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.The domestic/public dichotomy present in advanced industrialeconomies creates gendered dilemmas for Hmong parenting strategies.In Laos, Hmong parents taught children the skills they needed to be successful in life by modeling the appropriate behavior and by having children increasingly participate in adult activities.Some Hmong parents in the United States are able to continue along the same lines, depending on their circumstances.For example, one of my former Hmong-American students described her visit to see a distant relatives who farm in California.In this household, she observed the children returning from school to do many chores.She was amazed when her uncle had his eight-year-old son go out and butcher six chickens.My student said she has never killed a chicken and has no idea how to clean or chop a chicken.The fact that this California family maintains an agricultural lifestyle with many indoor and outdoor duties likely places the children, including boys, in positions of responsibility within the household.Few Hmong parents are able to teach their children the full range of skills they will need for socio-economic success in the United States.Many are finding it difficult to even teach their children their own culture and language.“We are living in a complex society now and we cannot teach our children about our culture and language at home like we used to anymore because most of the things they learn are from an instructional setting,” one man explained.Most Hmong-Americans are116Kinship Networks Among Hmong-American Refugeesfully aware of this reality and push both their sons and daughters to do well in school, but they also encourage them to speak Hmong at home.One of the greatest changes in Hmong family life due toimmigration is that educational and career opportunities exist outside the home for all children, regardless of gender.Women in this study described how they were encouraged to learn the skills necessary to become successful mothers, wives, daughters-in-law, and to find an occupation.Parents want their sons to do well by staying out of trouble, finishing school, and going on for educational or professional training.The men I interviewed were less specific on how their parents prepared them for their roles in family and kin groups.The domestic and familial responsibilities for boys and men seem less straightforward than those for women since resettlement.Many of the domesticresponsibilities (cleaning, cooking, childcare) easily carried over to life in the United States, while the “outdoor” duties (building, hunting, agricultural production and management) are waning in importance.Adaptation to life in the United States consequently produces many variations on gender roles and expectations.Necessity often trumps tradition in the course of daily life, and people do what needs to be done, regardless of “traditional” Hmong gender roles.Repeatedly, I spoke with men who cooked and cleaned for their families and cared for children because of illness, divorce, work schedules, or other circumstances.Shoua, then a young mother in high-school, described how her husband and mother-in-law stepped in and took care of her colicky baby when she was exhausted:When Kia was born and I had to stay with his parents (on theweekends when he came home to visit us), he would stay upwith her every night.He would say, “you go to sleep, I’ll take care of her all night.” I swear Kia was the worst cry baby---she would cry all night when she was an infant.She was justterrible.Cry every night and I couldn’t get any sleep and itwas just too much stress on me.And so whenever he camehome, he’d say, “You sleep, I’ll take care of her.” That really helped.His mom was really helpful sometimes when I comehome from work and she knows that I’m really tired and I hadschool-work to do, she’d say, “Daughter-in-law, give me Kiaand I’ll sleep with her tonight.And then tomorrow, you canGender, The Family and Change117sleep with her.” And so she would take Kia for the night andthat would really help.In this tsev neeg, family members share childcare responsibilities so that the new daughter-in-law could finish high school and work outside the home.Most likely, these educational and formal labor expectations would have been nonexistent for Shoua had she been in Laos.Her new family draws on a familiar pattern of taking care of their own in an adaptive way.Shoua and her husband, as do many in their generation, juggle old and newfound expectations [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]