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Parental assessment

In health, judicial and social norms concerning parental assessments, parents are asked to adhere to an extremely specific and defined parenting profile, i.e. one that corresponds to 'our' expectations, where 'our' indicates the parenting model that is dominant in Italy and endorsed by the practitioners. If these expectations are not met, i.e. if these parents fail to adhere to the majority’s educational models in a very short period of time, they are automatically considered inadequate and therefore incapable of taking care of their children's growth.
The migrant parent is forced to interface with the institution and thus to communicate with institutional workers. However, the different parental models and the relative meanings and values that these models convey often lead to real confusion when institutions investigate, going so far as to label certain behaviours and relational modes as disinterested, aggressive or within pathological categories. Sometimes there is a precise cultural practice that the parent puts in place, at other times the culture is expressed in his or her affective skills and ways of manifesting love towards the child: when these do not coincide with the majority ones, the parent is considered pathological (e.g. several Nigerian mothers are considered too severe because of the tone of voice, which is actually typical of that culture, and which the child does not perceive as aggressive). In addition, a certain 'other' culture is sometimes simplified and reified, e.g. an alleged 'African culture' is used with a certain superficiality of analysis to emphasise inadequacies on the part of parents. The pigeon-holing within predefined, rigid grids and the difficulty of communicating with the institution in its formal language, embedded as it is in a cultural and bureaucratic context distant from the one known to migrant parents, means that the experience of these people is reduced exclusively and 'objectively' to technical and minimal aspects that are in reality far removed from the much more complex reality.
Migration paths and experiences are in fact often complicated and not always easy to reconstruct accurately. This can lead social workers to a series of assessment errors and misunderstandings, causing the very issue of migration, which is fundamental to assessment, to remain in the background. Moreover, a further and fundamental fact to consider is that of the evaluation context, which is unfortunately often inappropriate. Evaluations by experts usually take place within the counsellor's office or within a so-called neutral place, managed by the counsellor as places of observation of the parent/child relationship.

​Some concrete examples

The following is an extract from a text by Simona Taliani (2019) as well as examples from an article by Manuela Tartari (2015), both anthropologists. From the passages quoted, it can be understood how the different ways of expressing feelings and affection are sometimes not taken into account and how the personal relationship between mother and child, their experiences and possible traumas are not considered. What also emerges is the difficulty of managing the complexity of the experiences of parents coming from different cultural backgrounds, with a migratory past behind them and therefore, often, suffering.
 
"Yetunde is a woman from the Edo State who arrived in Italy at the age of about 20, pregnant. [...] Following an attack with boiling water thrown at her by the woman who had brought her to Turin, Yetunde gave birth prematurely to her first-born daughter and asked the social services for assistance for both herself and her premature child. [...] The girl grew up for six years in Italy. Then Yetunde, worried about the prospect that social workers were proposing to her (to leave her daughter with an Italian foster family), took the girl to Nigeria where she is now in her twenties and still lives and studies. On her return from Nigeria, Yetunde will be under great pressure from the social welfare services, especially in connection with her subsequent pregnancies. The workers will go to great lengths, and by all means, to push her to separate from her last two children. Perceived, in fact, as an 'abandoning mother' for having left her first-born daughter in Nigeria with her paternal grandparents, she would be the subject of a negative assessment that will lead the court to deem both children 'adoptable' four years apart [...]. In 2011, a few months after the birth of the little girl, the child neuropsychiatrist in charge of following her would go on to say during a network meeting between social workers: "The next one she gives birth to will be taken as soon as it comes out of her belly" (Taliani 2019, p. 114)".
 

Photo by Ricardo Moura, on unsplash

"A report drawn up by social workers of a Child Neuropsychiatry Service draws attention to the Court’s "the lack of attention" towards the daughters of a Senegalese mother, housed in the communitỳ with them, evidenced by her way of talking in front of the girls "about any subject." It is thus written that the mother does not 'filter' her negative emotions and is therefore shown to be 'completely heedless of the little girls' emotions.' She manifests a 'meticulous and precise care of the exterior appearance, poorly supported by affectivitỳ.' The Court issued an Opening Decree of Adoptabilitỳ due to "a consistent difficulty of the woman to be emotionally and affectively close to the girls" (Tartari 2015, p.189)".                                                                      
"Neutral observers report that the Nigerian mother insists, against their instructions, on breastfeeding her daughter (two months old), cradles her in a "restless" manner, keeps her too covered. In their report, the Child Neuropsychiatry Service staff take up these observations and conclude: 'if the child were to live in the nucleus of origin, this would expose her to a mode of care characterised by the unpredictabilitỳ of maternal behaviour and incongruous maternal responses to her needs, both concrete and emotional and affective.' In this case, giving the breast to the newborn becomes a neglectful gesture because the mother should take into account that her milk is not needed as the little one takes her bottle at other times and no one thinks of fostering the bond by modifying the timetable, just as no one questions the restless cradling of a daughter from whom one has been separated a few days after birth (Tartari 2015, p. 189)."
 
Anthropology's task is therefore to convey the importance of neither trivialising nor simplifying the other's culture through generic or abstract categories, as they would fail to be effective in rendering the complexity of those different cultures. Such 'reductive' descriptions would in fact say nothing about the different social and symbolic systems to which the parents in question belong, and consequently about their relationship with their children/children; nor would they be able to express the difficulties linked to the migration route or the socio-economic conditions within the new life context. This reflection is therefore intended to emphasise the importance of becoming aware that the parental model we propose is itself the result of cultural (as well as socio-economic, in general) conditioning, and must therefore prompt us to reflect on the way in which the evaluation of other parental models is carried out. In essence, it is the questions and answers themselves that should be asked differently, avoiding simplifying, trivialising or encapsulating hard-to-understand behaviour in pre-established boxes.
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