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.