Across Borders, Beyond Wounds: Nurturing Ageing Parent Bonds Overseas
By Rinchaal Patel,
Mindset and Relationship Coach,
YOLO Academy
For many millennial migrants living in Australia, family life is a delicate balance of distance, love, and longing. Our parents remain in India, ageing in the homes where we grew up, while we build new lives thousands of kilometres away. Technology shrinks the distance via video calls, WhatsApp messages and remittances; but emotional gaps often remain stubbornly wide.
The challenge isn’t just about logistics, how to manage healthcare from afar, how to plan visits, how to juggle responsibilities. It’s also about emotional legacies: unhealed childhood wounds, unmet needs, unspoken conversations, and the slow process of forgiving each other for being imperfect humans.
Through this article, we will explore how migrant millennial adults can maintain healthy, compassionate relationships with their ageing parents, while acknowledging the weight of the past and the realities of distance.
The Weight of Unhealed Childhood Wounds
Growing up in Indian households often meant experiencing love in practical, duty-driven forms rather than emotional openness. Parents worked tirelessly, sacrificed comforts and pushed us toward stability. Their love was real, but it wasn’t always tender. Many of us longed for affection, affirmation, or space for vulnerability that didn’t exist in the family culture.
Some wounds we carry into adulthood include:
• Emotional distance: Our parents never said “I love you,” leaving us unsure whether we were loved and unsure how to express it ourselves.
• Strict expectations: Success and obedience were equated with worthiness, leaving little room for individuality. Being constantly compared to someone’s daughter or son who scored more than you or was accepted into a better school, often left us wondering if we would ever be good enough.
• Unmet needs: Times when we needed comfort, understanding, or validation but received discipline or silence instead, lead us to wonder if our parents understood what we were going through.
As adults, these wounds influence how we relate to our parents now. When they call us, we sometimes feel both love and resistance. When they ask for help, we feel compassion tangled with resentment. Sometimes it feels more of a duty or an expectation rather than coming from a place of shared love and compassion for our parents.
Silence and the Fear of Difficult Conversations
One of the hardest parts of being a migrant child is realising how many conversations never happened. Cultural conditioning often taught us to avoid conflict, to never “talk back,” and to keep family harmony intact, even if it meant burying our truths.
Today, as grown children, we may want to tell our parents: “I felt unseen,” or “I wish you had been gentler with me.” But the fear of hurting them or the belief that they won’t understand keeps us silent.
Instead, conversations stay on safe topics: health updates, relatives’ news, grocery lists. We rarely talk about loneliness, regret, or pain. And yet, those unsaid words live between us, shaping how connected or distant we feel. Having those hard conversations is what is required to release them and us of the unmet expectations and the trap of passing generational trauma.
The Role Reversal: Parents Ageing, Children Caregiving
As our parents age, the dynamics shift dramatically. They once guided us, made decisions for us, and held authority. Now, they may depend on us for financial support, healthcare arrangements, or even companionship.
This role reversal can trigger conflicting emotions:
Tenderness: A desire to protect and comfort them.
Frustration: Old wounds resurfacing when they are still critical or dismissive.
Guilt: Feeling torn between caring for them and pursuing our own independent lives.
Helplessness: Being far away when they need hands-on support.
The hardest paradox is this: while we’re called to care for them with compassion, part of us still aches from the times they couldn’t care for our emotional needs.
Forgiveness: A Two-Way Journey
Forgiveness becomes central to maintaining a healthy relationship in this stage of life. But forgiveness is not forgetting, and it is not excusing harm. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment that both we and our parents are imperfect people shaped by circumstance, culture, and limitation.
• Forgiving them: Recognising that their parenting style was influenced by the pressures of survival, societal norms, and their own unhealed wounds. They may not have given emotional intimacy, but they gave stability, education, and opportunities.
• Forgiving ourselves: Letting go of guilt for choosing distance, for not always meeting cultural expectations, for prioritising our own mental health and future.
Sometimes, forgiveness also means acceptance, that some conversations may never happen, and some apologies may never come. Yet, within that acceptance, there is still room for compassion and new beginnings.
Building New Spaces of Connection
Healing doesn’t require rewriting the past; it requires creating better patterns in the present. For migrant millennials, this often means finding small, intentional ways to connect with parents across borders:
1. Start with gratitude. Acknowledge their sacrifices, even if you wished for more emotionally. Simple words like “Thank you for everything you did for me” can soften walls. Sometimes, they may doubt themselves as parents and may need the acknowledgement from us that leads to open communication.
2. Introduce emotional openness gently. Share something vulnerable about your own life stress, uncertainty, loneliness to model openness. No matter how old our parents may be, they will have some wisdom to share from their own life experiences.
3. Ask deeper questions. Move beyond medical updates. Ask them about their childhood dreams, regrets, happiest memories. It reframes them as whole people, not just “parents.” Looking at them from a human perspective changes the expectations we had from them and somewhat gives permission to us all to make mistakes and be more understanding of their perspective.
4. Use rituals. Weekly calls, learning and sharing knowledge about our culture, religions, or recipes, often give us an opportunity to create continuity and give them something to look forward to.
5. Repair through action. Even when words fail, showing care—sending a surprise gift on special occasions/ festivals, visiting when possible helps build trust. This trust allows us to accept the past and live in the current state without being overly critical of them.
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Navigating Guilt and Boundaries
One of the most common emotional burdens migrant children face is guilt:
• Guilt for leaving them behind.
• Guilt for not visiting often enough.
• Guilt for not being their primary caregivers.
• Guilt for feeling frustrated or resentful.
But guilt alone does not serve relationships—it often leads to resentment or burnout. Healthy relationships with ageing parents require boundaries:
• Recognising that you cannot meet all their needs alone.
• Sharing responsibility with siblings, relatives, or professional caregivers.
• Setting realistic expectations about what you can provide.
• Accepting that love expressed consistently, even in limited forms, is still love.
Boundaries do not mean neglect. They mean loving without destroying yourself.
Healing the Inner Child While Caring for Parents
Part of maintaining a healthy relationship with ageing parents is tending to the younger self inside us, the child who still longs for validation or nurturing. Practical ways to support this inner healing include:
• Therapy or counselling: A safe space to process unhealed wounds without projecting them entirely onto parents.
• Journaling: Writing letters to your younger self or even unsent letters to your parents.
• Community: Sharing stories with fellow migrants who understand the complexity of cross-border family dynamics.
• Self-parenting: Learning to give yourself the emotional care you once sought from your parents.
When we care for our inner child, we show up for our parents with more patience, less bitterness, and greater clarity.
The Power of Acceptance
Ultimately, maintaining healthy relationships with ageing parents across continents is not about fixing everything. It’s about accepting dual truths:
• They did their best, and it wasn’t always enough.
• We love them, and we sometimes resent them.
• They are ageing, and so are we.
• Some conversations will happen, and some never will.
Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means living fully in the relationship that exists, not the one we wish existed. Within acceptance, there’s still room for joy, humour, gratitude, and connection.
Conclusion: Love Beyond Perfect Words
As a millennial living in Australia with parents ageing in India, I’ve come to see our relationship as a living thing imperfect, evolving, and tender in its own way. We may never have all the conversations I once longed for. We may never perfectly understand each other across cultural and generational divides. But we can still choose love, forgiveness, and connection—one phone call, one visit, one gentle gesture at a time.
Healthy relationships with ageing parents aren’t about erasing the past; they’re about weaving healing into the present. And sometimes, that is more than enough.
