ABSTRACT

We are seated in a small kitchen which serves as the teachers’ room during the regular school day. The director of the Sudanese 1 educational program, Judy, looks around at the room full of South Sudanese men and women and welcomes them to the first meeting of this session of the educational program: ‘We think that parenting is the hardest job in the world.’ She pauses as the group laughs and nods knowingly. ‘But we also think it's the best job in the world.’ The group is silent as she smiles at them expectantly. Judy's statement epitomizes the evolution of childrearing and family into the phenomenon known as ‘parenting’ and the expectation that parenting is a form of unpaid, but highly valuable labor performed primarily in the home. For the South Sudanese Assistance Organization (SSAO) 2 that arranges and runs this Saturday enrichment program for Sudanese children and parents, an underlying goal is to reprogram South Sudanese notions of childrearing, defined by community, kin, and lineage rights and obligations, to one defined by parental involvement, regimentation, nurturance, and outcomes measurable in educational achievement within the school system. For the South Sudanese, ‘parenting,’ as it is used in the discourse of the organizers, is akin to a foreign language, involving an interpretive framework for both parents’ and children's behavior that fits imperfectly with their own. The group's puzzled silence at Judy's comment is just one of many moments of miscommunication over the course of the educational program sessions. This miscommunication involves several axes of childrearing behavior, including norms of emotional and physical interaction between parents and children, appropriate forms of discipline and comportment, the significance of ethnic identity, and ideologies of personhood, individualism, and sociocentrism.