White mom and POC dad

[Anonymous]

I have one friend I’ve seen this with (specifically language) and it’s because she was a SAHM for a few years and his family lives in another country. She doesn’t speak the language and he works long hours. Most time was spent with the mom, so the kids have only ever picked up a few words and phrases. He always said he’d teach them, but it didn’t happen. He has to translate when they FaceTime his parents.

[Anonymous]

Moms take care of the kids. I am an immigrant (white) and most of my friends are immigrants married to Americans and all the kids go to language school for their mom’s native language. I know a few immigrant dads married to American women and those kids don’t get much of the dad’s language/culture because the dads don’t care enough to enroll the kids or do activities with them.
Also please stop making it about skin color. Just because you’re white doesn’t mean you’re American and just because you are not white doesn’t mean you are not American.

[Anonymous]

My cousin was raised white despite having black parents and now has married a Caucasian woman and has children. The children are raised white which imo is going to be bad for them later in life. At the end of the day the world is cruel and sees them as black. They have no concept of being black, black traditions, black friends, or food with seasonings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Generally the mom’s culture is what passes down most. I have many friends who are in mixed ethnicity marriages, and this is almost always the case. When Dad speaks another language, the children rarely speak it. But if it’s the mother’s native tongue then the children do. Yes, there are exceptions but I find it to be overwhelmingly true.

+1. Moms still run the house and manage the social connections.

[Anonymous]

I'm a white woman who married a hispanic man and yes our kids were raised as more white. There father didn't care about teaching them to speak spanish. As for family he wasn't close to his family due to issues of him moving away from them to a neighborhood close to my family. He chose not to visit them so our children never knew there paternal family. As for food I cook some Spanish food especially authentic holidays since that is what dh and our kids like.

I don't think me being white has anything to do with the way my daughters were raised. My husband could have married an Asian woman and he still would have moved out of the ghetto and his family would have disagreed. I joke that he's a white man in a hispanic man's body all the time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've noticed that when the mom in a mixed family is white, the family tends to basically function like a white family with minimal contact with the POC side. Very little observance of cultural festivities and definitely very little cooking of the POC side's foods. Families tend to not vacation in the home country or with the POC parent's family. My DCs went to one of the language immersion charter schools and very few of families that were native Spanish speakers had a white mom. Mine is a mixed race family (Latino and white) and I'm the mom and the Latino. Our social circle in DC has become mainly other Latinos and all the moms in our circle are Latino.

Do others notice this gender/race pattern too? If so, what do you think is the reason for it?

I'm white, my H is Mexican. Like PP said, a lot of it is that I do most of the child-related tasks.

I cook some Mexican food, but H usually complains that I do it wrong and that it doesn't taste good. So I don't cook it much.

I don't speak Spanish, so I can't teach it.

I usually try to find cultural activities - like I found a few options for Dia de los Muertos - H didn't want to go to any of them.

H's family has chosen to have minimal involvement, so we don't see them much. It's a huge family and our kids are the youngest of the bunch, so everyone just sort of stopped caring about grandkids by the time they came along.

For immersion schools - H wouldn't take the time to research schools, wouldn't want to drive the kids farther away, and wouldn't want to pay for it.

I'll probably get slammed for saying this, but I think part of the problem is that in many cultures, men aren't expected to do much domestic work. So they aren't hands-on with the kids very much, and their culture doesn't get passed down. H is fairly progressive and it's still a challenge to get past the subconscious cultural conditioning that women are the ones responsible for the home.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The mother is still usually the anchor of the family, even in our modern, so called equal times.

My father is POC, and it's only because my white mother developed a chronic disability that he did the cooking, cleaning, household chores, entertaining, etc. That's how I know to cook foods from my father's country, and have absorbed some of his culture.

That being said, I don't like the immersion schools, because I detest this concept that language and history/culture should be separated. In MCPS, the curriculum is the standard US one, except it's in another language. I prefer to send my kids to the weekend school in our native language, where they get history, culture and language as a package deal. All the international families I know do the same thing for their native language.

We are a white family, but I’m fascinated by this position on immersion schools. We sent our daughter to a Spanish immersion school. Most kids there speak Spanish as their first language. Neither my husband nor I speak Spanish so our kid will always be “behind.” But, the idea that she isn’t learning history and culture from Spanish speaking countries isn’t our experience at all. She is in 5th grade and for 4 years she had teachers from Colombia. She knows a lot about that country. And most of her projects are about Spanish speaking people, countries, holidays, etc. Clearly, the Spanish speaking world is huge and not monolithic. But she is doing lots of stuff that the English classes are not doing.

[Anonymous]

We did the culture of the family that lived near us because that’s who we were able to spend the most time with. Nothing intentional about it, just didn’t feel the need for the family to sit at home on Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter because the other side of the family is not American/Christian and doesn’t celebrate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DH here: it’s because, in general, moms are the ones who really care about that stuff, so they are the ones who drive it.

Women are usually the Center of family life and the coordinators so it makes sense for the mothers culture to be prominent. In my marriage I’m the Latina and my husband is white. I would say that my culture is prominent in my family. It’s the food I cook, it’s my native language, it’s the proximity of my own family.

My best friends are an Italian/Greek, so both white, and it’s still the wife’s culture that is predominant. Italian.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Generally the mom’s culture is what passes down most. I have many friends who are in mixed ethnicity marriages, and this is almost always the case. When Dad speaks another language, the children rarely speak it. But if it’s the mother’s native tongue then the children do. Yes, there are exceptions but I find it to be overwhelmingly true.

Agreed. This is my experience.

[Anonymous]

I find it is much more about the POC parent and how connected they feel to their culture. I'm the POC dad and I was raised in a bilingual household, but I'm American-born. We don't have much emphasis on my parents native language (although I am bilingual) other than for the kids to be able to say things like "I love you" "Happy Birthday" and so on to their grandmother. But since my parents emigrated to the US in the 1950's this isn't that big of a deal. My mother is pretty used to either language. But culturally, we are very tied to our ethnic heritage. My mother was a cooking instructor, so I'm the primary cook in our household and I incorporate a number of my mother's recipes in our cooking. We celebrate a few holidays from our ethnic background and I like to teach my kids the customs that I grew up with. But we are a primarily American household, mostly because I was raised that way.

I know quite a number of mixed race families and although the mothers do tend to have more influence on the family customs, POC fathers who are very tied to their heritage convey that to their children. We have neighbors where the father is South American and they visit his country of origin annually to visit family. The kids are a bit more Latino than many others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Generally the mom’s culture is what passes down most. I have many friends who are in mixed ethnicity marriages, and this is almost always the case. When Dad speaks another language, the children rarely speak it. But if it’s the mother’s native tongue then the children do. Yes, there are exceptions but I find it to be overwhelmingly true.

Agreed. This is my experience.

+1. Moms are the ones who generally put in the effort to preserve traditions, recipes, etc. So the Dad's side tends to get lost. This happened a bit in my family (I'm the white Mom, Latino Dad).

If the Dad is a recent immigrant, I think there can also be more of a striver mentality where he wants the kids to go the best schools, do the activities that will help them get ahead, etc. Like, I enrolled my older son in a bilingual school that was kind of crunchy and super-liberal, but my Spanish-speaking DH didn't like it and pushed us to move him to a more traditional public school with better test scores. He was worried about him getting behind in the more loosey-goosey environment (which is legitimate, and I didn't fight him on it, but I have the confidence of a white UMC person and was sure he would do fine regardless). I think he also sees assimilation as the route to success (although he would never say that), so instead of doing Spanish classes on the weekends, for example, he wants the kids to do soccer in the same league that as the other kids in their class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH here: it’s because, in general, moms are the ones who really care about that stuff, so they are the ones who drive it.

What if anything do men actually care about?

That’s kind of the looming question behind posts in 90% of the subforums in DCUM, isn’t it?!

[Anonymous]

Black mom here, and I absolutely have noticed this with respect to white Moms with biracial kids. I think it’s because moms are more likely to run the day to day logistics of the family, so they do what is familiar. I suspect if I had married a white guy I would still parent the same way. Men just don’t care as much (generally, not all of them). I married an African and very little of his culture/language/foods is apparent in our family because I don’t know them, and he doesn’t bother.

[Anonymous]

Latino is not a race. It refers to a group of people who come from a place where Romance languages are spoken (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian).

And yes, within these groups there are people of different racial backgrounds. Latin America is a melting pot of people from African, Asian, Native American, and European heritage.