Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [96]
In traditional cultures, a birth changes dozens of relationships within the extended family. Children fall into a carefully arranged web of family members. Mothers are expected to care for babies, toddlers, and young children. Fathers, cousins, older siblings, aunts, and uncles all have prescribed roles. Grandparents often live in the same home and play an important role in the education of their grandchildren.
I know an Asian family that consists of the parents, both university professors, their teenaged daughter, and the mothers of both parents. They live together and while the couple works, the older women cook, care for the house, and supervise the daughter after school. The mother told me, "Our mothers have gentled our daughter. If they hadn't been with us, I think she would have found trouble in junior high. But they were waiting for her after school with snacks, attention, and affection. They held her life in place."
The American custom of putting infants in day care is shocking to many newcomers. No day care even exists in most of Central and South America and the Middle East. Immigrants wonder why we, in such a rich country, leave our babies with strangers.
Developmental milestones occur at different times across cultures. In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, children are toilet trained very early by American standards. Latino mothers have more relaxed time lines for toilet training and weaning. In general, Latino mothers are more indulgent, talkative, and affectionate with babies than mothers from many other cultures. This is great for young children, but sometimes increases their separation anxiety when they begin school.
Traditional parents keep kids more involved with family and less involved with peers than do American parents. Our American ideas of overnights for children or birthday parties for friends of children strike many newcomers as odd. Children are expected to be with the family when they are not in school. In fact, often parents don't want their children to have friends because these friends could lead them into trouble.
Different cultures have different ideas about discipline and physical punishment. What many cultures consider appropriate, we define as abuse. Refugee parents have been told at cultural orientation that they will be arrested if they discipline their children with physical force. They are afraid to use what may have been their traditional ways of punishing their children, but they have no new ways. Children sometimes use their parents' fears of the law to bully them. One boy told his mother, "If you don't let me watch TV, I'll call the police."
Attitudes toward retirement vary across cultures. Middle Eastern people retire as early as fifty. Latino men generally do not retire while they are healthy. Often elders from traditional cultures watch children while parents work. Sometimes this works well, but sometimes it leaves elders lonely and vulnerable. Without English, elders may be dependent on grandchildren for the simplest things—answering the phone, helping them read their mail, or translating cooking instructions on a can of soup. Sometimes their grandchildren cannot speak the language of the old country.
ADJUSTING TO THE NEW WORLD
Parents must learn English or they will lose authority and control of their children. As mentioned earlier, Portes and Rumbaut documented the benefits of bicultural families. They found that the best pattern was one in which the family carefully chose what to accept and reject in American culture. Second best was a pattern in which the whole family moved into mainstream America at