Mixed Children Aren’t Made of Halves

There’s a quiet fracture that happens in multicultural families when we pretend a child’s identity can be split down the middle. We call them “half this, half that,” as if heritage is arithmetic, as if their Korean side belongs only to their mother’s home and their Dominican side only to their father’s. We assign ownership to language, holidays, history, as though love and lineage can be divided by household.  

But children are not made of halves. They are whole.  

When we gatekeep culture, when we say,  “This part of you is mine to teach, not yours to learn”, we don’t protect the child, we force them to compartmentalize. To tuck away pieces of themselves depending on which parent they’re with. To feel, in subtle ways, that one home celebrates what the other ignores, or worse, resents.  

This isn’t about claiming what isn’t yours. It isn’t about performative allyship or overstepping boundaries. It’s about recognizing that when we shut a parent out of a part of their child’s identity, we aren’t preserving culture, we’re withholding connection. We’re telling the child, implicitly, that some of their roots are conditional. That they can only be fully seen in fragments, never all at once.  

I’ve watched this play out in ways large and small. The mother who hesitates to play rancheras in the car because her ex-husband’s family “owns” the child’s Mexican heritage. The father who avoids bringing up Diwali because it’s “their mother’s thing”. The grandparents who stiffen when a child speaks Arabic in their non-Arab home. These aren’t acts of malice. They’re acts of fear, fear of getting it wrong, of trespassing, of being accused of appropriation.  

But here’s the truth: A child’s identity isn’t a territory to be claimed. It’s not half yours, half someone else’s, it is wholly theirs. 

This isn’t about what you know. It’s about what they need. A child shouldn’t have to fragment themselves to accommodate a parent’s insecurities, or a family’s unspoken rules. They shouldn’t have to earn the right to be whole in every room they enter.

The goal isn’t to divide a child’s world into “yours” and “mine.” It’s to build a space where all of who they are can exist at once, where they don’t have to switch between versions of themselves depending on which parent they’re with. Where their Blackness isn’t reserved for one home and their Judaism for another. Where their Spanglish isn’t corrected into compartments.  

Because mixed children aren’t puzzles to be solved. They’re whole people asking a simple question: “Can I be all of myself, here, with you?”

And they deserve to be fully seen, by all the people who love them.  

—Sara