I’m a 29-year-old white dude with two hapa boys, 5 and 2. The three of us have American citizenship, and we’re working on getting a green card for my wife. We live in a mid-sized city, and although all I have is a liberal arts BA I work as an assistant professor at a university here. This is probably one of the best jobs in the world. It’s usually less than 20 hours a week, and the pay, while not outstanding, gives my family a middle-class lifestyle. All of us also have excellent health insurance; my younger son attends free quality daycare for about forty hours a week; our apartment is pretty damn nice. My wife is an RN who’s been studying for quite a long time to become an American nurse.We’ve been planning to move back to America for months (my wife and I are actually heading to the US embassy in a few days for the first stage in the lengthy process of getting her green card), but the fact that I would have to work a real job is holding me back.Currently I see my family every morning, evening, and weekend, I have virtually no stress from my job, and while we aren’t rich we have enough money. I’ve been spending months applying to various jobs in America and have gotten nowhere, and I’m deeply concerned that things could really fall apart once we make the move. My wife is a nurse and I’m confident that she’ll be alright, but she has (reasonably) insisted that I work full-time in the US. I’ve studied coding and thought about going into law, but my passion is writing—I’ve self-published a few books that do actually sell—and I’m not sure I could deal with having no time to write and no time to see my family. When I was a kid my dad was never around (and always stressed out when he was) because he had to work six days a week to support us—the seventh went to rehearsing or playing gigs. I don’t want to raise my kids the same way.Trump’s victory has also made me fear the US economy is going to collapse, and/or that Obamacare—which is garbage compared to what we have here, but still so much better than the free-for-all beforehand—will disappear.On the other hand, I don’t want my kids to grow up here. We’re surrounded by concrete and packed together like sardines. Everyone is rushing everywhere, all the time. My wife and I teach first- and second-graders who go to elementary school and cram schools basically around the clock—to the extent that your kid can’t socialize/hang out with other kids unless he or she is in school or cram school. They study like this until the end of high school, and I feel this upbringing damages nearly all of them severely.In general the people here are well-meaning, but ignorance can be extreme, and an incredibly strong emphasis is placed on conformity and unquestioning obedience. If a person is older than you, he or she is right in any dispute, every time.I would feel like a failure as a parent if I sacrificed my childrens’ upbringing for my own comfort. While a kid’s life in America is no picnic, I think most kids would choose the relative freedom there—the nature, the wide-open spaces, the relative openness to other cultures and new ideas, the fact that people allow themselves to rest and develop their passions—over the headless-chicken-sprinting-in-a-hamster-wheel life here. My parents are also getting older, and they want me to be around, even though they live in a rural part of America where it rains eight months out of the year and jobs are limited to restaurants or decapitating mice for a big science laboratory.Writing this has made me lean more toward moving to America, but I'm interested in hearing your opinions.Tl;dr: What do you say, reddit? Move to America and give up my life for my children? Or stay in Asia and give up their life for mine? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2ieAfdG
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