Immigrant parent trap

If immigrant parents have a battle on their hands over cultural clashes, their children have a war, writes PRIYA RAJASEKAR

BEING AN immigrant parent is akin to walking a tightrope stretched over murky waters, like a participant in a Japanese game show. The reward at the end is often what motivates you to take the challenge in the first place, but without balance, parents could lose a lot more than they started out with.

As parents, we hope and dream for our children, wishing our definition of happiness upon them. As immigrant parents, we also feel compelled to pass on the legacy of an identity with our country of origin and our culture. But in our effort to do so, we often find ourselves battling it out with our children. On various fronts, be it academic, social or cultural, we try to impart values to our children that can be at cross purposes with what is acceptable in the land to which we have emigrated.

For instance, my children and children of other immigrant friends face name-calling at school for being too academic. But at home, given our backgrounds, we encourage our children to take their academic study seriously and compete to excel, an approach that is not always appreciated in Ireland.

When Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was first published, it created a flutter in the western world. Whereas Asian parents, particularly Chinese and Indian parents, are often criticised for being too demanding, here was one claiming confidently that her parenting style was superior and more successful than the permissive style prevalent in the US.

While the western world has been quick to label oriental parenting styles as pressurising and authoritarian, it has to be understood in context. Both China and India have huge populations, giving rise to intense competition: being “good” at anything will never do, and excellence is often the only ticket out of poverty. The culture of work-above-all-else is an inevitable consequence of such demands.

Likewise, in the western world, where society is relatively more egalitarian, there is less pressure to excel and more incentive to enjoy life through the pursuit of personal aspirations. This liberty to live primarily for oneself often extends beyond the realms of education and career to the way relationships are forged and families set up.

Immigrant parents and children from relatively conservative cultures also face challenges dealing with issues such as dating, “hanging out with friends” and premature exposure to sex or sexually explicit content. It is not uncommon for immigrant parents to choose to leave when their children, particularly daughters, enter their teenage years. It is easy to see how difficult it is for children to risk rejection and isolation in order to adhere to their parents’ wishes, or what they themselves believe is the right thing.

While immigrant parents are struggling to hold on to their identities and pass their culture on to their offspring, children of immigrant parents, in their struggle for acceptance, are often pulling in the opposite direction, giving rise to social complexities.

If immigrant parents have a battle on their hands, their children have a war: on the one hand they are asked to identify with a culture they have never fully known and on the other they are trying to belong to a culture that may be reluctant to adopt them as one of their own.

Even as very young children, they learn to separate their family lives from life outside their home, switching languages, accents, subjects of conversation or clothing, or even switching identities. But as they grow up to be teenagers and begin to explore relationships, life gets more complicated. They are faced with conflicting parental expectations, confusion in terms of ethnicity of their partners and a general identity crisis that prevents them from fully accepting one culture over another.

As with any conflict, this struggle for identity cannot be won without dialogue or compromise, and the answer lies somewhere in between these extremes. The opinion of Irish parents is crucial to the argument. Somewhere between the stereotyped East versus West, autocratic versus laissez-faire compartmentalisation, parents in general are unhappy with the erosion of moral and social values. In varying degrees dictated by cultural background, parents everywhere are worried about their children’s excessive and premature exposure to sexually explicit content, the pressure on even very young children to focus on sexual attractiveness, the increasing trend of dating even among primary school children, the “cool” tag associated with early experimentation with sex, alcohol and drugs, and the nonchalant attitude towards risk of teenage pregnancy. And now, dictated by tough economic circumstances and the compulsion to migrate, parents in Ireland, too, are placing more value on education and career.

Across cultures, in varying shades of intensity, parents are struggling to find the language to reach out and do what is best for their offspring. There is no one-size-fits all solution and blind cultural assimilation won’t help find a resolution. Perhaps the answer lies in amalgamation, a coming-together of the best of both cultures that will help adopt the best practices and walk that tight rope of parenthood, immigrant or otherwise.