Things Immigrant Parents Think Are Self-Care (And Why They're Not Wrong — But Also Not Enough)

Between Seasons: Notes from an Immigrant Daughter

My mother's idea of a good Sunday goes something like this: wake up, turn on a church livestream, let it play at a volume that could wake the neighbors, drink three cups of hot tea, go to church, come home and call at least four relatives back home, and somewhere in there, fall asleep on the couch with YouTube on her iPad still going. By evening, she will tell you she had "a wonderful rest."

And I will look at her, therapist brain fully activated, and think: that is not rest. That is survival dressed up in a church robe.

But here's the thing — I've had to sit with that reaction for a while. Because the more I examined it, the more I realized something: she's not wrong. She's just working with the tools she was given.

Kwame and Kweku at Costco with Grandma Ceci

The Immigrant Self-Care Menu

If you grew up in an immigrant household, you know the list. These are the things our parents swear by, the rituals they return to when life gets heavy:

• Drinking hot tea. Not for the antioxidants — for the warmth. The cup in the hands. The ritual of making something for yourself in the middle of a busy life. Now tea here is broad. It could be a bag of Lipton tea or a cup of Milo. Anything in the mug, is TEA!

• Falling asleep to the TV at volume 97. Because silence, for someone who has navigated so much uncertainty, can feel louder than any noise.

• Walking Costco for three hours. Don't laugh. This is community. This is abundance. This is proof that they made it somewhere where you can buy 48 rolls of paper towels at once.

• Talking to relatives until midnight. Because those calls are a tether. To home. To who they were before immigration reshaped everything.

• Watching church livestreams all day. Because faith has carried them through things that would have broken most people. Church isn't just church — it's the one place that has always felt like theirs.

These aren't random quirks. They're responses. Responses to displacement, to loneliness, to the particular exhaustion of building a life in a country that didn't always make it easy.

They're survival habits.

The Problem with Surviving as Self-Care

Here's where I put my therapist hat back on, because this is important.

Survival habits keep us going. They're the scaffolding we build when we don't have the luxury of rest. For our parents — many of whom immigrated with very little, worked jobs that didn't honor their education, navigated systems designed to confuse them, and somehow still made dinner every night — survival habits were everything.

But here's the gap: survival habits were never designed to help us thrive. They were designed to help us get through.

And when "getting through" becomes the permanent mode — when survival is mistaken for restoration — we end up running on a kind of empty that hot tea cannot fix.

Actual self-care looks different. It includes:

• Boundaries — the ability to say "I can't take that on right now" without guilt eating you alive

• Rest — genuine rest, not just the body being horizontal while the mind stays on full alert

• Therapy — a space to process, not just endure

• Hobbies — things that exist purely because they bring joy, not because they're productive

• Saying "no" — even to people you love, especially when you need to protect your energy

For many of our parents, these concepts are either foreign or feel indulgent. And that makes sense. When you've spent decades in survival mode, the idea of taking up space for your own restoration can feel almost selfish. Almost wrong.

It's not. But unlearning that takes time.

What We Can Do as Immigrant Daughters (and Sons)

I want to be careful here, because I've seen well-meaning children of immigrants try to "fix" their parents — dragging them to therapy they didn't ask for, challenging every cultural habit, treating their parents' way of life as something to be corrected. That approach rarely works. And honestly, it misses the point.

Our parents are not broken. Their coping was adaptive. It worked for the season it was built for.

What we can do is gently expand the menu.

Help them discover that rest can also look like a walk outside without a destination. That joy can be a meal eaten slowly, without the news on in the background. That connection doesn't always have to happen at midnight over a crackling phone line — sometimes it can happen right here, with the people in the same room.

And for us — the daughters and sons navigating life between two cultures — we get to do something our parents often couldn't: we get to choose rest before we desperately need it. We get to build self-care that goes beyond survival. We get to be, as one of my favorite phrases goes, the cycle breakers.

A Note for the Long Haul

This is the work I talk about in my podcast, Between Two Worlds with Dr. Phebe — the quiet, complex, often funny, often tender work of being shaped by two cultures at once. The immigrant daughter who loves her mama's Sunday routine and knows she needs something more. Who can hold both the gratitude and the grief. Who can laugh at the Costco walk (heavy on the free samples!) and still understand the profound longing underneath it.

These aren't contradictions. They're the whole picture.

So the next time your parent tells you that talking to Auntie Akosua until 1am was their self-care for the week — maybe smile, pour yourself some tea, and then gently, lovingly, open a new conversation about what else might help them feel whole.

And then go book that therapy appointment. For them. For you. For all of it.

Want to go deeper on this? Listen to the full bonus episode of the Between Two Worlds podcast — now streaming. And if this resonated, share it with another immigrant daughter who needed to read it today.

Follow along at @drphebebrako on Instagram and Tiktok for more notes from between the seasons.