By Floriane Papin, Maureen Davisseau & Hélène Josse
This paper is about mothers from Africa who came to live in Western countries. This is a short paper to talk about a big subject. Therefore we will be obliged to speak only of generalities and will not be able to enter into details. So you can feel frustrated, but this frustration is a good start that can lead you to learn much more with a little bit of courage … that we are sure you have !
According to Hélène Stork, there are three maternal learning stages:
- When the mother was a baby herself, she incorporated gestures and postures that her mother gave to her. This transmission is made by the kinaesthetic way.
- When the mother was a child, she learned by observation or injunctions (for example when she was playing with dolls or when she was taking care of children.)
- After the delivery, the mother received help and advices which came from professionals or others women.
Here we see that maternal learning start in baby time and is about kinaesthetics, observation, imitation, advices. We can easily understand that for a migrant mother it is much more complicated. We can give here a non-exhaustive list of what can determine the mother’s way of mothering : traumatism, past, vision of the future, original but also new culture and language, isolation, proximity or remoteness with her family and community, etc. Those mothers are welcoming a new child and at the same time, they fit into a new society.
There are some differences between Western and African countries which are important to know to understand better the difficulties of this mother which came from really different cultures. In Western countries, children belong to their parents (they take care of the child in their everyday life), to the state (the state is responsible of protecting the child from bad parents, and to children themselves (they have children rights, the most famous example is the « Children Rights Convention). In general, in most of African countries, children belong to the community. For example it is the community that takes care of the child and not especially the mother. In Africa the fosterage (donation of children) is a custom particularly used according to each community rules. In a lot of African countries in the first months of the baby life there is a lot of enveloping porterage, needs are anticipated, the baby does not cry, every frustration is avoided. The baby is not much watched. Another difference is that in Western countries there is a personal or couple desire to have a child while in a lot of African countries this desire is submissive to transcendental instance that is God. The big majority of migrant women in the perinatal period who are far away from their own mother talks about the suffering of their absence.
It is also very important to know the most common difficulties in this population of migrant mothers : psychosocial, financial, isolation and psychological distress. The social isolation disrupts mothering skills. The circumstances-based poverty has a huge impact in the family organization and the traditional roles of men and women. The fragility of psychological health is due to difficult events which arrived before and/or during migration. It also can be related to adaptation to the new environment. A deterioration of mothers health (both emotional and physical) affects most of the time people who did not want to immigrate, and those who have a great instability in their family and economic situation. When we read scientific articles about migration and motherhood, we realize that many of them talk about isolation. They have to rebuild networks, that is a long and difficult process in which they have to set off again from zero.
As maternity raises the question of paternity and the place of the father (in a heterosexual couple), it seems important to us to say a few words about it. Especially since migration can have effects on this paternity. The role of the father seems to take on a new meaning with circumstances of migration.
The father often has a difficult place because in many societies where migrants come from, the traditional roles and the sexual division at work can be very printed. For example, in their countries of origin, men are sometimes forbidden to take care of children and this can be a source of teasing if they do. In the context of immigration, in most cases, mothers say that fathers are more present and help more than they would have in their home country.
In migrant population there is a high prevalence of people with a post-traumatic stress disorder. For this reason it also seemed important to us to discuss how trauma can be transmitted to the baby. And also to talk about possible effects of trauma of the mother on the relationship between her and her baby. Mothers who have had trauma tend to have poorer interactions with their children. The mother has difficulties regulating her emotional state, and we can thus observe an accentuation of transmission of the emotional state of the mother. To better understand this in psychological terms: the “dead part” of the traumatized mother is a split. The mother cannot elaborate this “silent part omnipresent”. We can observe a transmission of disorganized attachment to children (attachment theory). There is a perverted circle between maternal mental representations of her children who are clouded by the trauma and reactivation of the trauma by distress and reactions of the child. For the infant, traumatic events do not participate to the destruction of the symbolic field. Indeed, the baby has not yet acquired a perception and a knowledge of the real external world. What is traumatic for an infant is related to the lack of response to his solicitations, which creates a sensory chaos that can be external or internal (sound, light, cold, hot, thirst, hunger, pain, etc.)
To conclude, we can say that migrating is already complicated, but go through migration and being a mother at the same time can be even more difficult. As there is more and more migration and this phenomenon will surely continue to increase, it is important for psychologists and future
psychologists to learn as much as they can about this topic in order to be more able to help these people better.
Words we have learned:
- kinaesthetic
- fosterage
- infant
- disrupts
- remoteness
Bibliography :
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