Foreign mothers Vs British mothers (nature V nurture)

[Condescendingtwats]

Looking for an interesting discussion on this as I’ve been pondering it for years! More so since becoming a mother myself. I don’t want to ask anyone in RL as don’t want to offend.

So in the UK and maybe other western countries we don’t tend to leave our babies with family and move away. In fact society in general can even be judgey about a mother going on nights out/holidays and leaving their babies with others.

A lot of mothers in the UK would say they couldn’t physically leave their child, it would make them ill/depressed and it unthinkable. A lot say it’s an instinctual thing and babies/children need their parents. They need their babies bear them.

But then, over my adult years I’ve met many mothers from all over the world due to work as well as travel.

In Thailand I met baby mothers who’s small children were still being raised by grandparents in their home village whilst they worked in the city to provide. Under stable and no choice due to poverty.

Then at work I met about 5 mothers over the past decade from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ghana who have children in their home country with family as well as other children here in the UK. They are doctors/nurses so not poor and no visa issues. Ann example is one mother who has a kids 8,5, 3 and a baby. The 8 year old and 1 year old baby in the UK with her but the 5 and 3 Year old are in Nigeria.

Then I met a Romanian mother at my baby class a few months back who has a child who’s 4 years old and living in Greece with relatives (same dad and both good jobs). Her youngest baby is here with her.

So it’s not always poverty related but seems to be ‘the norm’ in their cultures.

But there doesn’t appear to be any devastation of not being their their small kids or an urgency to see/send for them. They sound perfectly happy.

So that makes me wonder is what we (British mums) feel about being apart from our babies/children is more societal condition as opposed to a biological/instinctual need to be near our kids?

Does anyone have any experience of this and can explain it more clearly to me?

Im not judging by the way, just interested in the differences.

Also before anyone says it.. in regards to dads, well they seem to be able to walk away from their children all over the world so not really surprised at that.

A lot of factors might affect these decisions but just because you know one Romanian mum who’s done this you can’t say that all Romanian mums are like this. She might be considered as a very unusual mum in Romania. The same logic applies with Nigerian mums and others. Just saying.

I've worked with Indian women - so in the UK to work - who have do this to their children. The children actually complain when they return to the UK to go to school as their grandparents and other relations spoil them plus they have cousins to play with on tap all summer.

On the other hand I've worked with Indian women who wouldn't dream of doing this.

All families are different regardless of ethnicity and culture.

I know a few people from Asia who have done this while their kids were small. Both in well paid professional jobs so not a money thing. Instead it was a way of the mother continuing their career and the child could be raised at home by grandparents rather than in a nursery. Like how it would have been if they had stayed where they were from. Children joined parents when they were older.

I used to work with a lady from the phillipines who left her child at home with her mother to come here and work, her mother had left her at home with her mother and moved to another country to work. She told me all about how she grew up with her grandmother taking care of her then as a teen she helped her when she was dying then when she had kids her mother came and cared for her kids and she came here to work. It's so strange to me but that was a natural thing in her family

My ex is Romanian and when his parents moved to the UK they left him in Romania with his grandparents for a couple of years at a young age. This has had a huge impact on his relationship with them, he’s developed no attachment to them, in fact he forms very little attachment to anyone and has no problem cutting people out of his life (including several members of his immediate family).

This was due to money but at what cost.

@PepsiMaxandPringleStacks - similar things have happened in my family - but maybe not for an extended period - maybe like for 5-7 years (spent away from immediate family etc). People understood why it happened - and that their parents wanted what was best for them. An auntie who was single stayed with us - and was like a 3rd parent to me (my parents had to travel frequently at that time, so she was in loco parentis) - I feel so lucky to have had that relationship (she died a few years ago, and but I was able to be with her, even though she lived abroad at the time). I do have a good relationship with my parents - even though physically we weren’t always in the same place (went to boarding school).

One of my mum’s biggest regrets in life is that she did not get to raise my DD. It’s the norm in Italy, for example, at least till they’re 6-7 and they start school.
I didn’t ship DD to my mum’s, because my mum is not a very good mother, plus I was only ever going to have one child. And I wanted to do the mothering.
And yes, we were raised by my grandmother till I started school, then shipped to her’s every single holiday.

People who say I know an Indian/ African woman who would never do this etc- I bet those women were born in a western country and European essentially.
personally short of poverty I think it’s awful, especially when you treat siblings differently. There’s a mum in our class whose daughter is here and who’s son (a year or so older- still of primary age) is in Trinidad. She says she will send for him soon- child will be scared I’m sure.

Maybe they see extended family as an extension of themselves? So the person back home will raise them as well as they could?

I don’t think they’ve left them out of choice!

A lot of these people feel they have no choice. In those cultures you’ve mentioned, it’s common practise to cosleep and baby weed meaning constant attachment. If they’ve trained to be doctors or had no choice but to constantly work, then the grandparents will have basically brought them up.

Baby wear not weed!

It is definitely not normal Nigerian culture. Rather done as no other choice.
It does not matter if they are doctors/nurses there may still be visa/immigration issues. Even financial issues. You just don't know but never because it's 'cultural' and they are okay with it.

I would advice you to spend some time and find out from those colleagues of yours the reason why they send their children to be raised by relatives instead of asking mumsnet. Most of us non native British are often expected to take care of extended families back home. It's often the case that we do not often have extended families close by to rely on for childcare. These parents do so as a last resort unfortunately. Another reason is that foreign mothers do not often get the support of their husbands. They tend to be the main bread winners whereas their husbands can spend their income as they please and when she tries to confront him, she's viewed as a disrespectful wife. I'm speaking from experience. I'm lucky I integrated myself in to the British culture and I was able to make better choices for myself and 2 children. Although I continued to support my family, I took on lower paid jobs working term time only so that I could be available when my children are home. I've spoken to my fellow foreign mothers...they can see how my 2 boys are thriving in grammar school. Well adjusted etc despite the fact that their good for nothing father left us. The point I'm trying to make is, some of these practices are as a result of financial obligations

Attachment theory was invented by a British man (Bowlby) who was raised by nannies then sent to boarding school and who blamed his mother for abandoning him and causing emotional distress. A lot of UK post WW2 social/family policy was based on his ideas of society providing for mothers to have time to spend with young children.
But it was only a theory..

I just had to pick this up because Bowlby wrote the theory but it has been tested by decades of research since (mainly thanks to Mary Ainsworth, who never got as famous as Bowlby but is I think much more important in attachment research - she pioneered the Strange Situation test). Anyway the point of attachment isn’t that babies have to attach to their mothers (though it is usually the mother) but they do have to attach to one primary attachment figure in their first year. That attachment can then be transferred - which is why, if you’re adopting, you really want your child to be securely attached to their foster carer - and obviously through life we form attachments to all sorts of people.

Insecure and avoidant attachments, which are common across cultures but do exist more in certain cultures, are associated with all sorts of externalising and internalising problematic behaviours.

Back to this particular topic after that very long winded diversion… whenever I have read about this it’s always been because of money, not something the mother actually wanted to do.

Also, once you have left home, it's not as big a wrench to send your dc back there as it would be to send them somewhere else. You may be thinking 'Gosh, fancy sending your DC to the Phillipines to live'. They are thinking in terms of sending their DC home. This is the strange scary place.

That's what British families in India during the empire used to do — the children would grow up in India until they were 7 or so, then come "home" for prep school, even though it was home to their parents, but not really them.

I lived in China for a bit and they also leave children with relatives but that is due to poverty. However, when a couple divorce I see that the children will very often go with the father's side of the family. My flatmate from Philippines arrived to work just 3 weeks after her daughter was born, the reason was of course financial and she knew from the start that is what needed to happen. She told me when she saw her mum feed and care for the baby she felt it was OK.

I wonder if some of it is because there is less of a gulf between generations outside of the UK? In the UK I think the majority consider they parent very differently to the way they were parented themselves.

I don’t know how much people feel like their attitudes are very different from their parents, globally. Perhaps it varies a lot around the world.

Have you read Mary Ainsworth's original paper? I have.

The strange situation has been largely discredited due to its heavy bias towards American post WW2 culture. The sample size was far too small to make such grand claims about 'universal' attachment.

Attachment is a socially constructed concept to get mother back to the kitchen sink to keep jobs for the boys in the suburban late 20th century English speaking developed world.

Theories about 'insecure' attachment have been debunked when you look at cross cultural studies.

Supposed harms caused by separation anxiety were used to close the nurseries opened during the war to enable mothers to work in the war effort.

Ideas about long term separation eg long hospital stays where parents weren't allowed to visit dc were applied falsely to short separations such as day care.

We still haven't recovered from the pervasiveness of this in our culture. Despite all the more recent studies (with more reliable sample sizes) showing that DC with working mothers have better outcomes than those who have SAHMs (when you account for other factors eg poverty).

The whole language around secure/ insecure attachment has been misused as good/bad which is nothing more than unnecessarily stigmatising DC and mother blaming.

@vincettenoir I think that's very possible. How many threads do you read on here where a poster doesn't want to leave their dc with their mother/MIL for such simple reasons? Or a poster will be gutted because their dc loved a Christmas present from granny? We also have the idea that we are completely independent from our parents, which doesn't exist in many other countries.

Yes, I’ve read the original paper and yes I’ve read reams of research. The Strange Situation hasn’t been debunked at all - it is still used for psychology research across cultures (and now across species funnily enough - on dogs and cats). Ainsworth’s original sample size was small, but the paradigm has been repeated over… and over… and over.

I didn’t say anywhere that the ideas haven’t been misused/misapplied, and of course they’ve been very muddied in the context of parenting by Sears and co, but attachment theory is very much still used across psychology (and nowhere is it saying that mothers shouldn’t work, not sure where you got that from…)

@CoveredInCobwebs can you elaborate Re the Sears context please? I read a lot of his books when mine were young.

Sure - so he obviously advocated quite a strict interpretation of attachment - cosleeping, babywearing etc. Now I used most of those practices myself when my kids were young and they’re great if that’s what you want to do, but of course not everybody does, and of course they’re not a requisite for forming secure attachments.

I think what happened as a result was that this narrative developed among some parents (and maybe also among some parenting ‘gurus’) that if you didn’t practice attachment parenting then your children were going to be psychologically damaged. And you do see a lot of that - people saying that sleep training, for example, will damage kids; I never wanted to sleep train but, as far as I’ve read, there’s no research to say that it’s damaging to babies. I’ve even seen people saying that having babies in buggies will damage them because they can’t feel/touch their parent.

So then you have people equating attachment theory with that approach to attachment parenting v. all other forms of parenting, and it means people disparage attachment theory… but attachment theory is built around consistent responsive care, not physical attachment between mother and baby.