Bill Clinton Hadam is the 6-year old son of Congolese refugees entering his first school year in suburban Clarkson, Georgia. The Christian Science Monitor is chronicling his first school year in a special multimedia feature on their website. Bill's grades have not been that good, so his teachers and parents have been discussing how to discipline him. The appropriateness of corporal punishment has come up as this excerpt from the latest story by reporter Mary Wiltenburg shows:
"[Bill's father] Hassan agreed wholeheartedly with the teachers' characterization of his son's defiant behavior. Here in America, he and Dawami [Bill's mother] had the same problems with Igey at home, Hassan said. But what could they do? 'He says: "I don't want to do it,"' Hassan says. Where he grew up, in Congo, or where his wife did, in Rwanda and Tanzania, corporal punishment would've taken care of that in a hurry. 'But here, the system is you can't force a kid to do what he doesn't want to do. You can't slap him.'
Many of the countries in south, east, and central Africa have banned corporal punishment in schools, according to anti-spanking groups the Center for Effective Discipline and the Global Initiative to End All Corporate Punishment of Children, which track laws on the subject worldwide. The United Nations Children's Fund is lobbying nations to outlaw it in homes as well, but notes that it 'remain[s] prevalent in homes, where it is hidden from public view and often enjoys legal protection through civil and customary laws.'
This is not, of course, to imply that all African parents hit their kids. But interviews for this project give the collective impression that many refugee families are struggling with the disconnect between expectations of parental discipline here and back home.
'If you could [only] slap him,' Dawami joked, rolling her eyes. 'In Africa if you slap him today, he'll [do what you tell him to] tomorrow.'
Everybody laughed. But behind the joke is a worry she's expressed over and over: How do you raise 'American kids' when you were raised to be an African parent?
The readers' comments at the end of this piece are also worth reading.