Marie-Rose Moro (Ciudad Rodrigo, 1961) directs the Maison de Solenn in Paris, known as the House of Adolescents, a public and open space for young people in which a team of 150 professionals work in a coordinated manner: doctors, psychologists , psychiatrists, philosophers, musicians, writers, playwrights, dancers, painters…
Moro studies the role culture plays in mental health. He experienced the immigration process firsthand. She was born in Spain, but her family went to France when she was four years old. “They told me that my French was very correct, that I spoke like the teacher.”
Currently, she is a cross-cultural psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, a specialty in which she is an international reference.
In February, he visited CaixaForum in Tarragona to talk about migratory grief in a debate organized by the AFIN research group, from the UAB, led by the professor of social anthropology Diana Marre, within the framework of the La Caixa Social Observatory program.
What is the experience of a child who comes from another culture?
It will depend on many factors. A child born in another country and who arrives with his parents is not the same as another who has already been born in the host country, but not his parents or grandparents. It also depends on the age and the support he had when he arrived.
Let’s talk about the babies you are referring to.
You think that babies won’t notice anything because they are so small. It actually happens with children in general. It is thought that they do not need to receive explanations. But it’s not true. Babies perceive much more than we think, what happens is that they cannot verbalize it. They notice changes throughout their family, they perceive risks, the possibility that parents cannot protect them. Uncertainty can leave its mark on them in the form of insecurity.
To do?
Explain it to them. You can tell him that you are going to change space, that he will notice changes, that he will not see his grandparents… but that he will be fine because he will always have someone to take care of him. That allows him to calm his mind.
It is explained to them like children who already speak.
Yes, but they must also be given the opportunity to ask, ask everything they need, even help them shape new questions. They worry if they will stop interacting with their cousin, with their grandparents. And also what they are going to find and how they are going to deal with it.
And the teenagers?
For them, the loss is very great. They lose friends, the places in the neighborhood where they have lived, the values ??they have learned. And adolescence is a delicate time to help. It is the time of opposition to adults so they may not seek their help… Upon arriving in the new country, they will be sensitive to the hierarchy that is established between the majority and the minority to which they now belong. They require a lot of attention and it is necessary that they be expressed in some way, if not verbally through art.
Teachers explain that some immigrant children do not speak at all for a period of time.
They experience extrafamilial mutism, children who talk at home and not at school. This happens when the journey from home to school is violent for them. They need time to feel themselves and reconcile both worlds. It makes this task much easier for them to be recognized as having a different language and culture. It is important to make linguistic diversity visible in a school. We, with the aim of passing from one language to another without fear, use bilingual stories. First, the child listens to the version of the original language, then the second language, and then you invite him to draw, invent stories, to allow the transition from one to the other without fear.
One of the concerns of parents is precisely the learning of the language.
Children learn the language very easily, that is no problem. In two or three weeks they have made a lot of progress, especially if they arrive in the country before adolescence. And they speak it well, without an accent. To me, who is the daughter of Spanish immigrants, they told me “you speak like the teacher” because she used very correct language. The problem arises when parents, sometimes encouraged by teachers, stop speaking their language and use that of the host. It is believed that the greater the exposure, the greater the learning, but it is a mistake and not only linguistic, but also psychological and ethical. A child will speak better if he feels comfortable with the home language. The challenge of immigration is not neurological but affective and continuity of the self. If you think that the home language is worthless, you force the child to make a split between the cognitive and the affective. That makes him vulnerable.
Here it is asked that children be exposed to Catalan more at school because there are not so many spaces outside to learn it.
Ok, but first the school has to recognize that the child has something more than the others. Not least because he doesn’t know Catalan. And it must be taught from a multicultural perspective. Asking, for example, “Is there a subject in all languages?” What is he like in yours? Use the wisdom of children and make their wealth visible. It helps that there are multicultural teachers within the school.
Does immigration lower the level of reading comprehension?
Absolutely. Being bilingual or trilingual improves metacognition. One knows that the cup object has different names. In any case, what does correlate with academic level is poverty, the socioeconomic and cultural level of the parents. Parents cannot accompany their children in their learning and, in general, they are less culturally stimulated than native children. We see this in mathematics, for example, they feel more insecure. But it is poverty, not immigration.
How does migratory origin affect children already born here?
If they do not make the transition from home culture to school culture well, they run the risk of thinking that they are not legitimate. We see children who do not want their mother to pick them up from school because they are wearing a veil. In male children, the problem is more persistent. A large investigation that followed children of immigrants for 30 years showed that in one generation, girls reach the level of education as natives.
Are they more diligent or are they more capable of taking both worlds and jumping?
We found several causes. To begin with, social discrimination towards children is greater. In France, expectations of Muslim men are lower. In society and also in school. One sees them as small and does not think, as one would with the nationals, that they will become doctors or engineers. On the other hand, they are not clear about their references. They cannot rely on their parents, because they are not well regarded, they see them as archaic, sexist… but white French men do not serve as an example for them either.
Almost a quarter of the children in Catalan schools have a multicultural background. And that has occurred in a short period of time. It is being a great challenge for the school.
The challenge is to accept our differences within the principle of equality. But there has to be a symbolic political message of equality. To say that if our children do not read well it is because of immigration, that is making a negative correlation that, in reality, separates. The educational work must be to unite (with the help of cultural mediators, translators, psychiatrists…) and value what outside families think. The representation of what knowledge is is very cultural.
What is it referring to?
I’ll give you an example. A 10-year-old boy from a migrant background suddenly developed a strong phobia of school; until then he had excellent grades. We met with the family, the teacher and a translator. The father expressed his concern that French education weakens children. “In France they think that children learn alone and we think that children learn by relying on their parents and other adults.” He said that at a school party with the families, the father brought a gift to the teacher “because the child works very well.” She rejected it, as she is obliged to do, responding that the merit belonged to the child, for his intelligence and her perseverance, and that she helps everyone equally. The boy experienced badly the disqualification of his parents and the conflict between what the father understands about achieving success and his teacher. The two representations were crystallized and it was blocked. We, in the West, think that a child is good at school because he has many abilities. In other countries they think that merit is collective. What would have prevented the child’s phobia? If the teacher knows the representation of the family’s wisdom, she could have acted differently, allowing the child to reconcile both situations.
We must all learn to look with different eyes.
In the case of school, the sensitivity that can be acquired with training is capital. Even if the teacher does not know that there are other ways of understanding what it means to learn, only knowing that there is another, that’s it, the parent’s way is respected. What the child wants is to agree with both.
How is the new incorporated into an institution that reproduces cultural tradition?
To welcome other people is to allow yourself to be affected by diversity. There is no other. Either war or diplomacy.
But France does not accept the hijab.
You can tell girls not to wear hijab because it is based on your moral principle. But at the same time you can recognize that those Muslim girls who go to class contribute valuable things. Society changes by welcoming minorities. It does not mean that European values ??will be lost, but have no doubt that they will be transformed.
Populisms win votes by simplifying their speech.
The reality is that we are affected by the meeting. We must combat the idea that immigrants get worse grades, that is potentially dangerous… and it is necessary to value the differences between them so that all the children in the country are happy. And multicultural differences are not the only ones. There is gender, psychological or motor functioning. Do you see the change that represents?
I see that teachers are key in this change.
We expect a lot from children at school, they have to be good at everything. Let’s accept that this is not the case for everyone. Let’s ask ourselves what we are going to value in each of them, with their history, their way of being. How to get them to have a better self-esteem so that they want to learn and continue learning later.
What is your recommendation?
Children who don’t like math but are good at theater or urban poetry, value it the same. It is telling them: you have your place, you are valuable and capable of creating and acting on society. For teenagers it is important to have their own action. This is a new concept that works very well. Art allows us to change anger, for example. You put teenagers in the possibility of creating something, they transform the negative into positive.
