by Maryanne Waweru Wanyama | Jun 9, 2016 | 2016, Africa, Africa and Middle East, Boys, Child Care, Cultural Differences, Kenya, Motherhood, Parenting, World Motherhood
Over a sumptuous dinner with my girlfriends last weekend, we naturally got talking about our children. One of us had just enrolled for an eight-week programme specifically for ‘Mothers with Sons’.
For a cost of about $150 USD, with learning taking place once a week (Saturdays) for two hours, the course teaches how to raise our sons into fine young gentlemen. This is a good idea, if you ask me, because there is something about the crop of young men that we are increasingly seeing in Kenyan society today –men who are not as ambitious or focused as their fathers were, and men who would rather take the back seat as women take up the role of being the heads of the home.
In Africa, and I believe the much of the rest of the world, it is traditionally men who take up the leadership of the home. However, we are nowadays seeing more and more female-headed households.
This is due to a myriad of reasons, one of them being the fact that some men are just not willing to take up that kind of responsibility. This leads to the question: how were these men raised as boys? Weren’t our core values of hard work, discipline, consistency and responsibility instilled in them by their parents? This, I suppose, forms the rationale of such a programme that my friends and I were discussing last weekend.
The majority of moms who attend the programme are urban moms – career women who have enviable corporate or NGO jobs or run their own businesses. They are in their thirties to mid-forties, with their children mostly below the age of 12 years. These are women who receive updates from Baby Center and other informative parenting sites on how best to raise children. They attend First Aid courses and other related programmes about parenting. Some of these programmes are church-based, while others are sponsored by brands that seek out these types of moms and their children. Keen on learning different things about raising their children, you’ll find many urban moms today engrossed in courses and informative material about how to best raise their children.
But as my friends and I asked ourselves over dinner – do we pass on all we learn to the people who are helping us raise our children, specifically our housekeepers and nannies? In Kenya, most middle and upper-income families employ housekeepers and nannies to help with the domestic chores and take care of the children. They are the ones who actually spend a significant amount of time with the children during the day.
With all the demands of today’s modern woman – challenging jobs that require them to leave their homes at the crack of dawn and return at about 9pm – after spending hours in the traffic jam, or checking on their small business after work, or attending their Masters’ degree programme in the evening, attending a business meeting, or even having cocktails with the girls. By the time these modern women get home, the children are already asleep. On Saturdays, these women are busy running errands or attending weddings or baby showers/bridal showers, parenting classes and other such engagements and once again, return home late in the evening. Sunday is the only day where they get to spend time with their children.
So six days per week, it is essentially the nannies who are ‘raising’ their children. Nannies actually spend more time with their children than the moms do. So my girlfriends and I wondered, do these moms then pass on the information that they learn in their expensive courses, parenting newsletters and websites to the nannies? If the nannies are the ones spending the most time with the children, should we not focus on giving them the wealth of information we seek out about raising children? We didn’t get an answer, but I hope we will sometime.
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by World Mom, Maryanne Waweru-Wanyama of Kenya of Mummy Tales.
Photo courtesy of Michal Huniewicz / Flickr.
Maryanne Waweru-Wanyama, a mother of two boys, writes for a living. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya with her family. Maryanne, a Christian who is passionate about telling stories, hopes blogging will be a good way for her to engage in her foremost passion as she spreads the message of hope and faith through her own experiences and those of other women, children, mums and dads. She can be found at Mummy Tales.
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by Mama Mzungu (Kenya) | Jun 12, 2012 | Culture, Kenya, Living Abroad, Motherhood, Multicultural, World Motherhood
Before moving to Kenya, along with updating our vaccines and strategically packing our belongings to fit our meager bag allowance, one of the things I prepared myself for was the possibility of having house help. Both my husband and I would be working and we’d be living in a rural area, so we’d need someone to help look after our son. And unless I wanted to spend 20 hours a week washing our clothes by hand, we’d need to hire some house help. I’m not exaggerating when I say I hated the idea.
I consider myself hardworking and self-reliant, so I hated the idea of someone doing something for me that I could do myself. I’m a private person, so I hated the idea of someone observing, maybe judging, the interior of our lives. I’m a natural people pleaser, so I hate the idea of being someone’s boss in my own home.
More than anything I hated the prospect of putting someone in, what I thought, was a subservient position and, if I’m being honest with myself, bringing someone in who would be a continual reminder of the uncomfortable inequities of the world. Someone who could see what we spent on things like groceries and petrol and compare that unfavorably with her monthly salary.
And coming from the US, there was probably something in the recesses of my subconscious that was reflexively uncomfortable with being a light skinned person hiring a darker skinned person to clean my unmentionables. It’s a relationship loaded with historic and cultural baggage. (more…)
Originally from Chicago, Kim has dabbled in world travel through her 20s and is finally realizing her dream of living and working in Western Kenya with her husband and two small boys, Caleb and Emmet. She writes about tension of looking at what the family left in the US and feeling like they live a relatively simple life, and then looking at their neighbors and feeling embarrassed by their riches. She writes about clumsily navigating the inevitable cultural differences and learning every day that we share more than we don’t. Come visit her at Mama Mzungu.
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by Alison | Jul 21, 2011 | Being Thankful, Bilingual, Family, International, Kids, Language, Malaysia, Motherhood, Multicultural, Parenting, Technology, World Moms Blog, Writing
Where in the world do you live? And, are you from there?
I live in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. I was born and raised in Ipoh, a smaller city about 135 miles north of KL (as it is affectionately known to locals).
What language(s) do you speak?
I speak English, Malay and Cantonese. I understand a smattering of Arabic, courtesy of my in laws who are originally from Libya.
When did you first become a mother?
In 2009, when I was 33.
Are you a stay-at-home mom or do you work?
I stay at home with my two sons, after a 10 year career in public relations, events management and marketing. (more…)
Alison is a former PR professional turned stay-at-home mother to two boys. Growing up in a small city of Ipoh, Malaysia, Alison left home at 17 to pursue her studies in the big city of Kuala Lumpur. At 19, she headed to University of Leeds in England and graduated with a degree in Communications. Returning home to Malaysia in 1999, she began a 10-year career in public relations, event planning, and marketing, working for various PR agencies and one of the world's biggest sports brands. After a decade of launch parties and product launches, concerts and award shows, international press junkets and world travel, Alison traded all that in for a life as a first time mother in 2009, and has not looked back since. Aside from writing for her blog, Writing, Wishing, Alison is the Founder and chief social media strategist for Little Love Media.
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