I am going to say a few things that Pakistanis overseas need to get through their skulls:

Don’t live overseas if you are obsessed with preserving your culture and expect your children to adhere to a culture/a society that they did not grow up in

Stop using marriage in Pakistan

as a way of “reversing” the westernisation of your kids/adult offspring. Note the word adult.

Pakistani parents actually guilt trip you if you don’t wear Pakistani clothes for Eid.

If you are so traumatised by British colonisation, why the hell did you immigrate?

That little Pakistan that you try to create in your communities where you present in a romanticised fashion doesn’t exist in reality.

Helicopter parenting/DV is a serious issue in overseas Pakistani communities

Hypernationalism in overseas communities is a serious issue which fuels this delusional behaviour where people become the gatekeepers of their “culture” and get obsessed with preserving it and expecting their children to act accordingly otherwise they need an intervention

I’ve lived that reality twice where being taken to Pakistan and marriage was deemed a quick fix to me as being too much of an unexpected problem rather than addressing underlying cultural and patriachical practices that causes issues and prevents them from being resolved

Three disabilities later, its safe to say this stuff ruined my life and I know of quite a few this has happened to. And it doesn’t just happen in overseas Pakistani communities. Entire communities enable this, justify this, facilitate this and punish the ones who speak out by

shunning them. I for one am extremely sick of your hypocritical bullshit. It has to stop. I refuse to protect communities that have some inane and archaic practices happening amidst them. I also refuse to live in fear of it as well. Extremely well to do communities that work

together to “protect” their reputation but do nothing to fix their very serious issues.

Note the word westernisation: doesn’t mean drinking alcohol etc here. It could be developing an open mind outside of the confines of a cultural mindset whether it be via religious education, education, challenging cultural norms/practices or speaking out about “internal matters”

I saw this happening to a girl in Pakistan who was an American citizen. We lived in houses opposite from each other. She was younger than me. And like me, she felt helpless. Because that term westernisation is often misused to mean anything the parent wants it to mean.

The purpose of this thread isn’t to trash a community and not to make any country look bad. The inter-generational trauma that results as a consequence of colonisation cause a lot of problems in many ethnic communities.