How Kurdish Immigrant Parents in the United States Think about the Formal and Informal Education of Their Sons and Daughters ()
ABSTRACT
The study addresses how Kurds who currently live in
the United States think about and manage their children’s education. Of
particular interest is the ways in which the gender of their children influences how parents engage with their children’s
education. Based on interviews with Kurdish parents who live in Nashville,
Tennessee, the study reveals that, in general, they feel more responsible for
and take a much more proactive role in their children’s education than is
typical of Kurds living in Kurdistan. This is so because the parents are not
only concerned with securing an education for their children but also making
sure their children adopt a Kurdish identity. The study also found that gender
plays an important role in parental investment, albeit not in a straightforward
way. That is, even though parents support the education of both their sons and
daughters, they are nonetheless guided by deep seated assumptions that, once
they grow up, their sons and daughters will live very different lives. More
specifically, the parents operated on a taken-for-granted
assumption that their daughters would live more circumscribed lives than their
sons and hence needed a somewhat different educational investment during childhood.
Share and Cite:
Salih, S. , Matthew, E. and Linders, A. (2017) How Kurdish Immigrant Parents in the United States Think about the Formal and Informal Education of Their Sons and Daughters.
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
5, 79-102. doi:
10.4236/jss.2017.56008.
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