Growing up, Ms Kelly Latimer did not feel that she truly belonged in Britain where she was born. She and her younger sister were the only Chinese pupils in her school in Nuneaton, a small town in Warwickshire.

"As a kid of mixed heritage, you feel you don't quite fit in anywhere and you get bullied because you're different," recalls Ms Latimer, 27, a television sports presenter whose father is English and mother a Chinese Singaporean.

Regardless, her mother, leadership coach Jun Latimer, now 54, made sure she was not ashamed of her roots. During Chinese New Year, she prepared red packets, White Rabbit sweets and hawflakes bought from Chinatown, for her daughter to hand out to her classmates.

Ms Latimer says: "Knowing and understanding my heritage didn't make the bullying any easier, but I did learn to accept and embrace my 'worldliness' as opposed to resenting it."

When her father Tony Latimer, now 59 and also a leadership coach, relocated the family here for work in 1999 when she was 12, she studied Chinese - although she struggled with the subject - at Bedok South and St Anthony's Canossian secondary schools.

"It's important to live like a local. There was never any divide of them and us and, at no point did we feel we were foreigners or expatriates," says Ms Latimer, a communications graduate from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, who also studied communications and media at Temasek Polytechnic.

She is comfortable speaking in Mandarin and a little Malay, learnt from conversing with the family's helper. She also speaks Hainanese with her 85- year-old grandmother. Knowing native tongues breaks the ice in any group she is in, she says.

Increasingly, mixed- race families of expatriate and local backgrounds are integrating themselves with the Singaporean social fabric, rather than living in enclaves.

Singaporean Jesher Loi says his American wife, Ms Christina Kathleen Wagner, expected to live the "Singapore lifestyle from the get-go".

"She took public transport from the start, picked up Chinese and Hokkien as she went along and ate at hawker centres," says Mr Loi, director of branding and market development at Ya Kun International.

The 28-year-old says he "laid out plans" to live here from the time they dated while studying at a liberal arts university in California in the late 2000s. They got married in July 2011 and live in a private apartment in the Tanglin area with their eight-month-old son, Aniger.

Ms Wagner, a music teacher-turned-housewife, 25, says she misses the different seasons and vast outdoors back home, but marrying a man means marrying his lifestyle too.

"I want to be here and immerse myself in his world. I don't want my son to know only kids who would go back to America after a couple of years.

"The local context must be his second nature because his dad is Singaporean. It's important because this is where Aniger will grow up and be immersed in every aspect of local culture - like go to a local school and go to the army."

Indeed, Aniger is as familiar with rice porridge as he is with oatmeal and visits his paternal grandparents at their private apartment in Alexandra Road twice a week.

Maintaining frequent contact with parents and in-laws is "not common" in Western cultures, says Mr Loi, but his wife "understands and adapts to it".

Similarly for Ms Nurhidayah Hassan, her French husband and their three-year-old son, Ary-Kyann, it is not a case of having only either prata or pasta, but both.

Ms Nurhidayah, 29, who is doing her master's at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, says she and her engineer husband Olivier Le Neel, 49, "live as locals".

"We eat local food and are very much immersed in local culture and lifestyle. When my husband uses the car, I take public transport with my son."

Ary-Kyann goes to a local preschool, knows Singlish, celebrates Hari Raya and eats prata, says his mum, who is eight months pregnant with a baby girl. He watches French cartoons on YouTube, sings French songs and listens to dad read French books to him before bedtime.

Mr Le Neel, a Singapore permanent resident, who has lived here for seven years, says: "I came here as my company relocated me here to work, but I now have a wife and son, with a baby soon. I try not to live like an outsider or like a tourist visiting the country."

Grandparents play a key role in fostering bi-culturalism, say those SundayLife! interviewed.

Ms Erika Liu Ting Li, 21, whose father is a Malaysian Chinese and mother a Japanese, grew up in Singapore but learnt about Japanese and Malaysian cultures through annual visits to both sets of grandparents.

Her father, marketing consultant Michael Liu, 52, says: "My mum is friendly and talks to everyone in the market, even strangers. So my daughter learnt the friendliness of Malaysians from her and to be sociable."

"My in-laws live an active social life and took her to the associations and clubs they belonged to. So from them, she learnt about new cultures."

Ms Liu, an only child, is now studying for a law degree at Tokyo University, after her mother - Ms Satsuki Ikegami, 54, assistant secretary-general of the Japanese Association, Singapore - persuaded her to catch up on her Japanese roots rather than study in England or the United States.

National University of Singapore sociologist Paulin Tay Straughan says that in mixed-race families where one culture is more prominent than the other, it is not necessarily because of gender (mums pushing culture more than dad), race (a case of occidental over oriental) or occupation (the more professional parent calling the shots).

"We tend to assume that mum is the primary socialisation agent in the family. However, in families where fathers play an equal and significant role in childcare, there'll be a good balance of cultures and these children are more likely to be truly bi-cultural," she says.

All things being equal, children absorb the mores of the society they live in, adds Prof Straughan, 50, who is married to Dr Robert Straughan, 55, a senior mathematics lecturer at the Singapore Polytechnic.

For her sons, Robert William, 21, and Timothy Ashby, 18, who were born and raised here, her American husband has to "work harder" to ensure they appreciate their American "historical cultural heritage" - for instance, Thanskgiving and Independence Day.

Ms Esther Oon-Bybjerg and her Danish husband of six years do not consciously promote one culture or the other in their family, which include two children, Katie, five, and Ethan, three. Instead, it is the little things they do together that foster an appreciation for all cultures.

Her 43-year-old husband, Mr Kenneth Bybjerg, who is in logistics, has been here for 18 years. He is as happy eating bak chor mee as Danish duck during Christmas, and also inserts little Danish flags into dishes during birthdays and the Danish National Day.

Says Ms Oon, 37, group director for corporate communications at a global shipping and logistics firm: "Parenting ways should not be defined by race or culture, but by universal values of kindness, generosity and patience, for instance, taking turns and sharing."

Similarly, actor Adrian Pang and his British wife Tracie say they have "friends of all kinds of backgrounds", so the possibility of any "supposed culture clash" for their sons, Zack, 14, and Xander, 13, is remote.

Born in London, and now attending the School of the Arts, the boys are neither more Western nor Eastern, but "they are both", says Pang, 48.

"They are being brought up with a happy and healthy sense of belonging to the world and not just to one culture."

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