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June 2011 Moms
Sazhrah
member
Multicultural (or mixed) updates
Sazhrah
member
Just wanted to check in with everyone that is have a bi-racial, bi or multicultured or whatever term you would like to use baby.
Has anything come up with cultural boundaries yet with extended family?
Has culture influenced the name?
How about decor of the nursery?
Anything else come up?
This discussion has been closed.
Re: Multicultural (or mixed) updates
Nothing for me, the only thing I stress about is making sure the babe is bilingual. I speak Spanish fluently, although I definitely feel more comfortable speaking in English. My husband can understand and speak a bit, but only if we speak slowly, and simply. I fear that without speaking to the baby in Spanish constantly, she won't pick it up and I would hate for her to lose that aspect of our culture.
I also wondered the other day if she would identify as Latina....being only half South American.
My husband is Mexican/Apache and I am Czech Romani (Gypsy)/Sicilian.
I was wondering with DD what she would identify herself as and she actually says she is Mexican Gypsy. I am sure your daughter will.
I just posted last night about my Thai FILs name recommendations for baby. They are hilarious and awful! Other than that, nothing has come up on the culture front.
DH is of Thai decent and I am of Egyptian decent, but nothing has really ever been an issue with both our families or with us. I am not conservative, and neither is DH, so I guess that has helped us both mesh well without insisting one persons heritage over-shadows another's.
I would love for DS and future baby to either speak Thai or Arabic, or both. I can speak, read and write Arabic rather well, but DH does not speak, read or write Thai, he only understands it when spoken slowly. So only the grandparents can teach Thai...which would be hard since they live in Cleveland!
Even though I can speak Arabic, it's not my first language and I am not as comfortable speaking it so I doubt I would ever use it in the home. Also DH has a speech delay so we are a strictly an English-speaking household and I'm pretty sure we're going to stay that way. Growing up my parents only ever spoke English and I was taught Arabic in schools.
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While both DH and I are both caucasian, his fam is Russian/Polish Jewish and my fam is WASP Christian (dad is Catholic, mom is Methodist). It's so interesting to see such a great difference in culture in the different families. We are not raising our child in a formal religion. Neither of us are very religious so we're not going to chose one religion over the other. However, we will be exposing our son to both and he'll be at every holiday celebration on both sides. We are not having a bris or baptism, although our child will be circumsized in the hospital by a doctor. We want to educate him on both religions and if he chooses one over another, we'll both be very supportive of his decision.
As far as our son's name, we picked Jacob after DH's grandfather's name. It is Jewish tradition to pass on the name of someone who has died. I have always loved that name anyway. If the baby had been a girl, we would have picked Maya, after DH's father who just died a year ago (his dad was Myron). Jacob's middle name, Townsend, is a family middle name held by several males in my family including my brother and late grandfather.
Although his family does not usually have baby showers, I will have one. Afterall, I'm not Jewish! Many of his female family members will be there because they are very supportive.
It's interesting that both of our mothers don't see eye to eye on certain issues, not because either of them are right or wrong, but because culturally they were raised differently. This causes some stress, but they both eventually get over it... because they have no choice really.
If you can talk to his family and find out from tribal papers or even just what they say they are you can contact a tribal councel that is usually very open to discuss options on how to help you raise your children. Also if you ever can go to an open pow-wow (Gathering of the Nations is a great one to go to).
Though my husband is Mescalero Apache he is a medicine man and has dedicated his life to study of the tribes. I can try and find more information for you or help point you in the right direction.
We live closest to the Tigua reservation which the Tigua's are actually from New Mexico but were transplanted down here. It isn't the same as the Apache Nation but we can still expose our children to the dances and other cultural aspects. We try to make it up to Mescalero at least 3 times a year and we are going to more and more pow-wows.
Another great way to expose your children to their heritage is through children's books such as "Indian Paintbrush", "Grandmother Spider Brings The Sun" and "Bear Sleeps" and "Crow".
We are considering a Khmer name if we are to have a boy.
I also would definitely want our child to be able to able to speak both Khmer and Tagalog too.
Other than those, not much more.
I was raised Jewish and DH was raised Christian but neither of us believes in organized religion. We will raise the baby to be a moral person but not in a biblical way. We will go to the Jewish holidays at my moms and Christian ones at his parents but not observe any at home, except maybe a tree for christmas and if we do that we need a manorah for hunukkah too. I hope I can also find friends of other cultures and religions to expose him to. If one day he choses to pick a religion that is great, if not also great.
Our parents on the other hand.... My mom is harassing me to have a naming ceremony and give him a hebrew name. DH's mom has not mentioned anything yet but I am hoping she doesn't start with me about getting communion or something like that.
The name we picked because it was one of very few we could agree on and it happens that it starts with an L so we are saying he is named after my grandfather which is a Jewish tradition. If we didn't pick that name then I would have picked a middle name that started with one of the letters of my grandparent's name.
Has anything come up with cultural boundaries yet with extended family? I am Mexican and my husband is from Taiwan. So our twins are totally mixed...
Has culture influenced the name? Not at all we went with Joshua and Jacob. They will have Chinese middle names and my husbands last name.
How about decor of the nursery? Nope not at all.
Anything else come up? Our children will be trilingual they will speak Spanish and Mandarin at home and learn English at school. DS is Mexican and he spoke Spanish first and his second language was English...
Has anything come up with cultural boundaries yet with extended family?
Luckily nope - they seem to all get that these are our decisions and not theirs
Has culture influenced the name?
Husband is Sri Lankan and I am American (of Judeo-Christian of Irish, English, French-Canadian, Austrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Russian, Lithuanian descent). We had no idea what to name our little "mutt" child so we picked Teya. It seems to fit in anywhere and it is actually an Italian nickname for Theresa - go figure.
How about decor of the nursery?
I've been accumulating drums and puppets and whatnot from world travels for years - it is truly a multicultural room. Oh and lots of elephants - my Sri Lankan husband loves elephants and I like animals for baby rooms.
Anything else come up?
Religion - he is Buddhist but atheistic and I am Judeo-Christian, though very agnostic. However he is firmly rooted in his culture so we agreed to make the Buddhist temple part of our child's life - though we will still celebrate other holidays as well.
Location - will make efforts to spend part of child's life in Sri Lanka (maybe a few years of school, summers) - not sure yet on specifics.
Nothing really has come up for us. I think the only issue for my side of the family will be the name because I can already see some of my family members saying it's a 'black' name in my opinion it shouldn't matter.
The other is the baptism issue but we've worked it out and that doesn't have to do with race.
We've agreed on pretty much everything else, the way we want to raise them and all that so we're good.
DH is Jewish. His parents were both born and raised in Israel, speak and write in Hebrew, celebrate every holiday... I am a mutt of unknown origin but raised Christian.
From a purely religious perspective, we are holiday religious. His parents always had the perspective that by coming to a country that was primarily of Christian influence that they would accept anyone of any background that their sons wanted to marry. We celebrate Jewish holidays with his family and many of the Christian holidays with my family or friends.
I drew the line at a bris (if LO is a boy) but agreed to a circ in the hospital done by a doctor.
As far as decor goes, I had picked and purchased nursery decor before we were engaged.
We will pick a name that we like regardless of whether or not it fits into a cultural norm. I'm hoping we'll end up with something that honors my late mother or her side of the family since LO will be taking DH's last name.
WOW! Thank you for this info! DH doesn't have a ton of info so I was blindly trying to navagate it! We are much farther north and luckily fairly close to his triable land, I'm hoping towards the end of the summer we can venture over there and find some info etc. I'm going to buy those books you recommended though, what a fun place to start! Thanks again!
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My husband is from Taiwan...moved to the US when he was 9. We're definately going with an Asian middle name, either his dad's or grandpa's-we haven't decided just yet which one.
There haven't been any issues with his family really, but asian culture is very much natural in child rearing-which is what I'll be doing. (ie breastfeeding, natural childbirth, no immunizations, etc.) And they're not real opinionated so we get along great! lol
I'm really hoping our child will learn chinese...My husband speaks four languages and I really want that passed on to our children!
DH is hispanic, I'm white. The only major cultural differences would be they believe in piercing a babies ears, I do not. But DH agrees with me, so shouldn't be a problem.
Also, we tried to pick a name that wasn't too Hispanic or too White. Something that fit us and our last name. We picked Alisha. It sounds good with our A last name.
I don't think it has been an issue for us. My husband is mixed (white and hispanic). I am black. So the baby is an assortment
Only concern I have is living in an area that doesn't have a black prominence. I worry about her getting a strong identity when no one and nothing looks like her or accommodates her... (hairdressers and baby dolls and such).
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DH's sister's ex H was white and it was so cute when we would ask our niece Kaylee what she was when she was about three. She would say white one minute and mesi-can (just like that) the next. It was so cute. She learned early how to distinguish. DH, his sister and brother all have a white SO so there were plenty of "differences" around for her to distinguish/guess and we would tell her if she was correct or not. It was cute. Of course she now knows she's both...lol
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