This study explored how the child-rearing experience of love-marriage immigrant women was in the process of their being absorbed into Korean society as its members so as to have better understanding of them. Specifically, this study described love-mar...
This study explored how the child-rearing experience of love-marriage immigrant women was in the process of their being absorbed into Korean society as its members so as to have better understanding of them. Specifically, this study described love-marriage immigrant women’s child-rearing experience through "the narrative exploration space" proposed by Connelly and Clandinin(2000) and revealed what such experience meant. Toward that end, four love-marriage immigrant women were interviewed in depth, and relevant data were gathered. The findings of this study are outlined as follows:
First, love-marriage immigrant women’s child-rearing experiences differed according to historical viewpoints. This study dealt with the narratives of the four women regarding the process of adapting to Korean society in terms of social, cultural, and institutional situations. They experienced a dilemma 1) from the process of meeting and marrying their husbands, 2) from adapting to their husband’s family and Korean society with little knowledge of Korean language and from child-rearing experience, and 3) from child-rearing methods different from those of their motherlands while living with other Korean moms. Still, they managed to raise their children in their own way.
Second, love-marriage immigrant women’s child-rearingexperiences were analyzed in three aspects.
1. For love-marriage immigrant women, immigration means physical spatial separation. They as women traveled beyond their national borders, cut off their existing social relationship networks, and simultaneously got consolidated into a new social space. For their identity, they gained new cultural experience, institutional experience, and social experience, thereby having the experience of being linked with yet disconnected from their identity and expected roles in their motherlands. Thus, immigrant marriage places women in social relations that are very different from the existing ones, and it is a process of becoming Koreans as mothers. Married to Korean men, love-marriage immigrant women give birth to children and raise them. In the process, they have the identity of mother in their head with their physical foreign identity, however, they are becoming Koreans as mothers. For love-marriage immigrant women, the process of becoming Koreans as mothers is the process of discovering themselves and ultimately the reason for their existence as mothers.
2. For love-marriage immigrant women, giving birth to children in Korea is a psychological hub that is strange to them as they stabilize their position while becoming a mother delays or limits their expectations as immigrants. Love-marriage immigrant womenin special situations have difficulty communicating with family members, feeling isolated and lonesome, continuously experiencing conflicts and tension due to cultural differences, and giving birth to children. In this environment, love-marriage immigrant women communicate with their children in their native languages this connection with their children via their mother tongues gives them psychological consolation. Derived from stories of child rearing by love-marriage immigrant women were four reasons they communicate with their children using their mother tongues: 1) means of communication, 2) provision of opportunities to be chosen, 3) house of existence where they manage to live, and 4) hope for the place to return to.
3. Love-marriage immigrant women with cultural differences raise and educate their children according to social needs this process makes them feel deficient or powerless and experience the conflicts and absurdities in playing a mother’s role. It is also the process of performing diverse acts to become good mothers.
For love-marriage immigrant women, their self-identity and their identity as mothers can neither be strictly distinguished from each other nor be consistent. Love-marriage immigrant women as mothers play a mother’s role through the identity of immigrants through this position and the cultural difference experience, however, they deliver their motherlands’culture and identity to their children while bolstering
the identity of mothers as foreigners.
Love-marriage immigrant women recognize individuals’ differences; they do not completely exclude their motherlands’ child-rearing methods, learning Korean child-rearing culture from their Korean parents in law to allow their children to adapt to school. This is seen as a representation of motherhood to reconstruct culture.
This study sought to reveal the child-rearing experience of love-marriage immigrant women as it is thus enabling us to see them in a new light and helping them live a better life through consultation and education.