Culture clash help needed regarding child rearing

[NewJeffCT]

My wife comes from a different culture where it is very common for parents to send their children away to be raised by the grandparents for at least a few years. That way, it allows the child’s parents the extra time to concentrate on their careers (and make more money) and it allows the grandparents to bond with their grandchild. Also, in my wife’s culture, the women there look down on American women that sacrifice their careers for the children if they can avoid it. My wife also refuses any sort of day care.

Our daughter was born 16 months ago. A week after she was born, my wife’s mother flew across the world to live with us for our daughter’s first 11 months of life and to help us out, despite speaking very little English and not being able to drive a car. (You can only get a Visa for 6 months, renewable for another 6, so a max of a year).

My mother-in-law left in January and my mom – just retired after Christmas - took over watching our daughter during the week. Since my wife works in the opposite direction as my parent’s home and has a very long drive, it is up to me to drop off and pick up our daughter every day. This puts a burden on me, as my job can often require overtime. However, I have often blown off the overtime to pick up my daughter at a reasonable hour. I do not want to burden my parents by keeping our daughter there late a few nights a week every week.

So my mom can at least enjoy a little of her retirement, I was thinking of sending our daughter overseas to my in-laws for at least a few months. That way, our daughter (who will be almost 2 if we do this) gets to experience another culture for at least a few months and gets to meet her other relatives overseas that she has not yet met - we have not had time to visit them since our daughter’s birth. And, we know the people that are taking care of our daughter can be trusted.

However, if I even hint at sending our daughter overseas, my parents freak out, thinking it is lazy & irresponsible. They won't even listen. My in-laws live in a pretty modern city and the medical care there should be very good, if there was an emergency. And, my in-laws will likely come back here in 2005 to live with us for a year to help out again. So, it would only be for a few months.

My wife is kind of a frail woman physically and the burden of taking care of a baby at night and on weekends is taking its toll on her, as she often has to work late at night or travel for her job. Because I am needed more at home, I am also not doing the little things at work to get ahead. If my wife & I were both able to concentrate on our careers, we could both be pretty successful.

We have thought of trying to find a live-in nanny type to help us out as well, but the prices we have found are a bit too high for us, and we would also have the trust issue there as well.

Any ideas / thoughts? Sucking it up & sacrificing for the next year is not going to work, as I do not think my wife could handle it physically for too much longer.

[ihaveaquestion]

1. You don't say where your in-laws are,

but unless they are in a dangerous place (Israel, Syria, Columbia, etc.) you are probably justified in going against your parents wishes. They sound a little judgemental to me. You don't need their permission, especially since they won't even listen to you about it.

[SheilaT]

2. I'm curious as to what this culture is.

The women give birth, and someone else raises the kids. Not that much different from many in this country. Difference is that in her culture, according to you, the grandparents typically do the raising, rather than day care or a hired nanny.

What does she have against day care anyway? Why is staying home with her own child so terrible?

I'm controlling myself about not going off on a rant about why bother to have kids if you're not going to raise them yourself, since I try to respect someone else's desire for a meaningful career or the genuine financial need to work. But, really.

I suppose the real issue is that your jobs assume you don't have kids, that every minute of your time is available to work, travel, put in overtime.

How long would you be sending your daughter to the other country? How long will you go without seeing her? Will she remember you after all that time? Will she still be speaking English?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Let me guess, your wife is from China, Korea, or India

I've heard of families from all three of these countries doing that.

There's one hazard in doing this. If your daughter is only two, she won't remember you when you go to bring her back, and she won't speak English (unless your in-laws are actually from say, England, although I'm not aware of any English custom of sending children to grandparents. They're more into boarding schools. :-) )

She at least knows your mother-in-law, so it's not like sending her to a stranger, but it's still going to be traumatic for her, because she may feel rejected and abandoned, not understanding why you are sending her away.

It may work if you can arrange to visit or have your in-laws bring her back freequently.

Otherwise, she's going to be traumatized again when you claim her for good and she has to leave the only environment that she remembers.

Some things to think about.

[DemExpat]

5. I agree!

In the country itself, sending a child to another town with the same language and culture where the child feels familiar with everything is a different story entirely.

I feel passionately about the experiences and feelings of little children, and this scenario seems potentially very harmful.

I do realize that there are major cultural differences here, but children need their parents, need some stability to feel a little bit secure in this world IMHO.

DemEx

[NewJeffCT]

9. my mother-in-law was the primary care-giver for her first 11 months

My mother-in-law stayed at home with our daughter for 11 months while my wife & I worked. So, technically my mother-in-law was the primary care-giver for my daughter's first 11 months.

[DemExpat]

10. This might make it easier,

but I still believe in the value of stability (in environment and caregivers) for little kids.

Best of luck with this vital decision!

DemEx

[NewJeffCT]

7. good guess - China

We would likely send her overseas after Christmas and she would come back a few months later with her grandparents. In regards to Visas, we've been told that if somebody is here for 11 months like my mother-in-law was, she'd likely have to wait at least that same amount of time before re-applying for her Visa. My father-in-law would likely not be a problem, since he was only here for 2 months in 2002.

I'm sure my wife & I would drop her off if we were to do this and stay there for a week or so (my wife already has a post XMas business trip to China in the pipeline...)

[SarahB]

4. I try not be be culturally biased.

It seems as though there are other issues though. As a mom myself and also as someone with a lot of experience with children professionally (I have a degree in early childhood education), I'd be a little concerned as to what effect this would have on your daughter. To be separated at that age from the people who are her primary care givers could be a little difficult and possibly traumatic IMHO.
I honestly don't know what to tell you other than having children often entails sacrifices on many levels- both personal and professional. You have to do what you have to do sometimes in life and children are resiliant, but make sure you remember what's best for her as well during the process of deciding all this.

[Bridget Burke]

6. Non-parent here--but it might work....

Will your daughter be in a bilingual setting? You wouldn't want her to lose her English skills, but she's at the age where learning a second language would be easy.

Why don't you consider trying it & see how she fares? It does appear that the current situation is rather rough on your wife. And some careers really do not allow dropping out to be a stay-at-home mom (or stay-at-home dad).

I know a couple who send their children to stay with family in South America for part of each summer. The kids are older than yours. But they're doing fine & learning fluent, accent-free English & Spanish. (Well, English with a Texas accent....)

[DemExpat]

8. I would support this summer holiday idea for older children.

But 2 years old is far too young for this to have a good chance of having a positive effect on development IMO.

DemEx

[Nikia]

11. The multigenerational experience is good, but concerns

My sister and I spent a lot of time with our grandparents, perhaps even as much or more than we did with our parents when we were growing up. I think that this very valuable to us, especially because of our circumstances, but could be good for a lot of children. We usuaully did not spend the night and if we did it was only for a couple nights per week. Some of my cousins also spent a lot of time with our grandparents and but did not stay more than a week without seeing their parents. Of course, we lived in the same city as our grandparents.
My parents thought day care was terrible also. When we lived a couple hours drive away from my grandparents for a year, my mother hired someone to watch us during the day. I don't know how much the woman was paid but my mother did not make much at the time so it could not have been more than the equivalent of $6-$7 per hour. I don't know if you can find people willing to watch your children for a low wage in your area who you would be willing to trust.
In your case though, I don't know if it is wise to send a young child overseas in a non English speaking environment away from most of the people who she knows.

[brook]

12. Any chance...

your in-laws could line up a reliable amah for you?

I say that because I was 'farmed out' for a couple of years at the age of your child - and it left me feeling very insecure about my mother's affection. My grandparents were wonderful - and now that I'm older, I really appreciate them and understand that my mother's health was so bad, she couldn't care for me.

When I had my children, I had a nanny/housekeeper until they were teenagers. I was able to work and the kids were able to have the stability I wanted them to have.

[Xithras]

13. My wife says NO WAY, I agree fully with her

FYI, my wife has her masters in Child Psychology, so she does somewhat know what she's talking about.

Extended absences from your children prior to age three can lead to lifelong emotional insecurity and a total severance of the parent/child emotional relationship. At 16 months, the child will feel that she has been abandoned by her parents, and will reform those relationships with her grandparents (she will see them as her parents). Because long-term memory in children this small is so spotty, she probably will have zero memory of you when she returned from China, and from her perspective will be abandoned AGAIN, and placed in the custody of total strangers. The emotional damage that can result from this could be lifelong, and it will certainly permanently damage your relationship with her.

According to her, while some cultures do have the grandparents raise the children for part of their childhoods, that tradition is tempered by a few facts that don't apply in this case. First, it is very rare for a child younger than three to be separated from their parents. Secondly, and more importantly, the Asian cultures that practice this also usually have the parents and grandparents living in reasonably close proximity to each other. In some areas it's the same building, in others its across town, but in all cases the parents are still regularly involved in the child's life at some level...there is NO cessation of the relationship as you are proposing.

IMO, as a parent myself, one of you needs to find a new job and you both need to grow up a bit. That kid is more important than any paycheck, and the very fact that you'd propose to send the kid halfway around the world rather than scale back your career tells me that you haven't accepted this fact yet. Parenthood is about sacrifice, and it's IMPOSSIBLE to be a good parent without sacrificing and giving up a little bit of yourself in the process. If you refuse to do that, if you honestly plan on continuing your lives and careers as if she didn't exist and keep shuffling her off onto other people whenever her needs infringe on your "lifestyle", you're going to end up raising one f*cked up kid.

And don't you dare call me judgmental, because now I'm speaking from MY experience. My parents did to me EXACTLY what you're proposing to do here...my grandparents raised me for half my childhood, and all I heard the other half was their whining about how they couldn't do what they wanted because of their "little anchors". I hate my parents for that, and have spoken all of three sentences to my mother in the last decade. YOU need to ask yourself if that's the kind of relationship YOU want with YOUR daughter, because I'll tell you what, when the kids get to my age, it's too late to fix the damage done by those younger years. Once the relationship is severed, it can never be re-established.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. I would like to add that in the Korean situation I knew of

the mother was was convinced that she would never get ahead in her career if she had to have her daughter around, even in daycare. Her husband was no help around the house whatsoever, and as far as I could tell, they led such separate lives that I sometimes wondered how they had managed to produce a child.

She took her daughter to Korea at about the age of two and left her there with her parents. The idea was to have her come back to the States during vacations, but they ran into the problems described above: the child didn't know them and didn't want to go away with them and acted out the whole time.

As I spoke to the mother as she blithely insisted that even having a child in daycare hindered her career, I wondered if deep down, she had "buyer's remorse" about her daughter and would have been happier without a child.

[SarahB]

15. You said what was in my heart

I tried to be as diplomatic as possible, but nothing, NOTHING!!!, would make me leave my children no matter what I had to deal with (and a few people here understand exactly what that means to me personally to varying degrees). For me to do so, I couldn't live with myself. They are hard at times, but they are a part of my soul- they make me who I am and are my loves. What you said really touched me and I can understand how you were treated as a child and how it makes one feel. Been there (in a different way, but there).

[Xithras]

17. Exactly, as a parent I'd give up everything for my kids

And honestly, I've given up a LOT, which is another reason I have such a problem with the original posters suggestion. I used to make nearly $150k a year, own a home in a very nice neighborhood (which I could barely afford), and live it up travelling and hiking all over the country. To do that, I had a job that required me to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, not counting the three hours of commuting on top of that. My wife also worked long hours as a child counselor for a well known law firm, in a position that primarily required her to travel the state talking to kids involved in divorce and civil litigation cases.

Problem was, none of that worked with our being parents, so we both gave it up. Today we own a modest 4/2 in a blue collar neighborhood, I make just over $50k doing government work and teaching adjunct at the local community college, and my wife teaches preschool in the mornings, so she can be home when the kids get out of school.

We're not as trendy, we're not as wealthy, and we're not as worldly as we once were, but we live FAR richer lives. My kids taught me that you don't need a high paying job or a flashy title to be a good dad, you just have to be there :)

[Bunny]

16. You two are unbelievable.

Why did you even bother to have your little "burden"? To avoid any other harsh words,that is all I'm going to say. :grr: