Parenting Across Cultures

Before I write on a theme, I tend to gather. I spend days trying a theme on various situations I find myself in, to see how they fit together and if one makes a good example for the other. This time, I’ve started by looking up the Wikipedia entry for “culture.”

Here is the part of the entry which catches my eye: “an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance.” Culture is not something you are born with, it is something, many things, which you learn. It includes language and customs and ways of looking at the world. Four weeks later, I am back from a trip and finally ready to finish writing.

I was grand-parented and parented across cultures. On my maternal side, back to my grandmother, each woman has borne her children on a continent other than her own. My grandmother was born in Lithuania but had all her daughters in Brazil. My mother, born in Brazil, had me in the U.S.A. And I will bear my children in Switzerland. I come from a mobile clan, especially during the child-bearing years.

This means that when I think about Swiss culture versus my culture, I don’t just compare to America. Even in my own home, my American culture is different, a child-of-immigrants culture, compared to that of my husband’s, a six-generations-in-the-U.S.A. culture. Had we had our children in the United States, I would still be parenting across cultures. What we have named our children, what they call us, even the sound you make to indicate being gentle (“ai-ai” for him, “tsa-tsa” for me), our family cultures have different ideas about all of this.

But back to living in Switzerland and the tensions of deciding which cultural practices to pass on to our children. Living here, our family feels American, at least to us parents. We celebrate Thanksgiving and Hallowe’en in small ways, we make sure there are English books to read at bedtime, and American-style pancakes for breakfast many weekend mornings. We have friends who are also American. We watch English language television and our daughter has English language DVDs.

We speak English as a group, but I speak Lithuanian with my daughter when my husband isn’t around, and my daughter increasingly speaks German with other children and has always spoken it with her babysitter. I’m told she has a Zurich accent. I find the diminutives (Schneckli, Füessli, Schiffli, etc.) in Swiss German to be endearing. And I love the songs (especially all the Christmas songs) that my daughter is learning here in Switzerland. They are a mix of sweet and whimsical, but not infantile.

But with the language, and the songs, also comes culture, and acceptable behaviors and expectations. Here is where the American in me sometimes bristles. Because in addition to the good (the calm, the patience) it also brings some ideals I do not like. There is the concept of outsider, which we will always be, and which leads us to try to hide our otherness in public sometimes – not speaking English loudly on the bus, for instance. Or worrying that our child will be deemed to be singing too loudly (even if in Swiss German) and told off – it has happened – by a Swiss person wagging a finger. There is the unyielding, rule-bound side of customer service that can come out when I try to interact in German, and which can actually go away if I switch to English, where the words for “should”, “must”, “can’t” may not be as naturally encoded into the speaker’s English.

Wait a minute, I think, that is the REWARD? I thought the clouds were going to break open, sunlight and butterflies were going to rain down from above, and everyone was going to start smiling at me the minute I could speak better German. With Swiss German added in. I was misinformed. Or perhaps I just mis-assumed?

The neighbors and acquaintances who kept insisting that I “just need to learn German”, but never invited me to tea or coffee to actually speak with someone in German, have also recently come under suspicion in my mental model of what life would be like once I broke the language barrier. I guess I assumed things would feel more like home once I spoke the language. And to me, home means more open, innovative, lively. What I failed to take into account was that these are not characteristics of Swiss culture. Stability, tradition, group affiliation are.

The rose-colored glasses now came on when visiting other places – the chaotic romance of Istanbul, the hole-in-the-wall diners in London, the potholes and colorful houses of Tucson. Switzerland isn’t any of those.

But on a recent trip to London, when I got breathless at the stairs and smells of the underground and my daughter kept asking why people crossed the streets when the “do not walk” symbol was flashing, and why people wrote on the train windows, I think I finally came full circle. There is no perfect country or culture – each place shows us the trade-offs involved in the values that are idealized. So many good restaurants in London, something I miss in Zurich, highlight the good (risk and innovation), but also the bad (low wages for many workers). Each culture has its strengths as well as its lessons to teach us. I will not try to make my daughter the American she would have been in the U.S.A., but I will introduce her to the strengths of American culture, all the versions of it our family encompasses. And I will learn Swiss culture as much through her as anywhere else. The best lesson I can give her (and remind myself of) is to be an open-minded but also critical member of the cultures that surround her.

By Audra Baleisis

Audra is a mother of one (and finally expecting another, after a long three years of trying), a wife, a dog owner and a science educator. While living in Switzerland she has worked part-time on various projects involving museums, astronomers, and gender equity in university classrooms.