This study aimed to understand various situations within lives of female married immigrants of multi-cultural families in Korea, in view of their experiences in nurturing their children with disabilities, and improve awareness with children with disab...
This study aimed to understand various situations within lives of female married immigrants of multi-cultural families in Korea, in view of their experiences in nurturing their children with disabilities, and improve awareness with children with disabilities from multi-cultural families.
Moreover, this study intended to lay more qualitative and individual foundations for earlier approach of female married immigrants of multi-cultural families with their children in general development, and even with their children with disabilities and special needs to need individual supports.
In this study, data were collected between September and November in 2011, and subjects were 3 female married immigrants living in A City, 1 Vietnamese and 2 Chinese, who were mothers of children registered as disabled persons or in high risk groups. The data were collected through 3 sessions of in-depth interview on each participant, based on a semi-structured questionnaire according to classification into basic information, experience in nurturing children with disabilities and difficulties in nurturing children with disabilities in multi-cultural families.
Giorgi's analysis method were utilized to achieve the purpose of this study. From the analysis, 5 constitutional factors and 31 subordinate factors were derived.
First, mothers of multi-cultural children with abilities were female married immigrants to Korea, who suffered from 'difficulties in communication,' 'efforts to overcome language barriers,' 'maladjustment to nurturing culture different from the native country's' and 'burden of nurturing' and 'homesickness for the family in the homeland', with insufficiency of accurate information on living in Korea, vague expectation and anxiety.
Second, mothers of multi-cultural children with disabilities suffered from stress caused by maladjustment to living in Korea during pregnancy, through their nurturing experiences. After childbirth, they couldn't receive any help or support for nurturing their children, which resulted in greater burdens on them. In addition, difficulties such as sleep disorder of children who were left from general development increased their nurturing burdens. Before using early childhood educational institutions, parental monitoring on development of their children was actually difficult, so they couldn't easily tried to make an effort for positive screening and diagnosis of them, in spite of their anxiety about abnormal development of their children.
Third, mothers from multi-cultural children with disabilities regarded disabled children as poor ones, due to lacking of experiences in 'disability' in their homelands and poorer service support for special education, in comparison with Korea. For that reason, after using early childhood educational institutions, they had a doubt about their abnormal development and got their children diagnosed at medical institutions or private development centers on the recommendation of the principal and teachers of the institutions and based on information given by them.
Fourth, for mothers from multi-cultural children with disabilities, their 'disabilities' were regarded as 'disease,' owing to lack of understanding on specialists' opinions, caused by communication difficulties. In addition, most of them had heard before about types of their disabilities in basic Korean, with the help of their husbands, but regarded them as 'diseases' due to lack of understanding on difficulties of their children and guidance methods for them. For that reason, they tried to make a continuous request for diagnosis at medical institutions to find the cause of their abilities or find various solution including Oriental medicine.
Fifth, in most cases, mothers of multi-cultural children with disabilities received an early intervention service, based on special education, on the recommendation of the principal and teachers of kindergartens where they had been recommended for diagnosis of abilities of their children. Accordingly, after using rehabilitation center for their children, they heard about services for 'disabled children' on the whole and then used governmental welfare services such as「Voucher services for children with disabilities」 and 「Free education for young children with disabilities」and transferred their children on school age to special education classes and schools.
Sixth, mothers of multi-cultural children with disabilities had lower social support, while nurture, compared with Korean mothers with disabled children. Instead, they had greater support according to encouragement and support from their neighbors, their families in the homeland, supports from public institutions such as Multicultural Family Support Center, welfare centers for the disabled, kindergartens and schools, and those from Korean parents with disabled children, like them.
Seventh, according to answers of mothers of multicultural children with disabilities, their desired nurturing experiences were development of communication and development into allowing independent living. It showed that they wanted to solve problems from which they most considerably, such as communication development delay of their children, while nurture, and lack of social interaction.
According to results from this study, practical proposals, in view of education and welfare, are summarized as follows.
First, multi-cultural children with disabilities are another problem latent in multi-cultural families. Nevertheless, in view of insufficient monitoring of actual conditions on such families and lack of support systems, further long-term studies on multi-cultural children with disabilities are required.
Second, education systems for early intervention in multi-cultural children with disabilities should be developed.
Last, for multi-cultural children with disabilities suffering from double whammy, Multi-cultural Family Support Center currently supporting mult
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