Nobody plans for their child to grow up without their heritage. It goes quietly, through ordinary circumstance. The language you speak at home is the one everyone at nursery speaks. The food you cook on a Tuesday is whatever is fastest. Home is a place your child has visited, not a place they are from. None of that is a failure of parenting. It is what happens when a family lives somewhere else. But it can be worked against, and the working-against goes better when it is small, repeated and not presented as a lesson. Start with their name In Akan tradition a child has a day name from the day of the week they were born — Kwame for a boy born on Saturday, Akosua for a girl born on Sunday, and so on. If your child has one, use it sometimes. If they do not, you can still tell them what theirs would have been. It is a small thing that carries a large one: the idea that they were already placed in something before they arrived. Language, in fragments Full fluency is a big goal and often an unrealistic one. Fragments are not. A greeting, a word for thank you, the phrase a grandmother says at bedtime. Da yie. Medaase. Akwaaba. Children absorb these as texture rather than vocabulary, which is exactly right. The point is not that they can converse; it is that Twi or Ewe or Ga sounds like family rather than like a foreign language. Put a real place in their head Most children raised abroad have an abstract Ghana — hot, far away, where grandma lives. Abstractions are hard to love. It helps enormously to give them one specific place they can picture. The canopy walkway at Kakum, strung between trees above the rainforest. The fishing boats at Cape Coast. Makola market. One real place, described in detail, does more than a general sense of a country. A child cannot miss a place they have never been able to picture. Stories do this better than explanations Ask relatives for one story about their own childhood, not a summary of the culture. Specific beats representative every time. Cook one thing together rather than describing the cuisine. Jollof, kelewele, waakye — the smell does more work than the words. Find books set in real Ghanaian places rather than books about Africa generally. Go if you can, and if you cannot, talk about going as something that will happen rather than something that might. What we make Gli Books exists because of this gap. We make personalised picture books in which your child is illustrated as the hero of a story set in a real Ghanaian place — our first title takes them across the canopy walkway at Kakum National Park, frightened and crossing anyway. The bet we are making is simple. A child who has been the hero of a story set in Ghana has a Ghana they can picture, and a child who can picture a place can belong to it.