We failed to lure our son abroad home even with a $300K inheritance

In recent years, sending your children to study abroad has become quite common. If a child excels and earns a scholarship, it is a great honor for their entire family. There are cases where the child’s academic performance is average but for the sake of pride, parents would spend their own money to send them abroad.

However, in many cases, children ended up not wanting to come home. My spouse and I are experiencing the same struggle. We have two children, a daughter and a son.

Our daughter, who is married, lives quite far away, so we cannot visit her often. As for our son, we reluctantly sold a plot of land and pooled all our funds to send him abroad about ten years ago.

We have a relative near where our son was studying, so we were not too worried. After he finished his studies, we secured a job for him in Vietnam but to our surprise, he refused to return as he had grown accustomed to living abroad.

My wife cried, pleaded, threatened, and tried to persuade him to return and settle down here. We even offered him capital to start a business and promised to give him our land and the house we currently live in. The house is worth VND7 billion (US$278,000) and the land is worth about VND3.5 billion. Nonetheless, he declined our offers and told us to keep the properties for our retirement or give them to his sister.

Some of my friends who sent their children abroad also faced the same issue. Their children did not return and they do not know what to do about it. I feel like if we had not helped him go abroad and used that money to let him study or start a business in Vietnam, maybe my spouse and I would be playing with our grandchild now instead of feeling so lonely.

Should we not have sent him abroad?

Reader Minh Phan

*This opinion was translated into English with the assistance of AI. Readers’ views are personal and do not necessarily match VnExpress’ viewpoints.