Raising a mixed-heritage child in Thailand goes more smoothly when you and your wife agree early on home languages, school, discipline and the grandparents' role. Give each language regular use beyond the house, expect school and friends to shape your child's languages, decide how to answer the label luk khrueng, and register the birth within 15 days.
MarriageMeeting Your Thai Girlfriend’s Parents: What to Expect22 min read
MarriageFinding a Wife in Thailand: Meeting, Courting and Marrying32 min read
MarriageThai Girlfriend Problems and the Silent Treatment26 min read
Living in ThailandCost of Living in Thailand18 min read
Dating Thai WomenDating a Ladyboy: What It’s Like, Where to Meet, How to Ask34 min readContents · 12 sections
Below is what we found when we counted what people say in two places: Thai parents and mixed-heritage people on Pantip, a Thai forum, talking about mixed Thai children, and English-speaking parents on Ask MetaFilter talking about bilingual families in other countries and language pairs. Single accounts are attached as samples. Then come the decisions nobody in those threads talked about, the paperwork, and what to do when the marriage itself starts to show in the child.
Thailand, mixed race and the word luk khrueng
Luk khrueng (ลูกครึ่ง) is the everyday Thai word for a child of mixed heritage: luk means child and khrueng means half, and the dictionary sense is a person of mixed national or racial ancestry 1. Parents of two nationalities are not always of two races, and how your child describes themselves is theirs to decide as they grow. You will probably hear the word used about your child; how to answer it is below.
For this page we read 24 threads: 16 on Pantip, the big Thai web forum (2014 to 2026), in which Thai parents and mixed-heritage people talk about mixed Thai children, and 8 on Ask MetaFilter, an English question-and-answer site (2004 to 2022), about raising bilingual children in general. We counted 203 people who stated a rule or told their own story: 115 on Pantip and 88 on Ask MetaFilter. Each person counts once across all the threads, and once for each point they made. 29 of them are Thai mothers and 5 say they are mixed-heritage themselves.