I Never Grew Up With the Immigrant Child Mentality

I Kept Thinking I Was Missing Something

There seems to be a very specific immigrant child narrative going around online: the overtly strict parents, the constant pressure to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, the feeling of carrying your family’s sacrifices on your back, and the guilt that if you fail, you are somehow failing your parents, too.

And while that story is very real for many people, especially here in the United States, it has never quite resonated with me.

Now, do not get me wrong. I am a child of immigrants. Both my parents immigrated from Pakistan to the United States at different points in their lives. My dad came to the United States for college during the mid-eighties. My mom moved to the United States a year before she met my dad in Virginia in the early 2000s.

I always like telling people that my parents are the epitome of the so-called American Dream. They did not come from much, but they achieved everything they have through hard work, grit, determination, and initiative. They have both created successful, flourishing lives that neither could have imagined.

However, every time I hear another fellow immigrant child say, “Everything I do is for my parents,” or “My goal is to retire my parents one day,” I simply cannot relate.

I always feel strange admitting that. Guilty, actually. As if there is some universal immigrant experience I somehow missed. As if everyone else understands something that never quite clicked for me. People talk about survival mode, impossible expectations, and pressure that follows them into every decision they make. Meanwhile, I have found myself sitting there thinking, Am I weird if I cannot relate to this? Am I missing something?

My parents are not your conventional brown South Asian Muslim parents. Perhaps because they both came to the United States when they were both single and at such impressionable ages, they learned to adapt to American culture while still holding on to who they were. And do not get me wrong, we are still quintessentially Pakistani.

But I was never raised with some of the expectations people often talk about on the internet. I was never forced into a specific career path or raised with the expectation that I would become my parents’ retirement plan. They already had that figured out for themselves. I was never given the ultimatum that anything less than a perfect grade was not enough. I was never deprived of opportunities, experiences, or things I wanted growing up. I was never told what I should wear or who I was expected to marry.

My parents have always allowed me to live my life the way I want to, to speak my mind, and to become my own person. Even while writing this, I know that in it of itself is an immense privilege that not many people have and one I do not take for granted.

For example, last fall, I remember networking with a girl my age. Like me, she was a college senior pursuing a dual degree in biomedical sciences, and Business Administration at Penn State. She was also a child of immigrants, though not from Pakistan but from Taiwan. She was incredibly intelligent, ambitious, beautiful, and funny.

When we started talking about our families, I remember her saying to me, “One of my biggest career goals is to retire my parents by the time I am thirty.”

I remember sitting there almost speechless. In one way, I was in awe of her. What a beautiful goal to have. Our parents do so much for us that wanting to give back in that way is admirable. But at the same time, I remember thinking to myself, I have never thought of that.

When I think about my career, I think about finding purpose. I think about doing something bigger than myself. Does that make me a bad daughter because I have never viewed my future through that lens? Does it make me selfish that I never thought my career needed to support my parents?

I think in many ways, social media has flattened the immigrant child experience. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube videos, and influencers have all turned it into a single universal story when, in reality, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of it. Some people grew up feeling like they had to survive. Some people grew up with more freedom. Some had parents who pushed them relentlessly, while others had parents who simply wanted their children to be happy.

Neither experience cancels out the other.

For a long time, I thought not relating to the typical immigrant child narrative meant that I was missing a part of my identity. Like, everyone had somehow received a script that never reached me.

But as I have gotten older, I have realized there was never a script to begin with. There is no universal immigrant child experience. Some people are raised in survival mode. Others are not. Some carried pressure on their backs, while others carried it in quieter and more subtle ways. Neither makes someone more or less deserving of their story.

Maybe I never grew up with the immigrant child mentality that people always talk about. But that does not make me any less Pakistani, any less American, any less connected to my family, or any less shaped by where I come from. There was never one immigrant story to fit into in the first place. There are thousands of them. Mine just happens to look different.