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family snapshot
Waing Waing & Andre Helmstetter
Seattle’s Hla Yin Yin Waing or “Waing Waing,” 30, and her husband, Andre Helmstetter, 40, have firsthand experience with bridging cultures in their parenting. Waing, an ethnic Burmese woman who was raised in Botswana and came to the U.S. in 1993, married Helmstetter, a half German and half African-American man in 1997.
After their first child, Asha, was born in 2000, the couple soon realized that they both brought assumptions to their parenting that were the product of their culture and upbringing.
From the start, the couple had starkly different approaches to caring for the baby. A big part of Burmese tradition is to not allow babies to go outside at all and be exposed to the elements. Helmstetter was eager to take the baby outside and into the world, Waing Waing was completely opposed. “We had to come up with a compromise,” Helmstetter says. What they did was to wrap the baby up completely so that only her nose and eyes were exposed.
On another occasion, one day, Helmstetter came home from work to find Waing Waing and baby Asha in the bathtub with a pair of scissors. Both baby and mom were crying. At six months, Burmese tradition dictated that the baby’s head be shaved. But Waing Waing could not go through with it. “I had to finish the job because I had a patchwork baby,” Helmstetter says laughing.
In raising Asha and Thawda, the couple took a traditional Asian approach of feeding on demand, co-sleeping and not letting the baby cry. “This is very cultural for me,” Waing Waing says. “In Western terms, it’s called attachment parenting which is really normal for the Chinese. It’s funny that they have all these new terms for it. … It’s funny because it’s just what we do. It’s not a trend or a style.” Helmstetter adds, “Most people in the world have been doing attachment parenting and still are but white people don’t even think that it existed until they thought of it. Unless it’s written down, it doesn’t exist, instead of looking at the last 1,000 years of tradition around the world.” Yet attachment parenting has its drawbacks, the couple says. It’s harder to wean the children, for example, and the children have a harder time breaking away.
Another aspect of the couple’s culturally based approach to parenting is in their family network. Like many families of color, the couple defines their family more broadly than just the Western nuclear family. Elders are treated with great respect and relatives and friends are called “aunt” and “uncle” by the kids and are seen as such. While this was natural for them both, Waing Waing was surprised to find how unusual this was in the U.S. “In the Chinese Burmese culture there isn’t that nuclear family. For us, it’s a whole extended family. I didn’t realize the extent of this until I found out some of our American friends are very definitive about their family, they define it by law.” While some friends initially rejected the practice of being called “uncle,” others saw it the practice and then adopted it for themselves.
For Helmstetter and Waing, being a multicultural family has had a positive impact on how they raise their kids. Because their approaches are so culturally different, they are forced to look at and discuss their cultural norms and expectations and come to what is best for their children.
Waing Waing says, “Because we’re not just a homogenous family we’re forced to talk things through. You can’t assume the partner knows what to do. We actually have to sit down and talk about how we do stuff. It’s had a huge affect on how we raise our children and the things that we do.”
– Naomi Ishisaka
(Reprinted with permission from January 2006 issue of the ColorsNW magazine: www.colorsnw.com)
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