American Family » Love is sometimes a Battlefield.

American Family takes the time to expand on her education post and it’s worth checking out. See, if I were to debate A about our differing educational values and only came at it from a “But Alfie Kohn says…” I’d be missing his point. Yes, you can concentrate the discussion down to “what way works best?” but at a certain point A might say, “But I’m Chinese.” And I might respond with, “And I’m not.” And then we’d be at a cultural impasse. My choice to reject academic pressure has a different resonance for me than it does for Chinese A.

You know how Jane Brown infamously said that internationally adoptive parents are a fifth best choice? (And I’ll assume that domestic transcultural adoptive parents are a fourth best choice.)

The first, she believes, is for
children to remain with their birthparents; second-best is for a child to be
adopted by, or remain with, a member of the extended family; third-best is to
be raised by people of the same race in the country of one’s birth, and
fourth-best is to be raised by members of the same race outside the country of
one’s birth.

(quoted from The Pain of Adoption)

What she’s talking about are the levels of adoption loss — the loss of a biological connection and then the loss of a cultural connection. If we adopt transracially/transculturally, our children become biracial/bicultural regardless of their biological roots. Both Twice the Rice and A Birth Project wrote about this recently (click the links). (American Family also just wrote about this in her infamous and hilarious Emergency Code Whitey entry.)

My goal isn’t to do “as good a job” at nurturing Madison’s black self as a black parent could because that would be an impossible goal. I can’t understand the nuances of black culture the way I could if I had grown up there. I can read about them, I can visit them (as an observer, as a tourist) but I can’t live them. Like American Family respecting A’s core values about education as a cultural issue even if philosophically they are not hers. When they discuss/debate what to do for M (their daughter), her acknowledgment that this is a cultural divide will benefit the both of them because it explains what’s at the root of his argument and it also explains why it’s not at the root of hers.

It’s kind of the same thing when people say that doing a white child’s hair is as difficult or as important as doing a black child’s hair. No, it isn’t. Even if the two children have the exact same hair texture, if one child has pink skin and one has brown, the state of their hair has different cultural connotations. There’s an extra layer to the discussion. We can exchange hair tips, talk conditioner, and trade beads and baubles but when we send our kids out into the world, they bear a different weight in their curls.

There are a lot of challenges in being a transcultural parent (and I include bio parents who are transculturally parenting — especially if they do not have a co-parent who reps the culture of the child) and for me, one is trying to make sense of when my values are more or less important than the values of the child’s birth culture. So between my two kids, I have very different discussions in my head. Like I never ever ever considered sending Noah to a Christian preschool or an academically-oriented preschool but I would send Madison to a Christian, academically-oriented preschool provided that she wasn’t a minority child there. (I’m still holding out for preschool because I haven’t found one yet where she won’t be a minority child. I’ve found daycares but not preschools — except for one that’s about 45 minutes away. Ack.)

The way I figure it, Madison doesn’t just need African American peers and role models, she also needs an introduction to African American culture in an intimate, care-giving way. This includes an understanding of the importance of Christianity as a cultural value and also an understanding of the expectations that black adults have for black children. I know that we’re less strict than is the wide cultural expectation for black children, (which is to say that I’m not turning my generalization into assumptions about individuals) and in a preschool where she is being taught by black teachers, she’s going to get that. That’s about giving her access, which gives her choice.

When I think about a strict, less play-based preschool and the potential “harm” of that, I have to weight that against the potential benefits for each of my kids. For Noah, there isn’t a whole lot of benefit in going against our family values about preschool but for Madison, there is. It’s the same thing as parenting for temperment (making the decision to, say, go to Boston and leave the toddler when I’d never have left her brother) — different kids need different things.

What we fifth and fourth best choice parents have to do is give our kids access to choice. That doesn’t mean that every white parent with a Chinese child has to sign said child up for math camp or that every white parent of an African American child has to send that child to mostly black preschool. But it does mean that considering those things is part of what we need to do as we think about how to give our kids access. I mean, I can’t teach Madison to code-switch no matter how many Langston Hughes books, Fugees CDs or black baby dolls are in our house. Hopefully preschool will be part of giving her access to her options. Likewise, math camp and Chinese school may offer opportunity M and her sibling-to-be.

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