Friday, October 21, 2011
Ch 12 Intercultural Communication Blog 1
I do believe that anthropologist Ruth Benedict is correct, we are "creatures of our culture". Anyone with children can see that we raise kids to be creatures of our culture. I was raised in a Christian home, my mom didn't let us out of her sight, and we always had dinner together as a family. We celebrated Christmas with a tree and on Halloween we could trick or treat, but were never allowed in scary costumes. I learned that a man is the head of the household, that boys did outside chores and girls did inside chores. These are all things that my parents believed and so we grew up believing the same things. As an adult, many of the beliefs i grew up with I'm now passing on to my children. I caught myself telling my son that he couldn't be a zombie for Halloween because we don't celebrate anything scary about the holiday. He wanted to know why, and all i could come up with is that it's because that's how i was raised. I suppose in order to break through limits of our culture we have to be willing to challenge some of our belief systems and really decide if it's our belief or just what we have been told to believe. I'm having to do that as a mother, to decide if i want to raise my boys exactly how i was raised. I am a creature of my culture, and most of what i learned will be passed on to both of my kids. My husband and i were raised similarly, so that doesn't cause any conflicts. I can't imagine what it must be like for intercultural marriages to meld together two cultures and decide how to raise the next generation. Their belief systems will be shaped by their families.
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I tend to think it is definitely best for kids who are raised by parents with similar culture. I've had several friends growing up whose parents were from two dissimilar cultures (or religions) and their families all ended up having major problems directly related to the cultural differences. For example I had one friend with one parent who was Caucasian and grew up here, and then her father was from Pakistan. I always felt in their house that there wasn't a lot of cohesion between the three of them. My friend always seemed to kind of struggle with an identity, I couldn't quite tell if she identified herself as Pakistani or white.
ReplyDeleteMy friend was considered to be Jew in Russia because of her father. After her family moved to Israel she became a … Russian because her mother was Russian. She was never able to find a place where she would be comfortable until she moved to US. My husband comes from different culture, but we were prepared to work on our differences and raise our two children in accordance with what we both perceive as right. My kids know that there is never only one way of doing things. I teach them to be flexible, to be able to rise above traditional approaches of solving problems, to be creative. Then they spend time with their friends that also come from different cultures – from Italian, Jew, Romanian, Greek, and Chinese – we live in the multicultural community and this adds little more relativity to their tiny lives. All parents could disagree with each other, but I do not think that I and my husband have more disagreements just because we came from the different cultures. At least as long as we are ready to work on our differences and find solution. Thus I do not think that raising a child in the cross-cultural family would much differ unless both of the parents not willing to compromise.
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