Culture prominently shapes psychological adaptations and social adjustments for children facing potentially distressing circumstances. With three years of fieldwork on the children who stay after parental emigration in Guayaquil, Ecuador, I describe how children synthesize the competing values on émigré parents in wider society and in their transnational households that form a disjunctive socialization context. Children create a culturally constituted defense mechanism in their peer culture, which I call “transnational ties.” This defense allows children to view their geographically distant émigré parents as emotionally present by emphasizing continuing bonds, downplaying transitional periods, focusing on age‐graded care, and disconnecting family from the domestic unit. Children's personal practices reveal that enculturation is a social and psychological process.