Abstract
Parental meaning systems (ethnotheories) constitute a very important part of the context in which children live and develop. Parental ethnotheories are in turn shaped by implicit cultural ideals that organize parental beliefs and actions and frame child-rearing practices. The article presents a qualitative research into Bangladeshi parental ethnotheories in the United Kingdom, which illustrates both the rich cultural meanings that orientate parental action and also demonstrates how parents generate new meanings following migration and culture change. Professional understandings about children’s developmental needs, of child rearing and parenting, are not culture free and an examination of the cultural frames of professional theories is important as parenting is often taught as a universal technique that takes little account of the cultural context and of what parents think. An engagement with other cultural theories about child development can enhance critical reflexivity in clinical practice by provoking reflection on the cultural constructions of professional theories. Creating a context for the expression of parental ethnotheories is necessary for developing cross-cultural collaborations in clinical practice as it empowers families and redresses the power relationship between the therapist and the parent.
Keywords
In clinical encounters, the different cultural ‘realities’ assumed by clients and professionals are seldom made explicit, and the very absence of this may reflect the dominance of professional discourses in practice. However, as Levine and New (2008) have shown, professional theories of child development are not culture free and are based on studies largely confined to children in North America and Europe who comprise less than 10% of all children in the world. An engagement with other cultural theories about child development as communicated via parental ethnotheories about children is necessary for enhancing critical reflexivity in cross-cultural work. Furthermore, an examination of the cultural constructions of professional knowledge of childhood and parenting is especially indicated at a time when the parenting ‘taught’ by professionals is offered as a universal technique that takes little account of cultural context and of what parents think (Forehand & Kotchick, 1996).
Childhood as a contested site
Notions about childhood, children’s needs and rights, what children should learn and how they should be responded to vary widely across cultures and over historical periods, and bear a dialectical relationship with prevailing social systems and cultural values that define the ideal human. Aries’ (1996) controversial work has highlighted how different historical conditions in the West have shaped different ideologies of childhood, with a consequent impact on children’s subjective lives. Social change such as the rising influence of moralists as early as the 17th century, an interest in discipline, health and in education as a tool for improvement, generated in the West a conception of childhood as a biologically defined stage requiring specific treatment in schools providing homogenous subjection to specialists fostering emotional, physical, moral and intellectual development for all children. This required children’s separation from the world of adults for much of their everyday life, unlike the case in many rural parts of the world today (Lancy, 2008). Anthropologists (Lancy, 2008; Levine & New, 2008) have described how different economic, environmental and social conditions lead to very different ideas about necessary competencies in adulthood. On these are predicated different parental beliefs about child rearing and the organization of physical and social settings for children’s lives – the ‘developmental niche framework’ (Harkness & Super, 1994). For example, a free market economy requires competitiveness, mobility and independence, and a child-rearing style that promote independence and individuation from an early stage. In an agrarian-based economy, the family is the economic unit, and its survival requires interdependence and cooperation, and a child-rearing style that promotes interconnectedness. Cultural ideals script particular moral world views which dictate parental beliefs and behaviour and frame child-rearing practices (Levine et al., 1994). In an increasingly inter-connected world, the rapid flow of ideas, images and people creates new cross-cultural spaces where different cultural worlds are juxtaposed in time and space. The encounter with difference demands a critical engagement with other cultural worlds. Concerns about morality, cultural boundaries and risk in the cross-cultural spaces are played out through parental, public and professional beliefs about what is best for children and how they should be brought up, making childhood an intensely contested site for cultural production and reproduction.
‘Parenting’ and parental ethnotheories
According to Weisner and Lowe (2007), child-rearing practices are cultural pathways for children made of everyday routines involving cultural activities such as bed time, watching TV, visiting relatives and so on. Activities in turn are framed by many aspects of a culture, for example, goals, values, people in relationships, emotions and a script defining the normative way to do the activity. Endorsement of the everyday practices expresses implicit cultural theories of child rearing, whether parental or professional.
Harkness and Super (1996) cogently argue that parental ethnotheories about children constitute an important context for child development and are necessary for understanding parental action and motivations. Although intra-cultural variations exist and reflect differences in individual experiences, shared cultural understandings are powerful determinants of how we think, behave, our moral and aesthetic values and in short the construction of our subjectivity.
‘Parenting’ is a fairly modern term suggesting a technology that can exist outside its context and which can be self-consciously packaged and taught by experts (Kakar, 2012). Baumrind’s (1967) early research on the dimensions of parenting identified as disciplinary strategies, the provision of warmth and nurturance, styles of communicating with children and parental expectations of developmental maturity and control, has been highly influential in the growth of parenting programmes for managing children’s behaviour. According to Forehand and Kotchick (1996), although contextual variables such as family structure and parental psychopathology are recognized as important influences on parenting, the recognition of culture, ethnicity and other social influences is lacking. ‘Parenting’ as such also ascribes the task of parenting to biological parents, negating the role of other care givers in the everyday life of the child, unlike that embodied in the alternative term ‘to look after’. Until recently, the more commonly used term in English was ‘bringing up children’, which better recognized the implicit relationship between belief, practice and providing care in the care giver’s task to raise a child to achieve socially expected adulthood. In Bengali, spoken in Bangladesh, the equivalent terms connote, to make the child bigger/to grow or make human.
A professional approach to parenting is predicated on the belief that ‘parents may lack the necessary knowledge and need expert help to gain it’ (Harkness & Super, 1996). It masks the issue of the ethnocentricity of professional theories and of power in the relationship between professionals and parents, while ignoring the role of the parents’ cultural philosophy about children. An understanding of the social-moral world of parents from different cultural backgrounds will open up the possibility of a meaningful dialogue between professionals and parents, whose actions may otherwise appear obscure and somehow out of place.
Parental beliefs in changing contexts
The literature on parental beliefs is extensive and is largely focussed on discreet, relatively stable cultural contexts (Georgas, Berry, Van de Vijer, Kagitcibasi, & Poortinga, 2006; Harkness & Super, 1996; Lancy, 2008; Levine & New, 2008) and less has been written about parental beliefs in the context of social transformation, such as following migration. Parental ideas may change as families migrate and as successful adaptations in the new context are required.
Where transnational migration occurs in the rural to urban direction, the parent is often positioned in the wider context of the historical and political relationships with the country of origin and the new country, with inherent power asymmetries. Power inequalities are often expressed in generalizing theories, for example, a tendency to cast intergenerational issues of a migrant community in terms such as ‘culture conflict’. This assumes the universal desirability of Western values for the young and a view that parents maintain entrenched, ageless positions with little new understandings. Detailed studies of post-colonial situations show variability in encounters between different systems of knowledge and cultural practices, suggesting a need for more nuanced understandings (Ericksen, 2001). Kagitcibasi (2006) argues that following rural to urban migration, a direct shift towards the Western pattern cannot be assumed and the transformative process is likely to be informed by cultural orientations that endow meaning. For example, Kwak (2003) found that contrary to expectations, Asian adolescents in Canada do not experience autonomy and family embeddedness as being in conflict. Ewing’s (2008) ethnographic study of Turkish men in Germany demonstrates that masculine honour remains an enduring concept among the Turkish, although how honour is derived in Germany is negotiated in multiple new ways.
Bangladeshi diaspora in London
In modern societies, it is impossible to study everything about every community, due to the complexity and scale involved. Hence, although this study was focussed on the Bangladeshi diaspora in London, it is hoped that it will contribute towards a framework for understanding transformative processes in other communities undergoing rapid transitions.
Much has been written about cultural change, particularly that affecting the young South Asians in Britain (Gardner, 1995; Lau, 2000), but less attention has been given to its impact on the everyday knowledge and practice of migrant parents for whom the implicit structures of the familiar world are not available. This article presents the findings of a study exploring Bangladeshi parental ethnotheories about children in London. A total of 47% of British Bangladeshis reside in London, with 22.8% within Tower Hamlets. The majority come from small landowning families, mostly from Sylhet in the northeast of Bangladesh. Sylhet is a largely agrarian, relatively prosperous region of Bangladesh and culturally holds much in common with the rest of Bangladesh. Most men came in the 1970s, with women and children arriving subsequently. The community in Tower Hamlets is concentrated over a small geographical area with easy access to Bangladeshi services and goods. Although families are housed in nuclear units, chain migration has ensured that most have access to extended kin in the United Kingdom. The smaller number of British Bangladeshis of higher socio-economic and educational class are not represented in the sample.
Social organization in Bangladesh and continuity in London
There is little research on how children are brought up in Bangladesh. Children are often incidentally referred to in gender and kinship studies on rural Bangladesh as they inhabit the same space as women, who are often the focus of studies (Aziz, 1979; Blanchet, 1984; Kotalova, 1996). Bangladeshi social and kin organization reflects cultural continuity with other South Asian regions but is also distinctively Islamic. Hence the article will draw upon a range of studies from both Islamic contexts (Beshir & Beshir, 2009; Fernea, 1995; Olgar, 2008) and South Asian ethnographies (Kotalova, 1996; Mandelbaum, 1988; Seymour, 1999).
The little that is known describes the organizing principles of hierarchy of age and gender and the primacy of the interest of the family. Kotalova (1996) describes how in agrarian Bangladesh a person is always viewed as enmeshed in a complex network of family (poribar, ghor, bari) and the consensual moral community (shomaj). Connectedness with others possesses an intrinsic value, and any form of detachment from social bonds suggests a lack of belongingness, the ultimate stage of which is social death. As elsewhere in South Asia, large agnatically related units provide for multiple adults who share child care (Mandelbaum, 1988; Seymour, 1999), and although children are present in every social event, they are usually not the focus. Where American and Northern European cultural systems tend to emphasize the individual and idealize the autonomous nuclear family unit, in Bangladesh, the cultural ideal is the family system which posits the welfare of the collective family above all. Furthermore, descent and inheritance are traced predominantly through males (patrilineality), which in turn gives males precedence over women and links family honour to the sexual purity of women, ensured through institutions such as early arranged marriage and veiling. For many Muslims, veiling is also scripturally sanctioned and holds a transformative potential in the politics of identity, modernity and multiculturalism (Taro, 2007). Veiling ensures that the family is protected from potential impurity and dishonour affecting the lineage that a sexually mature girl could bring if she were to have contact with inappropriate men. Both men and women are perceived to have active sexual desires, and accordingly, with puberty, girls are cautiously watched over until marriage. The outside world is perceived to be very risky for the girl. Among Bangladeshi Muslims, marriage between cousins, ideally parallel cousins (children of two brothers), is approved of and ensures that the young bride does not face an unfamiliar, hazardous world after marriage.
An understanding of the moral universe of Bangladeshi parents in the United Kingdom requires knowledge both of their roots and of the context of their lives in the United Kingdom. In London, educational and occupational success brings a higher status for the family, and which necessarily requires an engagement with the world outside and the possibility of culture change. Furthermore, with migration, the sense of belonging to a pan-Islamic world has redefined their Islamic identity, with an emphasis on the role of Islam as an organizing force in the change process.
Methodology
As the British Bangladeshi community is in transition, it was expected that the parents will use a range of socialization strategies, some new and some old, and the direction of change would be influenced by exposure to new moral worlds, new risks and new roles. The research questions were focussed on two central issues: (1) What are the socialization strategies used by Bangladeshi parents in the United Kingdom and (2) What has influenced the direction of the socialization goals and strategies? The term ‘socialization’ was operationalized as the knowledge, skills and values to be transmitted by the parents and their intended means for inculcating this knowledge in their children in order to ensure that they grew up to become competent British Bangladeshi Muslims. The limitations of time and resources did not allow for a broader exploration encompassing the role that children play in the process. The emphasis was on what parents wanted their children to learn and how they tried to achieve this, as opposed to constructing a framework stressing the dimensions of ‘parenting’ discussed above.
The study took place in 2006–2009 in two Boroughs of London, Tower Hamlets (East) and Southwark (South). Ethical consent was granted by the North East London Consortium Ethics Committee. Semi-structured in-depth interviews of 24 Bangladeshi parents, overwhelmingly mothers, from a community centre for Bangladeshi women in Southwark and via introductions by health centre staff in Tower Hamlets, were tape-recorded by the author who speaks both Bengali and Sylheti, which is related to Bengali. Where possible, direct observation of interactions between parents and children was noted and discussed with parents. The researcher also drew upon her experience as a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist working with British Bangladeshi children and families in London. The data were analysed using Grounded Theory application, identifying concepts, categories and the relationship between concepts, categories and meta-categories. The original design had an observational component, but this was abandoned due to the constraints imposed by ethical requirements and the researcher’s role as a clinician in the local area (Table 1).
Research participants.
While presenting the findings, I will attempt to explicate Bangladeshi parental theories about children and refer to the work of other researchers. The findings will also highlight critical issues and dilemmas experienced by parents and where they perceive a need for new solutions or interpretations. While only some anonymized quotes are discussed to develop the text, these have been chosen as they illustrate themes that appear recurrently and as is the case usually, some participants were more eloquent and provided details that others touched upon briefly.
Bringing up children and the goals
Children are given by Allah. Our job as parents is to guide them the right way and when they are mature, it is down to them to take the right path. If they choose the wrong path, it is entirely up to them. The right path is to grow up in a loving family, study obviously, decent job, marry and settle down. In terms of qualities: obedience, follow the religion and to be spoken well of by others … our duty as parents is to create the right environment for this to happen. (Reshma, 30 years)
There were no self-conscious terms equivalent to the term ‘parenting’. Parents referred to their task as parents in terms of making children grow bigger/make manush (human), guiding them to learn right from wrong. Nor was there an emphasis on development according to ‘normal developmental stages’, but rather the stress was on allowing the child to simply grow/be in the early stages. However, the inculcation of good behaviour and avoidance of bad behaviours through instruction was emphasized as something that must start very early. Good behaviours to be taught from a young age include obedience and showing respect for elders and relatives, sharing, adab (Islamic etiquettes) and learning about Islam. Behaviours to avoid were anger, fighting and disrespect of elders and kin. The emphasis was on the duty of parents to teach proper conduct to enable their children to play out their life within the social and moral universe of the Muslim Bangladeshi community. This overarching goal was also shared by younger parents with formal education. The phrase ‘study obviously’ highlights educational achievement as a marker of responsible parenting for children’s success in the United Kingdom. The stress on ‘choice’ is new for someone of Reshma’s age and background and reflects a renegotiation of parental authority and choice in a diasporic context where individual choice is highly valued.
Organizing values
Respect for elders and obedience
At the end of the day talking to your elders, listening to your elders, getting advice from them helps … I have two kids but I still live with my in-laws. I would like my children to think the same way … show respect to Kutumb (kin) … not call Kaka (father’s younger brother) by their names but by the relational term Kaka. Here they must learn to respect elders, it is necessary for our culture – they should not call teachers by their name. (Reshma, 30 years)
Respect for elders, especially parents, is highly valued and is also enshrined in Islam. Crucially, showing respect assures the honour of the parent and which in turn confers nurturance. Respect and obedience to parents and kin elders evoke the necessary nurturing and disciplinary authority and this interplay maintains the moral and social order. ‘Obedience’, using the correct kin term, and valuing the wisdom of parents are markers of respect. The link between respect and obedience is highly significant. A child’s assertion of his or her contrary wishes would need to be negotiated with parents so as not to cause an open rupture in a relationship predicated on obedience as an embodiment of respect. This process of negotiation can be an important therapeutic tool that can help families manage change.
Relating to others
When Kutumb come to the house, small children should learn how to introduce themselves, understand kin relationships and use correct kinship terms, how to speak and behave with them, when you go out how to tell baad (bad) behaviour if you see it, know how to tell haram (religiously proscribed) from halal (religiously permitted) food, to do salaam (greetings) show maya (affection/compassion) if someone does not know something, give food nicely to the guest, not to kick nor hit other children, share, play and study together, not get angry, behave such that other people do not think badly of you but praise you instead. (Halima, 33 years)
Behaviours that bring social cohesion by emphasizing one’s relationship with others and by negating conflict, as opposed to asserting oneself, were stressed. A further point was that specific behaviours are associated with specific relationships and indicate one’s place in the social world. Learning one’s relationship to kin confirms where one belongs. The emphasis on kin terms endorses the affective quality that goes with specific kin relationships (affection, distance, respect, obligation, obedience, nurturance). Learning what is morally prescribed/proscribed is stressed as necessary for imbibing the ‘right path’. The emphasis on social cohesion will not fit well with therapeutic approaches that focus on understanding conflict as a meaningful tool for exploring relationships and as an expression of individuality.
Belonging to the shomaj (moral community)
Everyone has their dhormo (religious-moral duty enjoining a way of life). Shomaj will determine how well your children have turned out. If children in our house are not good people will say ‘so and so’s daughter is on the baad poth’ (path of ill repute), if they behave well people will speak well. Sometimes children understand this, sometimes not. They say: ‘you were brought up differently, this is London culture’ – we don’t have to worry about what people say – we have to give an account to Allah only (her daughter has refused to wear the veil). I say to her ‘everyone has their religion, you are a Bengali Muslim, you live according to our ways, not according to English, Christian ways, everyone has their own religion, we have to keep our sharam (respect/honour) this way’. (Jahanara, 36 years) In Bangladesh, a person is always viewed as enmeshed in a complex network of family and community (shomaj), that one associates with and can translate as the cohesive moral community. One’s relationship with other family units in the shomaj is central, first, because of the intrinsic value of connectedness with others and, second, as approval by the shomaj is important for the social standing/honour of the family and its members, particularly for girls. Shomaj’s collective sanction may bring not only formal disapproval but also temporary exclusion for the family (Kotalova, 1996).
Jahanara also describes how her daughter views individual relationships as being of a higher order, which then weakens the need to heed the authority of shomaj. This is not surprising for a young person growing up in London, where an emphasis on autonomy and individual assertion is adaptive. However, the fact that Jahanara cites her daughter illuminates her awareness of a central conflict in her own struggle to enculturate her daughter, who is successful in the outside world but, at the same time, Jahanara has to ensure her well-being in their shomaj.
Gender, socialization and the consensual moral community
Keeping sharam (respect/honour)
For us Bengalis, when a girl becomes shahein (pubescent) we don’t want them to go out much in the neighbourhood. After school we want them back – if they stay out their mind turns to dangerous ways. We have to then shashon (discipline that asserts authority) them. Outside there are many kinds of people – some dangerous. If out with friends, we tell them to come home. If she does something that breaks her sharam it will be very difficult for her. She will not be able to show her face. (Shuma, 26 years)
The words sharam or lajja are difficult to translate into English. Seymour (1999) in her ethnographic study in Orissa, India, defines it as follows: ‘it really means a time of self-awareness of a girl learning about her fertility and her need for modesty and about how to comport herself in a mature way so everyone will know that she is grown up’ (p. 253). It earns her respect. If loosely translated as shame, it connotes a negative sense, as opposed to something that a mature girl can acquire and demonstrate. The consequences of a girl losing her sharam are perceived as an unthinkable tragedy. Families do everything to prevent any risk of this occurring. This is borne out in the study, where even mothers of children who were toddlers spent most of the interview discussing the dangers for girls in adolescence:
Boys and girls have to be brought up differently. We have to help them to choose their line. The line of the girls – we don’t want to give them much freedom (uses the English word ‘freedom’). If we do they will become like the English – in how they dress, mixing with boys, lose their maan-sharman (respect/honour). When they learn how to look after their sharam we can let them go on their own to school and back. If a girl does not develop sharam, we think about arranging her marriage before university. We have to think foremost of her well being (in the longer term). (Shahanaz, 35 years)
The risks attached to giving a girl ‘freedom’ (letting go) are unimaginable. Why? The risk is to her sexuality, and should she encounter sexual liaisons, she would lose her sharam and her place in the shomaj. In Bangladesh, the unfamiliar outside world is seen as dangerous to women’s sexuality, as both young females and males are thought to have a high propensity for sexual attraction. In a society where singleness for women is highly undesirable, the loss of sharam could hold very serious consequences. As the sharman (honour) of the family rests on her reputation, the future of her siblings will also be at risk, as other families would not wish to make ties with a family where a daughter has lost sharam. Control of male sexuality is of less concern as it does not threaten the patrilineal descent principle.
Western practitioners could easily misconstrue this sort of maternal concern as being oppressive for her daughter’s development, as adolescents are deemed naturally to seek peer contact and develop interest in their own sexuality. In the West, skills for independence and individuation are seen as requiring exploration of the outside world, establishing relationship with peers and developing one’s identity separate from the family. For the Bangladeshi mother, her moral duty enjoins her to ensure that her daughter is protected from any risk to her sharam from the outside world until she is able to take care of it (her sharam) herself. While in Bangladesh, her confinement to family at this stage would still offer her ample opportunities to mix with trusted peers and younger aunts in the extended kin networks, but this is very limited in London where kin networks are smaller and less accessible. Significantly, Shanaz demonstrates flexibility in a changing context by renegotiating the conditions for letting go of her daughter when she says that girls can be trusted here to travel alone when they learn to take care of their sharam.
Izzat (honour/respect)
Parents were less worried about boys. As Shahanaz (35 years) notes, ‘We cannot keep them in the house. Have to let them go. Worry when they are late coming home – are they having alcohol, ganja, who are they mixing with?’
Letting boys go out was seen as necessary as their ‘nature’ demanded to be ‘outside’ where they would have to learn to hold their izzat (honour). Izzat holds many connotations, including acquiring a standard of moral excellence and distinction which has to be gained and defended (Kotalova, 1996). For the boy, who must earn respect, izzat, in his social-moral community, un-Islamic behaviours like smoking and imbibing alcohol threaten his standing in shomaj, as well as that of his father’s, as it would demonstrate his inability to control his son. What earns him respect is his ability to sustain, protect the family and be in control as a parent. In the UK community where unemployment is high and many men do not have an assured livelihood, an emphasis on parents as the repository of knowledge and wisdom, and as doing their best to care for the children under adverse circumstances, legitimizes respect for parents and their authority.
Organizing beliefs about children’s learning
How children learn
Even young children can understand and can begin to learn early. When very little they have to be told – ‘this is a good thing to do, this is wrong’. Initially they have no buj (reasoning, also moral reasoning), but buj will appear with age … Little children can be dushtu (mischievous in a playful sense), but as they grow buj will come from within. (Sheuli, 26 years)
Childhood is equated with the state of non-reason (not having buj). Temper tantrums, even the use of abusive language, are benignly tolerated and explained as the child does not understand. Because of that and because child development is perceived as an organic process, regulated by God (‘Allah gives buj and we teach’) and nature (Kotalova, 1996), parents found it difficult to explicate easily their role in shaping the little child’s behaviour, other than as instructing them about what is right or wrong behaviour. Dushtami is the Bengali word denoting acceptable transgressions in a little child, while the word ‘naughty’ was used with more serious connotations. ‘Naughty’ is a word used by others, such as teachers, to describe the child’s transgressions. Its use indicated mother’s awareness of how others, specifically outsiders, would perceive the child’s behaviour, with more serious consequences.
There was little description of little children’s subjective worlds as parents were meant to provide for all their needs, the emphasis being placed on teaching proper conduct and providing physical care and love. As this contrasts with parents’ awareness of their children’s sadness, anger, envy and loss expressed in clinical situations, the apparent lack of emphasis on children’s subjective states in normative conversations may well be a reflection of the belief that a well cared-for child should not have serious worries. With older children (starting from 4 to 6 years), the use of explanations was emphasized, such as the need to provide more explanations regarding good or bad behaviours, and it was hoped that with the appearance of buj, the child would be capable of moral reasoning necessary for distinguishing good from bad.
The fostering of developmental/cognitive skills was not mentioned. Parents described the process of development as something that ‘just happens/unfolds as the child grows’. Educational teaching was seen as a task for teachers, and most had not conceived a role for themselves, other than ensuring school attendance and completion of home work. This may reflect the educational status of the mothers as most had recently made the rural to urban transition with little or no formal education themselves. However, younger mothers participated significantly more in their children’s education and actively stimulated skills for success in school, such as conversational skills.
Discipline and nurturance
You want to explain and do shashon (discipline by asserting authority), here you cannot shashon, that is the main problem. In Bangladesh speaking loudly or a slap will frighten the child, it will make them realize that they have gone too far and therefore should stop … as my guardian is angry … without shashon children are ruined … you must also show maya (affection) and explain with maya for your child. (Jhuma, 47 years)
Bengali understanding of how the moral order is maintained endorses the duty of superiors to judge and punish, teach and take care. Although a fear of moral disciplinary authority for maintaining order is thought necessary, there is an equal emphasis on superiors, like parents, needing to protect, foster, explain and show affection/compassion that expresses embodied values (Kotalova, 1996).
Most parents thought discipline should be enforced by an occasional light slap, a chor (unlike maar or hitting which was frowned upon), raising the voice, evoking threats or the higher disciplinary authority of the father. They worried about how to exert disciplinary authority in London where they believed parents would be taken to task for using physical means of chastisement (even light slapping or raising their voice). The concern was that without deterrents, explanations and pleas alone would not stop children from getting ‘distorted/ruined’ or becoming socially and morally disorderly. While feeling inhibited from exercising disciplinary authority in ways familiar to them, they were unsure of entirely doing away with them.
Shaming as a disciplinary technique was frequently mentioned. Sheuli (26 years) states, ‘In Bangladesh there would be a lot of ninda (social disapproval) if children are not behaved … you have to try different ways of getting them to understand (including) showing how they compare with others’. Comparison with more successful children was deemed to increase a child’s wish to excel, gain approval and conform, but this was balanced with an equal acceptance of children’s innate differences expressed in the phrase ‘fingers of the hand are not all alike’.
Division of labour and new roles
Most parents identified the mother as the primary carer for socializing young children, and the father as the family earner and for being available to discipline (shashon), if required. However, with older boys, a father’s guidance was deemed essential both for his development and for consolidating the father–son relationship.
Although lifestyles in London did not easily allow for extended family members to live together, most mothers thought that the authority to guide and discipline children could be exercised by others such as elders and patrilineal males:
There we had grandparents, aunts and uncles (uses specific kin terms) who we talked to everyday. They would discipline and also give aador (affection). If my mother scolded me I would go to my grandmother). Children may feel isolated here due to lack of relatives. Here one has to talk more to the children (both boys and girls) … the mother has to teach different things (all the things that the daughter would have spoken to her aunts and cousins about) e.g. things that cause lajja/sharam such as why she should not have a physical relationship without marriage. If the mother does not become friendly and talk about these things, she (daughter) may get into trouble. (Anamika, 41 years)
The availability of other adults for affectional bonds in Bangladesh may preclude the development of intense tensions/rivalries that an exclusive relationship between mother and a child may engender. It also afforded children the opportunity for other close relations in a large family. Anamika describes how mothers now are required to take up new roles normally relegated to others in an extended family and must find a different way of relating to children and daughters in particular. Talking directed at understanding their subjective emotional worlds and teaching them about growing up were emphasized as new domains. In Bangladesh, much of this learning would have come from younger relatives in the home. The use of the term ‘become friendly’ was repeated in several interviews and articulates a different way of relating to children that the new context requires. It is associated with non-hierarchical talking that opens understandings and allows parents greater influence than the traditional mode of a more hierarchical relationship.
Routines and habits
In Bangladesh we studied in the evening, went to the Mosque in the morning, then to school, ate after returning … here children don’t listen to parents, they do what they want and when they want, they do ‘ultapalta’ (topsy-turvy), here children think they can do what they see outside. They cannot discern between what is outside (culture of school, TV, friends) and what is inside (culture taught by parents). (Hasna, 33 years)
Routines with distinctive activities delineate social spaces with different symbolic values, for example, between the home and the outside world, or the home and the community of the mosque. Routines mark the point of transitions for the children and give a sense of order as to what belongs where. Hasna bemoans the fact that the world has turned topsy-turvy for the children who have no routines that mark the different social-moral spaces. Most informants emphasized the importance of the daily routine for children being indicative of order. Disorder (sense of something not being in place) would become evident by the child not following routine/roles, rather than by clues about the child’s subjective state. The emphasis here is on developing an ordered world, both inner and outer, as opposed to fostering of individualities, and this stands in contrast to a Western emphasis on attention to the state of the child’s emotional world.
Religious observances
It is hard bringing up children here but it becomes easier if you can bring them up the Islamic way. There are plenty of religious schools and mosques to help. Allah’s compassion can bring a wayward child back. (Abdul, 35 years)
Teaching children about Islam was often undertaken by mothers and religious teachers and strengthened by attendance at the mosque. The reading of Islamic books and viewing Islamic DVDs and TV channels were highly prevalent and considered essential for enabling children to grow into the moral world of a consensual Muslim community. Parents also believed that by becoming good Muslims, their children would evoke Allah’s blessings, which would enable them to stay on the ‘straight path’. When parents lost hope, they prayed that Allah would guide their children back to the right path.
New risks, strategies and engagement with change
In this country 90% of the problems with the children are due to problems of the mon (the thinking-feeling entity of the Bengali self). What the child think/feels she can do, she does. Parents cannot ‘control (her mon)’. Parents try everything – give all the maya (love) but this still happens. Our home culture is one kind and the outside culture is another. For the English it is the same culture, home and outside. We repeat to them: don’t go here, don’t watch too much TV, don’t smoke, say namaz (Islamic prayers recited in a daily routine). In Bangladesh if a girl mixed with a boy, other people would scold her. But this is not possible here, as the outside culture is different and would not support us. (Maha, 41 years)
The lack of an ‘external’ consensual community upholding parental values is perceived as one of the most difficult aspects of bringing up children in London. Maha expresses the effort that parents make at keeping control of the boundary between the moral world of the family/non-family, shomaj/non-shomaj, while also recognizing that the boundaries are not so distinct for the children who carry the risk of transgressing them.
How do parents in London resolve what Kotalova (1996) highlights as the essential paradox for the human situation: keeping boundaries while establishing relationships across them? Parents were aware of the difference in values between them and their children, shown by the increasing use of the term pharak (difference) and in the dilemmas they described. Some found new ways of interpreting and articulating the dilemmas for the children in ways that resonated with the children.
Minu (38 years) states, ‘If you keep a total difference between home and outside it does cause the children koshto (pain), they lose confidence:
Children get ‘confused’. They want to do one thing and we tell them to do another. They may not understand, but parents feel the shame. They are less upset by the shame, but we have to keep explaining to them … I understand their confusion but sometimes I feel angry. (Shahanaz, 35 years)
This statement is an explicit self-positioning that offers several alternatives to coercive ways of ensuring compliance. Shahanaz is sympathetic to the confusion and the distress that children feel when sharp boundaries are created within the everyday space of a child’s lived world. She acknowledges that the children do not recognize the shame that she knows, but she has yet to discover how to explain it to them. Shahanaz goes to a great length to recognize her own ambivalent feelings and attempts to adopt a talking/feeling stance which brings her closer to her children.
Some others, recognizing the emotional distress that the children experienced, sought new emotionally nuanced ways of disciplining:
If parents are doing too much shashon they may behave differently at home and outside. If a girl is forced to wear a scarf she will take it off outside. This may be difficult for her-cause her to lose confidence. (Anamika, 41 years) If fathers are ‘too tight (strict)’ it does not work … If the child is at home all the time they will become sad – it won’t work. You have to let them come and go, give freedom. You need to be ‘medium tight’ … parents should make ‘friendship with the child’ and talk. (Naima, 38 years)
Here a picture emerges of Naima recognizing the futility of a ‘too tight’ way of disciplining and advocating instead discipline that draws upon building emotional ties with the children through talking in a non-hierarchical relationship. Her specific reference to fathers, whose moral duty is to ensure discipline, is salient as it offers them an alternative to strict discipline.
Implications for clinical practice
The prevailing medical paradigm of symptom diagnosis and treatment of the individual has shaped most modern therapeutic interventions. The approach is based on the assumption that a difficulty or symptom can be addressed via an identification of the underlying problem that rests in the individual or their relationships, by an expert, applying established universal methods of analysis and treatment. This paradigm is culturally very powerful, but crucially it risks de-contextualizing human subjectivity by ‘atomizing our humanity as we construct the individualized person splintered from that which troubles and more importantly enriches our social milieu’ (Timimi, 2005, p. 179). This research highlights the social cultural world that frames human actions. Both the understanding of and solutions to human problems are grounded in social action. The findings demonstrate how the parents were meaningfully engaged in equally maintaining cultural continuity and evolving new solutions in a changing social cultural context. Parental ethnotheories provide a powerful understanding of the social cultural milieu of children’s lives, and an engagement with this is essential for establishing meaningful therapeutic relationships in clinical practice.
Evidence suggests that socialization concerns and strategies used by minority ethnic parents are rarely visible from the outside, and therefore need to be explicitly explored in professional/parental encounters. Cross-cultural therapists have written about the need to understand a minority families’ cultural world and develop a stance of ‘not knowing’, which facilitates curiosity about the family and the possibility of learning in the therapeutic situation (Maitra & Miller, 1995; Singh, 2009). This requires professionals to make sense of the family in the therapeutic present, and the family to explicate beliefs and ideas that are implicit and constitute their subjective being. As most parents find it difficult to say why they do what they do beyond the immediate level (Falicov, 1998), insights from other disciplines such as cultural psychology and anthropology have much to contribute in broadening knowledge of other cultural meanings and of the processes of culture change. Crucially, it can counter the circularity of tautological reasoning that arises when the approach is largely uni-disciplinary. In this kind of approach which prevails in therapeutic work, both the understanding and the solution of a problem are drawn from the same cultural and theoretical premise. The approach is very limiting in under-researched areas such as cross-cultural therapeutic work, where it is necessary to broaden the knowledge base for understanding other cultural positions.
Equally, ‘seeing’ the meaning of what the parents are saying provides a powerful insight into what motivates their actions. An understanding of the parents’ cultural world and their moral concerns will facilitate an empathic engagement with the whole family as opposed to a greater identification with the more familiar dilemmas of the young person. The latter approach risks further marginalization of the parent, particularly as morality derived from other cultural sources is often stigmatized, and the stigmatizing process is seldom explicitly recognized. In this study, the mothers’ interpretation of Muslim Bengali behaviour for girls reflects their own socio-political and cultural positions. Paraphrasing Chakraborty-Spivak (1988), the question is, ‘Can the subaltern (the mothers) speak?’ (italics mine). Crucially, how are the mothers to be heard without attempting to reframe their ‘voices’ in terms more acceptable to professional values or constructions, or without situating them in another time and place? The fact is, these conversations in clinical practice constitute part of modern discourses and require the clinician to engage with a plurality of concurrent positions, sometimes very different from their own. It is, however, necessary to engage with this question, if we are to connect with and empower those with whom we work (Krause, 1998).
Creating a context for the expression of parental ethnotheories is essential to the process of developing cross-cultural collaboration in clinical practice as it alters the power relationship between the parent and the therapist. Karl, Cynthia, Andrew and Vanessa (1992) illustrate how observations and distinctions that we emphasize focuses our attention and organizes our responses in particular ways. Where an assumptive observation/distinction is made by the professional that the action of the parent is unfamiliar and traditional or their values are seen as in conflict with modern discourses, an understanding of the parents’ ethnotheories can allow a different professional perception which is more likely to help parents to feel appreciated and understood, which in turn will make them more receptive to explore new alternatives. For example, a therapist seeing that the parent’s actions are meaningful and that they are engaged in the process of reworking their experience opens the way for collaboratively generating new meanings with the family.
Developing a culturally collaborative stance in clinical practice
Although socialization goals reflected in parenting norms are tied to required competencies for adults in a particular society, parents also reinterpret the received norms in new situations. When encountering new/troubling experiences, culturally available understandings afford plausible narrative frames for responding. However, as the study shows, alternative interpretive frameworks are also developed simultaneously in a moving tapestry of change, and what is seen as necessary and relevant may change through time and with unfolding events. New solutions evolve through the interweaving of both old and new meanings. In this journey, the clinician may join the family in co-constructing narratives by guiding awareness and accentuating new understandings and solutions which may be more adaptive for the family. This, however, will require the clinician to draw upon a repertoire of ‘cultural resources’, including awareness of the culture of their own professional training, the dimension of power in clinician/client relationship, engagement with a plurality of ‘voices’ in the family, curiosity about other cultural meanings and skills in facilitating shared agreements about new ways forward.
Limitations of the study
The small numbers of fathers who participated is an obvious limitation. The lack of participant observation is another, as there may be differences in what people say and as it provides rich insights into how people reinterpret meaning and reposition themselves in new cultural situations. A further study with young people is required to enhance understanding of the part that young people play in the socialization process and enrichen knowledge of culture change. Another line of enquiry to pursue is role of the wider social and political context in the change process.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Irfat Tarafdar for her untiring help with sample recruitment.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.