A thank-you to my parents

Honor generational sacrifices with gratitude, not guilt. 

If you stop me on Locust Walk for a fit check, most of what I am wearing started in my mom’s closet. My apartment tells the same story, furnished with the “good” hand towels, the sturdy pots, and the dishes my parents once kept for guests.

But this is not about plates and clothes. It is about what they represent: the sacrifices that set my foundation. Taking the best from your family as your baseline carries pride and pressure at once, and I am still figuring out how to hold both.

I call this second-generation guilt: the pressure to turn my parents’ sacrifices into achievement and the unease I feel when I accept comfort or ease.

As the daughter of immigrants, I carry a real, necessary burden to honor what it took to build a new life. But second-generation guilt is not remorse for existing or for having opportunities. It surfaces when leisure starts to feel like waste, or when I catch myself forgetting how I arrived here.

The sharper edge of this guilt comes from forgetting — losing sight of the work, risk, and love that paved my way. I would have nothing without the generations before me. Now, that does not require living in perpetual debt, but it does require deliberate acknowledgment. Dealing with second-generation guilt, at its core, is a commitment to remembering where I come from and to honoring those sacrifices with intention.

But that is easier said than done. As new opportunities open, it is easy to lose sight of my purpose, and enjoying what was once out of reach becomes complicated. At Penn, dinners out, downtown nights, spring break trips, and new wardrobes are part of our routine. For me, those things were once unimaginable. I am grateful to participate, yet the casualness can feel like a betrayal of how rare these experiences used to be.

I want to keep the first-time awe: the gratitude of a nice restaurant, the awe of traveling outside of the country, and the respect for $5 that used to feel like a fortune. When that feeling fades, I sense distance from the values with which I was raised. The gap between my new normal and my old reality can leave me ungrounded, and even entitled, unless I actively try to reconnect with those values.

That same distance also appears as the luxury of choice. I have access to opportunities my parents didn’t have at my age. My mom once dreamed of studying chemical engineering but chose accounting instead, whereas I have been able to immerse myself in the liberal arts, learn to code, and even consider fine arts, if I can make room for them in my senior year.

Being able to choose my path is a real privilege. I live my life with my parents’ steady support and advice, yet indulging in options they never had can feel like I am flaunting what they were denied. So I try to hold that tension with gratitude and make choices that honor their sacrifices.

In that light, gratitude may be a better frame than guilt. The guilt often feels one-sided in that my parents are not asking me to feel remorse for using what their sacrifices made possible. They wanted me and my brother to live this way, as the immigrant dream was meant to be lived with ease, not carried as a punishment.

Thus, the privilege of being a second-generation immigrant can be honored without guilt. Gratitude can replace the urge to forget. Practiced consistently, it pays respect to the past while keeping eyes on the future.Top of FormBottom of Form

There are also moments when guilt can be worn like a badge of honor, a motivation to work harder in college. Even then, the point is not self-reproach. Past generations did not sacrifice so we would feel ashamed of opportunity. The right balance is ambition guided by gratitude, not progress powered by remorse.

The privileges from first-generation sacrifice are not a burden to carry; they are a dream realized. Honoring the sacrifice means living with grace in how we show up, gratitude in how we remember, and responsibility in how we choose.

Ashti Tiwari is a student at the University of Pennsylvania. This article was originally published in The Daily Pennsylvanian and is posted here with permission from Ashti Tiwari.

Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.