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Parenting into two worlds in northern Namibia

Parenting into two worlds in northern Namibia. Jill Brown Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology Creighton University 41 st Annual Meeting of the Society for Cross Cultural Research. Socially distributed child care.

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Parenting into two worlds in northern Namibia

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  1. Parenting into two worlds in northern Namibia Jill Brown Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology Creighton University 41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Cross Cultural Research

  2. Socially distributed child care Child caretaking often occurs as a part of indirect chains of support in which one child assists another, who assists another. Support is not always immediate and not necessarily organized around exclusive relationships between parent and child Aggression, teasing, and dominance coincide with nurturance and support and come from the same people. Dominance increases with age Food and other material goods are used to threaten, control, soothe, and comfort Children are socialized within the system through apprenticeship learning of their family roles and responsibilities. Children look to other children for support as much or more than they look to adults Care often occurs in the context of other domestic work Elaborate verbal exchanges and question-framed discourse rarely accompany support and nurturance for children. Verbal bargaining and negotiations over rights, choices and privileges between the caretaker and child are infrequent Social and intellectual competence is judged by a child’s ability to manage domestic tasks, demonstrate appropriate social behavior, do child care, and nurture and support others. School achievement emerges as a competency Mothers provide support and nurturance to children as much by securing that others will support their children as by supporting their children directly. Fostering and other forms of child sharing are common Weisner,T.S., Bradley, C., Kilbride, P.L. (1997). (Eds.) African families and the crisis of social change. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.

  3. Child Fosterage • Goody (1982) defined it as, “institutional delegation of the nurturance and/or educational elements of the parental role. Fosterage does not affect the status identity of the child, nor the jural rights and obligations this entails” (p.23). Fosterage is the rearing of a child by someone other than the biological parent. • Additive not substitutive

  4. Table 1. Patterns of fostered children as a percentage of all children under age 15 in selected countries Living with Country Survey Year # Surveyed Both Mother only Father only Foster/neither Southern (median) 50.7 18.4 2.7 11.3 Namibia DHS 2000 13,641 26.4 29.2 3.6 26.3 Zimbabwe DHS 1999 11,313 45.6 20.5 3.6 12.5 Botswana MICS 2000 9,950 26.1 33.1 2.1 19.4 Eastern (median) 70.7 10.7 1.8 5.2 Kenya MICS 2000 16,394 57.9 20.5 2.3 7.0 Uganda DHS 2000 19,538 60.4 12.4 4.0 9.9 Tanzania DHS 1999 8,293 62.5 13.8 4.3 9.4 Western (median) 66.3 9.8 3.1 9.0 Ghana DHS 1998 9,379 49.1 26.3 4.5 13.2 Sierra Leo MICS 2000 10,131 60.9 8.8 5.0 10.3 Nigeria DHS 1999 17,027 72.0 5.1 2.4 5.8 Central (median) 65.6 12.1 3.2 7.9 C.A.R. MICS 2000 47,516 68.1 10.0 4.7 6.4 Gabon DHS 2000 12,481 41.4 28.1 6.6 14.6 Cameroon MICS 2000 10,979 65.6 11.5 3.8 7.9 Adapted from Monasch, R. & Boerma, J.T. (2004). Orphanhood and childcare patterns in sub-Saharan Africa: an analysis of national surveys from 40 countries. AIDS, 18(2), S55-S65

  5. Child Fosterage • The process of raising a child (nonbiological) • Oluteku

  6. Distribution of Owambo children’s kinship relationship to head of household (N=5942)

  7. Education markers for biological and fostered boys and girls (F(4, 3,766)=4.44, MSE=21.97, p=.03) (F(1, 3,766)=7.38, MSE=.811, p=.007)

  8. Height and weight percentile of biological children vs. fostered children Height and Weight percentile were calculated using the CDC Standard Deviation-derived Growth Reference Curves derived from the NCHS/CDC Reference Populations N=1303 (F (4, 1299)=5.00, MSE=3835.4, p=.025)

  9. Education of children with different relationships with the head of household F(12, 3790)=6.05, MSE=29.46, p=.001 F (5,3758)=5.95, MSE=.64, p=.001

  10. Child Fosterage Motivations: • Teaching Discipline (Bledsoe, 1990) • Education (Isiugo-Abanihe, 2003) • Gifting/sharing (Madhavan, 2004) • Establishing Social Bonds (Brown, 2011) • Enhanced Fertility (Pennington, 1991; Isiugo-Abanihe, 1984) • Entering New Relationship (Vandermeersch & Chimere-Dan, 2002) • Times of Crisis (Brown, 2009; McDaniel & Zulu, (2008) • Apprenticeship/Domestic work (Bledsoe, 1998) Outcomes: • Health and iIlness(Brown, 2009) • Education (Brown, 2009; Anderson, 2006) • Work (Bledsoe, 1990)

  11. Ongoing fieldwork • Case Study: 4 families • 3 connected through fostering (one not) • September –November 2006 • Life History Interviews • 11 women fostered as children • Ethnography of nonkin boys • 8 non related boys and families • June-July 2009 • Interviews, observations and • field notes audio taped and transcribed in English

  12. Fosterage Chains

  13. “The small ones are difficult sometimes. They get sick and you are not the mother. You are not the one who she wants when she is sick, and when she was two or three days old, if you were not the one to care for her, it is difficult to know if the child is not doing well.” MN “Me, I hate Popi showing people that this is my biological mother and I am not the biological mother of her. I hate those things. She said that it creates something between me and her. It works the opposite. There are children who are having those bad behaviors and do this to other children. One of those children is my own.” NK

  14. “You can do no other than take the child” NK “We thought she was just coming to visit but after one, two, three days we then asked, “Sisco when are you leaving?” Sisco said, “No, Meme, I am not leaving.” I said, “For what good reason?” I couldn’t say go back so I said, “Wait until Tate comes home and we will sit and talk because you can’t just come and stay with someone without informing them.” I know she is a true orphan and that is why we allow it.” MN

  15. Table 1. Characteristics of Auambowomen

  16. Children are not people..they are children • “So when we go for holiday at Christmas I am together with my parents and they treat us nicely and every time we want to talk to our mother and father about our problems, like I have this problem and that problem, I had to keep it inside myself. Even the bad treatment I get from my grandmother I have to keep it strictly to myself. “ • “You must trust the family, but you don’t have power over it. Even if the child is telling me about the treatment, we are the adults and we do not listen. To adults it is just talk.”

  17. Preservation and Dissolution of Sibling Groups • “We played together. The time we are fetching water we can yell for each other. ‘Come on Olivia ‘let’s go’. The time we go to pick up omauni [fruit] or evanda [spinach] in the bush we are together. We go to church together. And we go to Sunday school together. It was very good.” • “At first it was very difficult. I am oshivele (firstborn) and it is difficult because the one that came after me, that I use to wash and carry, I saw her when she was grown up. I wasn’t even thinking she is my sister. They said, yeah this is your sister, but it didn’t feel like it. I was happy to meet her but it didn’t feel like she was my sister. That was the tragedy in this, you see.”

  18. Moral development • “My mother died earlier so I got that love but not too much let me say that if you are staying longer with your mother then you have to learn more, how to suffer, how to survive. That is what I used to tell my kids ‘don’t think you will always stay with your parents’.” • “I feel I am lucky being raised by my grandparents because my attitude compared to my brothers and sisters who were raised by their own parents is quite, quite different. I can’t say that I am better than them but I have different ideas. I think I am stronger in the mind and I have developed into a person who can endure and does good for others.”

  19. Parental ethnotheories and cultural pathways to development Independent self construal autonomy, independence Interdependent self construal relatedness (Kagitcibasi, 1996; Greenfield & Suzuki, 1998, Keller, 2008)

  20. Competent adults • Market Economy vs. Economy of Affection (Hyden, 1992)

  21. Central Question • What are the implication of the ‘ foot in two worlds position’ implied in the economy of affection to parenting among the Aaumbo in Namibia?

  22. Aaumbo US • Tradition and conformity • Power and Achievement • Benevolence and prosocial • Relatedness • Agency • Agency/Self direction • Benevolence and prosocial • Tradition and conformity • Relatedness • Power and achievement

  23. Mean scores on Values and Goals (Suizzo, 2007) for Aaumbo and US mothers

  24. Ovafika (apprenticeship fosterage) • Brown, J. (2009) Child Fosterage and the Developmental Outcomes of Ovambo Children in Namibia: • Implications for Gender and Kinship Childhood in Africa 1(1): 4-10.

  25. Conclusions • Merger of these two worlds into parenting beliefs and practices • Not two separate worlds? • Fosterage carries and reflects the realities of these two potentially conflicting maintenance systems.

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