By Marisol Gonzalez
We are in a family therapy meeting after many interventions with the social worker of our son's middle school. The therapist is a blonde young woman who is turning red every time I raise my voice because I don’t know how to hide my disapproval of our son’s request. His voice is also elevated, requesting allowances for taking out the garbage, cleaning his room, mowing the lawn or raking the leaves.
In my head and in my husband’s head, we are not going to pay him for contributing to the place he lives. In our culture, we never received money for helping our families. On the contrary, we started working at a very young age to help our parents, and that put joy in our hearts!
“We aren't in Mexico, Mom! This is America! It works differently,” is what my son replied.
The therapist tried very hard to keep us calm.
“That is true. We do things differently here,” she said. “I think it is a good idea to give your son some money for the chores. It will be like an incentive, so he will do the chores happily, knowing he will get something in return.”
How do we explain to him and the therapist that in our culture, we believe that everything in this life you have to work for? The roof he has over his head, the meals at the table, the clothes on his body, the piano lessons, the soccer games, the birthday parties, the vacations – everything we give him has a cost. And, we are happy to do all this for him as long as he is happy to contribute to the family.
In our culture, children don’t deserve things for free just because they’re our children; they have to work for it. It’s a lesson we want to teach them because we know we won’t live forever, and we aren’t leaving them an inheritance.
He will have to work for what he wants.
Raising Mexican kids here
The book “Parenting with Love and Logic” was my friend's recommendation after that failed family therapy session. But, raising children in a bilingual and bicultural family has an exponential level of difficulty, harder than love or logic.
Latino parents are constantly questioning if their way of parenting is the best or if they have to change, since the environment is different from the one in which they grew up. Values are questioned, and discipline too. Everyone has an opinion on how you should raise children, even people who don’t have children.
Research shows a link between acculturation (assimilation to a different culture, typically a more dominant one) and negative mental health outcomes for Latino youth, according to a 2014 article in Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review. Kathryn E Lawton, the article’s author, found that despite being at a higher risk, Latino youth and their families face more barriers to mental health services.
What if that therapist had been Latina, or even better, Mexican? A person who understands our culture and can explain to him what we want to teach him? What if she could help to bridge the gap in what we are trying to communicate? Research shows that culturally competent therapy works; representation especially in these intimate spaces matters.
Bilingual children may experience “bicultural stress.” Feeling caught between competing cultural values. They may feel they do not fully belong to either culture, resulting in insecurity, social insolation or regression.
En un mundo perfecto (In a perfect world)
It would be wonderful to have therapists who could validate both of our perspectives and help us understand the positive and negative consequences of living within two cultures. We need therapists who would recognize the parenting styles of both cultures as valid and positive, and who would enable us to learn and respect the differences between them and reach agreements.
This would go a long way toward overcoming the language barrier as a primary obstacle and continuously developing professionals knowledge about parenting methods in other countries.
The good news
Dane County now offers therapy to bilingual families. Some of the benefits of culturally relevant therapy, such as CogiviBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), to align with a client’s culture, values and language significantly reduce disparities and improve outcomes.
Therapy that is imbued with cultural values through language between therapist and client can be more effective. In the words of Madison therapist Clarisa Pearson: “I think it is important to acknowledge that cultural therapy can be highly beneficial to many and create a safe space. For others, it might not make a difference as long as there is a mutual respect for not making assumptions.”
The challenge of course is that bilingual therapists are hard to come by and research into mental health tends to be focused on Western cultures and values without relevancy for other heritages.
My husband and I left that family therapy meeting mentioned above with frowns on our faces – and our son with a smile on his face, since my husband’s way of getting out of that room was to agree to everything the therapist said.
Unfortunately, our English language was limited, our son sounded sophisticated and we had a limited vocabulary, so we lost the argument before it even started.
In our heads, he will grow up thinking he deserves everything just for being him! Y seria mucho mejor—and it would be much better—if therapy were accessible to everyone since insurance is one of the biggest barriers. Because, logically, we too love our children.
