We live in a multicultural world. Many children find themselves between different cultures:

·       because their parents don’t belong to the same cultural group

·       because they are fostered or adopted by people belonging to another culture

·       because their parents are immigrants                  

What are the possible consequences of these situations for the children concerned? What sense of identity has a child living between different cultures?

What can be done to help children to grow up acquiring a proper sense of identity and respecting every culture?

The presentation of this subject will be based on research, as well as on personal experience, both as an adoptive mother of children born in Angola (western Africa) and as a teacher in a school with many pupils from Portuguese speaking African countries. The research was conducted not only going through studies on the matter, but also interviewing immigrant families to learn about their children’s difficulties to find their way between different cultures.

A study conducted in three schools

Families from many countries are coming to Lisbon.

Their children live often torn between two cultures. Three parents talked about that experience lived by their children: Sebastiao, Angola: 4 children; Silvana, Brazil: 2 children; Natalia, Ukraine: 2 children.

What are the immigrant children going through?

Those three parents described the difficulties their children went through: different language, difficulty to keep the memory of their own language and values, poor grades in schools, lack of time from the parents to care for their children because they are working very hard… 

Ana, the principal of an elementary school, also talked about the reality they live there: There is a big diversity, both ethnical and social. Learning to live together…is very important for their future. What future can they build?

How important is culture in the building of the identity?

A culture is a mixture of knowledge, values, attitudes and traditions that guide the behaviour of a group of people. In the process of growing up a child interiorises gradually the groups to which he or she belongs to.

Family and school can work together to achieve an intercultural education. The knowledge of other cultures is not an aim in itself, but it is important only because it allows the possibility of interethnic communication.

“Integration is not assimilation: It doesn't mean to suppress one’s own identity, but to walk towards an open society living in mutual respect and solidarity” (Pope John Paul II, January 2005).

We will reach some conclusions on what can foster or adoptive parents do to help their children who live between two cultures.

The cross-cultural issues are very important for the wellbeing of a child and for a balanced growing up in the global “village” in which we live now.