My kids don't have the culture I grew up with. Did I fail them?

Let us name the thing plainly: you left a place, or a language, or a household, and something did not travel with you. This is not a moral failing. It is what happens when a person crosses a border — of geography, of class, of ambition — and the old world does not fit neatly into the new suitcase. The institutions that raised you — the kitchen, the church, the extended family, the mother tongue spoken without translation — were built to pass down knowledge without effort, the way water passes down a hill. You built a different life, and different lives require deliberate irrigation. That is harder work, and later work, but it is not impossible work. Guilt tells you the window has closed. I do not trust guilt as a reporter of fact. It is a poor scholar. It exaggerates, it flatters your importance, and it keeps you from the desk where the actual labor happens.