An interesting story popped up in my Google alert for homeschool, although it has nothing to do with homeschooling.  Still, it is an interesting look at the difficulties experienced by some immigrant communities and raises a lot of questions for me regarding the whole assimilation process, how immigrant families are instructed in American values and what the idea of American culture and values even means.

Over 100,000 evangelical Christians from the former Soviet Union live in the Portland area and the older generation is increasingly clashing with the younger.  In the Soviet Union, they were fined, jailed and put in mental asylums so the community learned to exist by isolating itself.  This has also been an interesting part of the ongoing homeschooling story in Germany as one of the stories to really gain a great deal of international attention involves the so-called “Paderborner Baptists,” an ethnically German group which had relocated back to Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union.  They rejected the values they saw in the schools, isolated themselves and began to homeschool.  They also resisted the state’s pressure on them, and some speculated that the resulting standoff had less to do with religion and homeschooling than it did with a community that had continued to exist by resisting Soviet oppression.

Here in the US, however, we do not have that kind of pressure.  Certainly there is a form of pressure put on immigrant families and their children, but it is of a different kind.  More subtle, not forceful, but still felt.  Some members of the community have responeded by withdrawing into their community, refusing to learn English and by maintaing their “old ways” as best they can.  But in the process, some fear they are losing their children.

The story focuses on Mariya and her family who immigrated here 6 years ago.  She feels helpless as she watches her children stray from her values and reject their heritage.

In Ukraine, she says, she never had trouble with her children.  Now they refuse to go to church or eat the Ukranian food she prepares.  They tell Mariya they will call the police if she disciplines them.  “I have no more hope that anything will change for the better,” she says.  “In this society, you basically have to do what your kids say.”  OregonLive.com

A pastor gives some additional insight:

“Parents think that if their kids get involved in American things, it’s desertion,” Faith Community Church Pastor Robert Rathburn says.  “It’s like corruption of their Russian or Ukranian culture and religion.”  Ibid.

Throughout the article, “American culture” is seen as pulling these children away from their parents, drawing them into our way of life and away from their parents.  Even the title, “Slavic parents lose control of their Americanizing kids” implies as much.  The sad thing is, however, the behaviors raising concern are not part of “American culture.”  The article leads off with an example.

Mariya calls her children’s schools almost daily, or comes to school crying.  Her three teenage sons smoke and drink, even in front of Mariya and her husband.  They go out at night, don’t return home until morning and sometimes disappear for days.  Her oldest dropped out of high school last year; another son did the same a few months ago.  Her preteen daughter ran away from home.  Ibid.

Drinking, drugs and running away certainly exist among American youth, but most of us who have been born and raised here would be horrified to see this kind of behavior in our children, and would also arrive at meetings with the school in tears.  It is shocking, and the parents feel completely powerless.

Later on in the story, we see a glimpse of the real problem.  The parents do not discipline their kids.  Back home, they spanked.  With a belt.  Here, parents fear losing their children if they use this sort of discipline and they seem at a loss for any other way to raise their children.

It is a difficult situation for all involved.  Perhaps when social workers receive reports arising out of these situations, some consideration needs to be taken for the culture they are coming from.  What we see as abusive, many of these families see as normal child rearing.  Education and assistance is needed more than splitting up families.

It makes me wonder exactly what they have been told.  Here in Lincoln, Catholic Social Servies helps to introduce refugees to American culture, teaching them a little of what to expect and specifically outlining parenting practices common in some of their native cultures which can lead to CPS involvement here in America.

In the immigrant population I worked with for a short time, I saw a lot of the same kinds of problems expressed in this article.  I don’t know specifically what they were told when they arrived, nor how they parented in teh refugee camp in the Middle East where they lived before coming here, but I was shocked at how much control children had over their parents and how parents were reluctant to even say “no,” let alone offer consequences for misbehavior.  And they also blamed American culture for seducing their children from their way of life.

But is American culture really to blame?  Somewhere along the line, someone did their job informing these immigrants that certain discipline techniques will bring the state into your home and possibly lead to your children being removed.  But it seems that something that is perhaps lacking is someone to teach them that there are other ways of setting and maintaining boundaries.  That even in America, we don’t allow our children to control us.  And that when our children make bad decisions involving underage drinking, drug use, gang behavior and even theft, we too are devastated.

Instead, they live in fear of their own children calling CPS or the police, and end up covering up the crimies of their children out of fear of the stigma from friends in their community and what will happen if the police get involved.

Ukraine corporal punishment parenting culture