A Family Across Two Cultures
“Just leave me alone, Mom! You don’t understand and you’ll never understand because you’re not even trying!” Rosa shouted for what seemed like the tenth time this week. She felt a pain in her heart every time she shouted but she also felt like her mother couldn’t begin to comprehend what it is like to be a teenager, in Denver, with a boyfriend and the social, educational, and mental pressures all around her.
And she was right, her mom, Maria didn’t understand. When she was growing up in Mexico, parents and elders were revered, respected and you wouldn’t think of talking back, let alone shouting. The conflict between Maria and her daughter was intense most days - but she brought Maria and her two siblings here, to make a better life for them, and with that came the adoption of the American culture. Maria and Rosa had to find a way to communicate and bridge the gaps between the cultures they grew up in.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in May when Maria received the phone call from her daughter’s school that Rosa had been found off school campus, with three other children including her boyfriend, drinking. Appalled and shocked do not begin to explain Maria’s emotions. I was brought in as part of the Savio team to help this family through not just this specific situation of truancy and underage drinking, but to get to the heart of what was pushing Rosa’s behavior.
One of our core values at Savio is to treat children and their families together in the comfort of their own home in order to understand their physical environment and to strengthen the family and the communication between them. With Maria and Rosa the challenge was to bridge the cultures of these two worlds together and help Maria understand Rosa and vice versa. I work on a team with all-Spanish speaking therapists that specialize in these types of cases which allows us to work more effectively with our families from the very first visit.
Specifically, we utilized our well-proven program of Multi-Systemic Therapy, or MST, with this family. Sounds complicated? It is, but at the same time it isn’t - we look at multiple (multi) parts (systemic) of the family’s life - usually the family, school, peers, neighborhood - to provide treatment that addresses all aspects of the individual and the family. None of us live and work in a vacuum - we live and interact in our family, at school or work, in our neighborhood, in our city, and so on.
The area of focus with Maria and Rosa was primarily on communication. With Rosa this meant sharing with her mom her feelings about challenges with school, friends, and a boyfriend and how it is different from what she experienced growing up in Mexico. For Maria it was helping her to understand that Rosa can have, hold and honor Mexican cultural values but they need to be merged with her American lifestyle.
In talking with both of them, we all agreed their mutual love of cooking, a significant part of Mexican culture, was a perfect place to start. They worked together to pick recipes and meals and used that time together, to talk about their daily lives, their feelings, and their challenges. This did not happen or change overnight by any means. I visited with Maria, Rosa, and the other siblings in their home, three times a week for four months. Bringing people together and learning to communicate effectively takes time and practice. Just like any other skill, you have to work at it.
Maria wanted to be able to listen and understand Rosa and her life and struggles without judging and criticizing her. And Rosa needed help with how she communicated with her mother. She had to not only share her particular situation but also how it “is” in America for teens - a different world from her teen years. We worked together so Maria could get to know and trust some of Rosa’s friends’ parents so she had other adults she could count on to watch out for Rosa. Perhaps the biggest challenge for Maria was Rosa’s boyfriend. I told Maria she didn’t necessarily have to like that Rosa had a boyfriend (she felt she was too young) but she had to respect the different ways in today’s society compared, again to how she was raised. Boys did not come to the house when she was young.
This wasn’t easy for either of them. But over the next four months we were able to not just get Maria and Rosa to a place of communicating but to trust. Maria educated herself on issues she was concerned about for Rosa (like pregnancy and STDs). Instead of Maria shutting down the relationship with the boy, she grew to trust Rosa and her ability to make more mature and sound decisions for herself. In the end, Maria was seeing and appreciating Rosa’s maturity as a personal strength and grew to trust that Rosa would be responsible in her actions. This was a great achievement for both of them as they had both been afraid to discuss these things.
Ultimately my role was to help Maria with her confidence in her existing skills as a mother but to have a box of tools she could pull from to help her when needed, which included communicating but also included discipline, which was still needed. Additionally, Maria wanted to be and needed to be someone that Rosa could trust.
While my weekly visits to this family have concluded, they have and know they can reach out to me, as needed for tips and help along the way. The journey of the relationship between parents and children is always evolving - and we are always here to help.