Mothers’ Accounts of Attending to Educational and Everyday Needs of Their Children at Home during COVID-19: The Case of the UAE

From March 2020 until July 2020, the UAE implemented mandatory distance learning due to COVID-19, which meant that children had to continue their learning remotely at home. Though schools concerted exemplary efforts to ensure that children received all that was necessary through advanced technology platforms and interfaces, the duty of ensuring that children continued to engage in successful learning fell solely on parents. This paper is based on a self-report study conducted during this first period of distance learning where parents were invited to anonymously complete a survey and then be interviewed. The paper relies on interviews as its main data source. Interview transcripts once transcribed were thematically analysed. One recurring theme in the data was gender differences in domestic and other duties as well as attending to the educational needs of children. Mothers, irrespective of cultural or educational background, disproportionately seemed to be the caretakers of the home and of children’s educational needs. Mothers spoke of their mental health concerns, pressures of time management, and negative effects on their own work. This paper makes an original contribution by exploring parental experiences of emergency remote learning and what these reflect about parental ethnotheories in the UAE.

Cultural Learning

Chapter 12 explores the ways we learn about our culture, how culture shapes learning, and different learning contexts. It discusses attachment, Bowlby’s attachment theory, the Strange Situation, attachment styles, challenges to Western attachment theories, and attachment and culture. It addresses parenting, Baumrind’s parenting styles, parental ethnotheories, and parenting in different cultural contexts. It explores learning in formal settings like school, the connection between culture and schooling, parent beliefs and academic outcomes, apprenticeships, and learning in informal settings. Finally, it investigates play as a context for cultural learning and includes culture-specific and cross-cultural studies. This chapter includes a case study, Culture Across Disciplines box, chapter summary, key terms, a What Do Other Disciplines Do? section, thought-provoking questions, and class and experiential activities.

Learning to be a mother: Comparing two groups of Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands

Immigrant parents may have to rebuild their parenting knowledge after migration to keep up with their new milieu. Comparing two subgroups of Chinese immigrants, economic and knowledge immigrants, this study shows that the construction of different parental ethnotheories can be understood through the characteristics of their parenting knowledge acquisition, social networks and networking strategies. Findings from ego-network interviews with 15 economic immigrant mothers and 20 knowledge immigrant mothers indicate that the former tends to obtain practical tips and specific instructions directly from experts and acquire practical help from local, co-ethnic, small and dense networks, while the latter engages in critical peer-based learning in multicultural, open and long-distance networks. This study argues that a social network perspective can shed light on the “black box” of how parenting theories are reconstructed after migration.

Understanding Parental Ethnotheories and Practices About Healthy Eating: Exploring the Developmental Niche of Preschoolers

Purpose: To understand parental ethnotheories (ie, belief systems) and practices about preschoolers’ healthy eating guided by the developmental niche framework. Design: Qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology. Setting: Home. Participants: Participants were 20 parents of preschool-age children ages 3 to 5 years, recruited from a quantitative investigation. A majority of the participants were white, female, married, well educated, and working full time. Methods: Participants who completed the quantitative survey were asked to provide their contact information if they were willing to be interviewed. From the pool of participants who expressed their willingness to participate in the interviews, 20 participants were selected using a random number generator. In-person semistructured interviews were conducted until data saturation (n = 20). Thematic analysis was performed. Results: Three themes and 6 subthemes emerged: theme 1—parental ethnotheories about healthy eating included subthemes of knowledge about healthy eating, motivations to promote healthy child development through healthy eating, and sources of knowledge about healthy eating (eg, doctors, social media, government guidelines, positive family-of-origin experiences); theme 2—parental ethnotheories that supported organization of children’s physical and social settings included structured mealtime routines and food socialization influences (eg, grandparents, siblings, and childcare programs); and theme 3—parental ethnotheories that supported children’s learning about healthy eating included parent–child engagement, communication, and encouragement in food-related activities (eg, meal preparation, visiting farmer’s market, grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, baking). Conclusion: Findings advance the literature on parental practices about healthy eating. Parental ethnotheories (eg, beliefs, motivations, knowledge, and skills) matter. Developmental niche of preschoolers (ie, physical and social settings, childrearing practices, and parental ethnotheories) constitutes an interactive system in which ethnotheories serve as guides to parental practices. Fostering nutrition education and parent–child engagement, communication, and encouragement in food-related activities are recommended to promote children’s healthy eating in daily routines.