Raising kids abroad: keeping them connected to family in Nigeria

I build products in Lagos for families who mostly aren't in Lagos anymore. Most of the people who use JoJu Kids are calling into Nigeria, not out of it. I'm usually the one on this end of the call, which means I hear a particular version of this problem a lot: parents raising kids in London, Houston, Toronto, or Dubai who are watching their children grow up without the things that shaped their own childhood, and trying to figure out how much of that they can actually pass on across a screen.

It's not a small worry. A child who grows up abroad can end up knowing Nigeria mostly as a place their parents talk about, rather than a place that feels like theirs. Language slips first, usually. Then the food becomes something you order rather than something you grew up watching your grandmother make. Then the extended family becomes a list of names attached to birthday video calls rather than people the child actually knows.

None of this happens because anyone did anything wrong. It happens because distance is real, and rebuilding a sense of home across it takes more effort than staying in one place ever did.

Language holds more than words

Of everything that gets lost, language usually goes first and hurts the most once it's gone. A child who doesn't speak Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or Pidgin isn't just missing vocabulary. They're missing a way of joking with their grandmother, understanding a proverb their father drops in casual conversation, or following along at a family gathering where half the room slides naturally into a language they don't have.

You don't need a formal program to slow this down. Grandparents on video calls are an underused resource here. A grandparent who speaks to a grandchild consistently in Yoruba or Igbo, even in short bursts, even if the child mostly answers in English, keeps the language present in a child's ear in a way that's hard to replicate any other way. Consistency matters more than fluency. The child doesn't need lessons. They need exposure, repeated often enough that the sounds stay familiar.

Food is a faster bridge than most people expect

Cooking together over video, even when one person is in Lagos and the other is in a kitchen in Atlanta, does something language lessons alone can't. A grandmother walking a grandchild through making jollof rice, even badly, even with substitutions because half the ingredients aren't available abroad, gives that child a memory attached to Nigeria that isn't abstract. Food is one of the few things that translates almost perfectly across a screen. You can smell it, taste it, mess it up together, and end up with something real at the end.

Let them know the extended family, not just the immediate one

A lot of diaspora kids know their parents and maybe their grandparents well, and everyone else as a name mentioned in passing. Uncles, aunts, cousins, family friends who function like family, all of that gets thin fast across distance unless someone actively keeps it alive.

This doesn't require a big effort. A five-minute call with a cousin here and there, a video message from an aunt on a birthday, being included (even briefly) in family gatherings over a shared screen, all of it keeps a child's mental map of 'my family' wider than just the household they grew up in.

Tell them the ordinary stories, not just the big ones

Parents raising kids abroad often default to the big cultural touchpoints: Independence Day, a wedding back home, a major festival. Those matter, but they're not where a sense of home actually gets built. It gets built in the small, ordinary stories: what it was like to walk to school, what a typical Sunday looked like, a nickname a grandparent had for someone, the small chaos of a family compound. These stories are easy to forget to tell because they don't feel significant, but they're usually the ones that make a place feel real to a child rather than ceremonial.

Make the connection visual, not just verbal

Kids remember what they see more than what they're told. A video call where a grandmother just talks is forgettable to most children under ten. A video call where a grandchild watches a grandmother cook, draws alongside a cousin, or plays a simple game with an aunt sticks in a way conversation alone doesn't. This is part of why I built JoJu Kids the way I did: a shared drawing board, quick games, and a story built together, all things that give a call in Nigeria and a call from abroad something to actually do together, not just talk about.

This is slower work than it looks

None of this fixes itself in a single big effort. A child doesn't come home from one video call speaking fluent Yoruba or feeling deeply connected to a cousin they've spoken to twice. What actually works is closer to what raised most of us growing up in Nigeria in the first place: repetition, small rituals, being around family often enough that it stops feeling like an occasion and starts feeling like normal life.

You can't fully replace growing up surrounded by family in Nigeria with video calls, and it's worth being honest about that rather than pretending otherwise. But you can build something real across the distance, one ordinary call at a time, and for a lot of families, that ends up being enough to keep a child feeling like Nigeria is theirs too, not just their parents'.