offspring. The acronym ABCD -American Born Confused Desi is wrongly used. Instead it should be CPABD - Confused Parents of American Born Desis.Why do second/third generation Muslims become more Islamist than their immigrant parents.. but second generation Indians become completely deracinated, mostly dumping their Indian ties?
It’s a puzzling situation.
This is from my personal experience in my family and around me in 90s and 2000s. Hindu Immigrants (first gen parents) when they first move to US they take "When in Rome do as Romans do" too literally and try to assimilate excessively. May be it stems from financial/social insecurities felt in India and may be the "Model Minority Certificate" that whites give to Indian-Americans is too hard to resist.
But this results in the 1st gen parents publicly dissing on ones hindu/indian/brown heritage when new in the country. The 2nd gen small child growing up notices this.
Now a lot of 1st gen parents after living in US for 10-20 years and becoming financially successful try to belatedly install hinduness on their grown-up kids at warp speed. By now the kid thinks parents only want a free caretaker in old age and are doing it out of personal need n selfinshness.
Some of these parents may teach children about hindu values in private and but avoid wearing it on their sleeve in the public. The 2nd gen child sees this as hypocrisy and loses respect for parents.
Many parents fail to convey to their kids that meek behavior in public earlier was the need of the hour for them bc of the very racist and hinduphobic enviornment of the old days. And instead end up teaching "All religions are the same" BS . Many also end up teaching their kids to do the same hypocritical public/private dance without realizing that times have changed and now it is cool to show hinduness in public now.
Basically, a 2nd gen child growing up in US gets so many conflicting signals and messages from his parents and society that the poor fellow isnt able to make out his front end from the rear especially if hes a good at heart fellow.
Hindu parents have basically lost the art of parenting. This is visible in modern India as well but is amplified when placed in challenging circumstances of adopting a foreign country. Hindus' traditional inter-generational information transmission mechanism was temple classes and gurukul. That was destroyed by the govt. Our second transmission mechanism was the large family staying together with grand pa and grand ma. With atomization of the family and 2-child small families, this method was also lost a generation ago. Hindus basically have no effective way of transferring culture, beliefs and values from old generation to the present. The small family (hum do hamare do) campaign has been a total disaster for Hindus and India. But this is off topic, more on this on a seperate thread.
Contrast this with the way a muslim immigrant family in US behaves. From Day 1 the muslim parent flaunts his muslimness on american streets. They take pride in dressing and acting differently from other americans and they pass on this kattarpanthi/radicalism to their kids. And they have large families with many kids all staying under one roof. So they have one transmission mechanism in tact. Secondly, muslims in india, us, everywhere in worlds also have their equivalent of the gurukul system in tact as a transmission mechanism while hindus dont. They have mosques, madrassas, islamic schools that make it easy to impart their worldview on next generation. And thirdly having such institutions makes it easier to have lots of kids bc these orgs do the job of free baby sitters and ease the financial burden of having large families. While hindus have no such luxury and stick to small families bc they have no social support.
In the US in my town there are many private islamic schools that muslim parents send their kids to but not a single hindu school. Inspite of hindus on the whole having more purchasing power. Almost 100% of hindus end up going to american schools where the syllabus is filled with anti-hindu garbage.
Of course the downside of muslim kattarpanthis is that they are generally disliked and end up earning less money in their lives while hindus are the highest earners in the US. But then the question basically becomes of a trade off: Hindus in the past have prioritized their earning power over instilling of dharma in their kids and the results are here for us to see now:. Deracinated kids, Self-Hating brown Sepoys and Coconuts.
There is no free lunch in life. And I hope future hindu parents put greater emphasis on their hinduness over financial well being.