Refuge and life overseas: Influences of gender, culture, and migration on parenting practices of African refugees in Canada
Abstract
Parenting is a socially and culturally constructed role and experience. Parenting practices vary across and within communities yet most of what we know about parenting in the literature stems from Western worldviews on what ideal parenting and child-rearing looks like in practice.
Taking a postcolonial feminist approach, this study helps to diversify the literature by presenting the perspectives of 11 parents with traditional and postcolonial African worldviews who have migrated to Canada. With the purpose of examining gender-based parenting practices of African refugees in Alberta, Canada, this study drew upon existing interviews from a larger study focused on gender relations in African immigrant families. The study used interpretative phenomenological analysis informed by three theoretical frameworks (transnationalism,
postcolonial feminism, and intersectionality) to generate three themes and nine subthemes. These
findings reveal old, new, and bifocal ways African refugees practice parenting in a postmigration context as well as the impacts of structural forces on their practices. Key among the complicating factors described involve a lack of community-focused and culturally-informed social supports for adjusting to new gender roles and relations in cultural traditions, family life, and parenting challenges typical in their post-migration experiences. Implications for childcare, community, and workplace supports to help African refugees successfully manage the higher risk of facing a host of interpersonal, systemic, and structural barriers when they arrive in Western host countries like Canada are discussed. Studies on gender roles and relations in parenting practices for African refugee parents are rare and this study provides much-needed insights that can be further explored.
Notes
Open access: Yes
Locations: Edmonton and Calgary
Key populations: African refugee parents who now live in Alberta
Community organizations: n/a
Key recommendations:
1) Account for differences in marital status of parents in childcare policy changes affecting African refugees, as parenting experiences of participants differed between single and married parents.
2) Develop diverse, culturally-appropriate childcare options.
3) Recruit and train frontline workers that represent the African refugee community.
4) Broaden the operational hours and flexibility of childcare services to account for limited choice in selecting work hours.
5) Consider where community events are already happening when planning childcare services (e.g. churches).
6) Increase government subsidies for childcare.
Integration timeline: not defined
Future research / gaps identified:
Interviews were completed pre-COVID-19, and does not account for COVID-19 related changes that may have occurred in this population and/or their parenting practices and experiences.
Key findings:
3 main themes were found, alongside 9 sub-themes:
1) Raising children according to gendered experiences and expectations
a) Aspirations for children’s education
b) Ways of relating and interactions
2) Gendered division and shifts in labour among African refugee men and women
a) Disruptions to men’s role as the primary breadwinner
b) Impacts of childcare on women’s educational and work pursuits
c) Striving to find work-life balance through childcare supports
3) Men and women’s views and use of parenting support systems
a) Gendered experiences with parenting support systems
b) Suggestions from men and women for parenting supports
c) Significance of communal parenting
d) Support in handling cases of domestic violence