What the Therapy Room Reveals: A Conversation with Pinkal Panchal on South Asian Kids & Family Pressure
What does a South Asian kid who just came home from another day of feeling like an outsider actually have to say? Associate marriage and family therapist Pinkal Panchal can give us some insight.
Pinkal is a therapist based in Los Angeles, focused on helping modern love thrive inside traditional and multi-generational family systems. Her work centers on naming the hidden protection patterns that shape how people love, fight, stay, and heal. She works with couples, families, kids, and teenagers, and she is on the front lines of South Asian kids’ struggles.
I sat down with Pinkal for a conversation about the Brown Voices project to talk about what she’s actually hearing inside South Asian American families, what it costs kids when the pressure goes unnamed, and what families can do differently.
https://youtu.be/rciiNkvcpUQ
Here are some key moments from our conversation…
What she’s seeing in the therapy room
Pinkal’s practice gives her something researchers don’t often have: real-time access to the interior life of the kids living these patterns. She’s not analyzing data from a distance. She’s sitting with the child who just came home from school.
What she sees most consistently is pressure.
There’s so much pressure within South Asian kids. And it’s the whole idea of you just cannot be dumb. You have to do great in school, in math, in science. You have to be either a doctor or engineer. You don’t have any other choice. Because if you deviate, if you do something else, you basically won’t excel.
Pinkal Panchal
Alongside the academic pressure, she sees something else: South Asian kids quietly absorbing the language of their peers, including the way those peers describe South Asian culture itself.
Kids who don’t want to bring food to school, who don’t want to wear Indian clothes. The parents are saying: “this is our culture, you should be proud.” And the kids come into the therapy room and say: “why just us? Why do I have to eat that stinky food?”
Pinkal Panchal
Kids absorb someone else’s assessment of their food, and internalized it as their own. This maps directly onto what the research in Brown Voices documents: the particular way that South Asian American kids experience being othered at school shapes not just how they see their peers, but how they see themselves and their backgrounds.
“Too Desi for the Americans, too American for the Desis”
The dual identity pressure that appears across the research shows up in Pinkal’s therapy room with striking regularity. The South Asian kid navigating two worlds — deeply Indian at home, trying to fit in at school — is one of the most documented patterns in the literature. What Pinkal adds is the clinical texture of what that split actually does over time.
That’s the whole segment where they feel like: “we’re too Desi for the Americans and we’re too American for the Desis. So where are we?”
Pinkal Panchal
She’s seen teenage girls develop a disdain for their own community… not because they actually hate being South Asian, but because being South Asian has become associated with the very thing that makes them feel like outsiders. They’re not rejecting the culture. They’re responding to the cost of it.
In the most painful cases, the lines she hears in session go further:
They’ve started questioning their own existence. That is the saddest part. The lines I hear in the therapy room: “I wish I was white.”
Pinkal Panchal
The language that plants the wrong seeds
One of the most striking parts of our conversation was about the language parents use without realizing what they’re teaching alongside it.
The phrase Pinkal returns to again and again: behave like Indians.
You’re actually putting in your kids’ minds that they’re different. You’re planting a seed. When you say “behave like Indians.” What does that mean? Are you saying give up your autonomy? Your freedom? You’re not allowed to have choices? To set boundaries?
Pinkal Panchal
The problem isn’t the standard being set, but the framing that standard as Indian teaches the child to associate being Indian or South Asian with constraint rather than with pride, producing an unintended outcome.
There are other lines she hears as well, including about pressure applied from multiple directions at once:
One of the things I’ve heard from parents: “you’re not pretty, so you can’t afford to be dumb.”
Pinkal Panchal
A child being told she must excel academically because she won’t get by on her looks is carrying a burden that has nothing to do with education. That’s not motivation. That’s a compounded weight.
Why telling kids “you’re strong” can backfire
Pinkal described a moment with a friend who, after Pinkal shared something difficult, responded: you don’t have to if you don’t want to. Pinkal’s response:
Do we have that option in our culture? “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” I don’t think I have a choice.
Pinkal Panchal
That permission not to do something is also what South Asian kids in her therapy room often don’t have access to, and it has real consequences.
When you keep telling kids that you’re strong, they just can’t come out and tell their parents: “hey, I’m weak.” And that is a problem.
Pinkal Panchal
Five things South Asian families actually need to hear
By the end of our conversation, we had arrived at five concrete pieces of advice for South Asian American families:
1. Empathize.
Understand what your child is actually going through — not what you think they should be going through. Sit with them in it.
2. Don’t minimize.
“It’s okay, you’re strong” and “so what, move on” can be forms of minimizing.
3. Don’t compare.
Whether intentional or not, comparison creates labels. The offhand remarks — the unintentional language used at home — these are the ones that shape a child’s sense of who she is and what she’s worth.
4. Don’t add more pressure.
There is already pressure everywhere: at school, in peer relationships, in the wider world. Adding to it at home doesn’t build resilience. It builds silence.
5. Help them love their culture — without forcing it.
Which brings us to the last section…
Plant the seeds. Then wait.
On how to actually help a child love a culture they currently associate with being different, Pinkal suggests parents model it without lecturing.
If they catch negative, they also catch positive. You don’t have to make them sit and listen to a five-hour lecture about how beautiful our culture is. Just have those conversations near them. Two aunties talking about how beautiful the Garba was. Kids at the other end of the room. They’re always listening.
Pinkal Panchal
When children eventually arrive at their own curiosity about their background (and in Pinkal’s clinical experience, many of them do), they often arrive there on their own terms… which makes it stick.
You don’t force the outfit, the food, the participation. You plant the seed. You water it. And you wait — sometimes for years… Plant the seeds. Slowly keep watering. Nurture. Wait. You can’t plant a seed and have the tree grown the next day.
Pinkal Panchal
She also suggests giving kids an explanation and insight into the whys of South Asian culture.
When kids get a little more mature, they want to know — curiosity, why? When you get to know the answers behind the do’s and don’ts of your culture, and those answers connect with you — that’s when you start loving your culture.
Pinkal Panchal
And a child who loves her culture has something to stand on when school tries to make her feel like an outsider for it is a protective factor.
This conversation is part of the Brown Voices project — an ongoing series of conversations bridging the research with the lived experiences of South Asian Americans across roles and generations. Brown Voices: South Asian American Experiences in Schools is rereleasing this fall. Thank you for reading.
