Special Edition - Healing Forward: An Invitation to AAPI Parents This Heritage Month

Each May, AAPI Heritage Month gives us the opportunity to celebrate who we are—our languages, our foods, our stories, our ancestors. But for many Asian and Asian American parents, this month is not just a time of celebration—it’s also a time of quiet reckoning.

We carry so much. We hold histories shaped by migration, sacrifice, silence, and survival. And we do so while raising children in a world vastly different from the one in which we were raised. It’s no wonder that we often find ourselves in moments of self-doubt, whispering:

“I should have known better.”
“They’re hurting because I failed them.”
“I’m not doing enough.”

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And more importantly: you are not failing.

This inner voice—so quick to blame—often comes from a place of deep love and cultural inheritance. Many of us were taught that love looks like endurance. That responsibility means never making mistakes. That worth is earned through self-sacrifice.

But while this mindset may have once protected us, it no longer serves us—especially when it begins to distance us from the very people we’re trying to raise.

Self-blame doesn’t make us better parents. Presence does.

Our children don’t need us to have all the answers. They need us to sit beside them when life feels heavy. They need us to see them not as extensions of ourselves, but as whole people in the making.

And they need us to be kind—to them, yes—but also to ourselves.

Parenting is difficult, not because we’re doing it wrong, but because we’re often doing something new. Many of us are working to heal in real time while also parenting, and that is sacred work. It is legacy work. And it is not easy.

This AAPI Heritage Month, let’s expand our understanding of what it means to honor our culture. Yes, we celebrate our foods, our dances, our languages—but we must also honor our pain, our resilience, and our right to heal.

Let us begin to replace the question, “What did I do wrong?” with “What does my child need from me right now?”
Let us shift from “I should’ve known better,” to “I’m learning to show up differently.”

Because every time we pause to reflect instead of react, every time we choose connection over control, we are doing the work of healing forward. We are parenting not only from what we inherited, but from what we now know to be true:

That love without compassion becomes pressure.
That discipline without understanding becomes distance.
And that parenting without self-grace becomes unsustainable.

We are not alone in this journey. And we were never meant to do it alone.

So this month, may we celebrate our children by extending to ourselves the same compassion we long to pass down. Let us remember that our healing is not a detour from our heritage—it is its evolution.

And let that be enough.