To understand a child's home culture, early years educators need to look beyond the superficial, such as food and dress, to parents' ways of thinking, attitudes to behaviour and long-term aspirations for their children, says Opal Dunn
Education of nursery-aged children is more than a ‘partnership’; it is an interactive triangular relationship involving the child, their parents and their teachers or carers. In the early years, the influence of the parents and home is the strongest, especially in more educated families as the parents, generally mother, have taught and are still teaching their child to speak and thus think, and are still acting as their child’s most important mediator of their environment inside and, to a certain extent, outside the home.
On nursery school days all children, irrespective of their home life, have to get used to moving between two worlds – home and nursery school. To enter in to the very different world of nursery school and then re-adjust to home after the school day, when some personal development and thus change has taken place, is a challenge, which adults rarely recognise. (Compare it with the entry and re-entry experienced by adults on a holiday.)
Each home has its own unique culture, even when English is the language spoken both at home and school. It takes time for English-speaking children to get used to the different speaking voices of teachers at school, while bilingual children have to pick up a new language, English, as well as get used to the different use of body language. The ability of young children to glide successfully between two different worlds is remarkable. (Compare it with English-speaking adults in situations abroad where little or no English is spoken.)
WAYS OF THINKING
As nursery school educators in a multicultural society, it is important to know more about a child’s home culture than the obvious stereotypes like food and dress. Without some understanding of the ways of thinking, the conventions of behaviour and the aspirations that underlie the support and home education, it is impossible to understand and respond to a child’s holistic interests, values and needs.
It is important to realise that children being brought up to use two languages and cultures tend to see things differently from monolingual English-speaking children. These ‘double’ children already realise, unconsciously, that there are two ways to do the same thing to get the same result for example, counting to ten or saying ‘Good night' in another language. These ‘double’ children are becoming lateral thinkers; lateral thinking leads on naturally to creativity.
TIGER MOTHER
Amy Chua’s latest book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was reviewed in the UK press as a book on Chinese parenting revelling in the bitter clash with western methods. Reviewers, as well as readers, scornfully described Chua as a ‘pushy Chinese parent’. In fact, Chua writes more than a parenting manual. Through her personal account she gives educators a rare opportunity to find out about the home support organised by an ambitious Chinese mother, daughter of mainland Chinese parents who immigrated to the US.
Easy to read and sometimes humorous, Chua relates how, as a Chinese mother, she supports and personally plans the education of her two young girls up to teenage, whilst continuing to work herself. As she relates her girls’ school and musical education, she continually compares Chinese philosophy, educational methods, aspirations and desired achievements with western (British and American) parenting and schooling. 'In Chinese culture, it just wouldn’t occur to children to question, disobey, or talk back to parents', she notes. (This relates to Confucian principles also underlying Japanese and Korean relationships with elders). 'Westerners believe in choice, Chinese do not.'
Chua saw 'childhood as a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future'. Although most parents do not dream of their children becoming a music virtuoso like Chua, she explains that Indian, Pakistani, Korean and Japanese educated mothers’ parenting models and degree of support for their children’s education is similar.
Some zealous Japanese mothers in London – often referred to as 'education mamas' (kyo-iku mama) – describe how their young child attends two schools: ‘the English school is where my child plays and socialises and learns English; the Japanese school is where he studies’ one mother told me.
Many these parents feel, like Chua, that in the early years, especially where nursery education continues to six plus, children can begin to acquire life-lasting skills – languages, swimming, ball skills that are more difficult to learn later and especially in the teenage years.
Chua, married to a Jewish-American professor, arranged for her girls to grow up bilingual – English and Mandarin-Chinese. As Chua speaks only Hokkien-Chinese (a dialect), she arranged for Mandarin-Chinese speakers to come into the home.
Getting to know what support can or already goes on in the home is vital if the capabilities and potentials of children in the nursery school are not to be under-estimated. Home achievement can be simple from growing flowers to gaining confidence in emergent reading skills that come from regularly reading picture books together; the positive intimacy of supporting children has a powerful influence on developing emotional security, self-esteem and verbal skills.
Chua maintains that 'Western children are definitely no happier than Chinese ones.' What is happiness for a child? Is happiness the glow and self-esteem that come from positive intimacy with a parent and the lasting satisfaction of achieving a clearly defined, but achievable, visible goal like catching a ball five times or reciting, un-aided, a complete rhyme?
MORE INFORMATION
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Bloomsbury)
