I hope you have enjoyed listening. To know more about expat life in Finland, visit this page or start from my crash guide. If you yourself are an expat in Finland or somewhere, I would love to hear about your experience. Do you relate to my story? Any tips to share? Comment down below and let me know.

Featured picture by The Slow Photography.

The post Raising A Family In Finland – Guest On The Expat Focus Podcast appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

Italy in particular has faced an incredible peak in immigration in the past few years. Alongside with it, a wave of violent  intolerance spurt and grew to radically change the dynamics of everyday life. I daily read about racist aggressions or acts of discrimination on newspapers, not to mention the online harassment I spot. It’s the tip of the iceberg and, more alarming, it’s openly supported by key government figures. It’s impossible not to notice the parallel with Finland. The “True Finns” Party has collected consensus for years, up to becoming the 2nd biggest party in the country. Even though they publicly save face hiding behind a centrist position, they are nothing short than a nationalistic party (I mean, the name!). Just at the start of 2019, their association of young supporters officially commented the good news that grants for international adoptions had been incremented by protesting our children should come second to support for fertility treatments and international adoption shouldn’t be forbidden but definitely discouraged. Right.
Good news is the large majority of people is growing tired of these bullies. They scream loudly to make up for the fact they are few. Back in Italy, some fellow adoptive mothers had enough and decided to take action by founding “Mamme Per La Pelle”. The association was started in November 2018 with the clear goal of promoting the value of diversity. Board member and co-founder Adriana Pumpo agreed to an interview and shared about their important work.

It all started with a viral Facebook post by Gabriella Nobile, published before the elections in March 2018. Gabriella is an adoptive mother of two African children. She addressed Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega Nord party and currently Italy’s Prime Minister, and his racist declarations and policies. She shared her children were growing terrified by the day: “My 7 year old daughter before bed asks me ‘If the guy who speaks ill about us (Salvini, ed.) wins, will we be sent back?’ before crying inconsolably.”. Her 12 year old boy was regularly harassed on the bus by Salvini’s supporters and addressed with slurs as “sh- n-”, “go back to your country” “you’re here to steal from us or kill our women”. She concluded her message by accusing Salvini and other politicians to employ fear and racism to distract people from all the disgrace they were bringing to her country. The post quickly got the popular attention and reached national news outlets and television. Gabriella, Adriana, and other mothers understood this was only a start. Mamme Per La Pelle was born.

Adriana explains, “We started off as an association of adoptive mothers. Our sons were discriminated based on their skin color or ethnicity. We wanted to take a stand and defend them.”
The same harsh reality they lived through encompasses also other types of multicultural families, “for example foster families, transracial families, immigrant families.”

“We have a growing number of immigrant mothers among our members. We want to give them a voice.”

One of the services offered is first contact in cases of racist aggression, harassment, or discrimination.
“We receive hundreds of reports every month, especially at school. They range from long stares on the bus suffered by school-age kids to systematic racist bullying. Harassment includes being thrown into a dumpster, being followed home on a daily basis, being told ‘go back to your country’. We recently received a report of a 20 year old man being denied access to a nightclub because of his skin colour, while his white friends were allowed in.”

Adriana explains how perception changes over time: “Racism changes with the victim’s age. I am an adoptive mother of two African children. When they came home, everyone thought they were cute and we experienced no issues. Now my oldest is 14 years old and looks even older, and it’s all starting.”

Through the first contact service, victims receive emotional first aid and can be advised on how to proceed, for instance if it’s recommended to alert the authorities and how to do it. Volunteers step up all the time, offering their time and their expertise. “We even have professionals like lawyers and psychologists.” The offers for help and support for the initiative continuously flow in “We were surprised to received several accounts of support. People felt less alone in this. When we started this, it felt like an avalanche.”

“We gave a name to an issue that was covered in silence.”

Mamme Per La Pelle started building a database of these reports to collect experiences and statistics on racial discrimination and attacks in Italy.

Another domain of action for the association are events to spread the message of inclusion and valuable diversity. The young association has already won a couple of big challenges in that regard.  The first successful event they organised was the photography exhibition ‘One family, all colours’ (“Una famiglia, tutti i colori”) with the support of renowned artists like Tom Watson and Francesco Guerrera. “We recruited several adoptive families and he created the portraits. Guerrera hand-drew stories on top. The message was, who better than a multicultural adoptive family can teach you about inclusion?”

“If my chocolate-colored child calls me, a pink woman, mom… what greater love can there be?”

The exhibition was launched on February, 26th 2019 in Milan and was a huge success. “We received requests from all over Italy and it will now go on tour. It will tour in Bari, Palermo, Florence, Rome, and more. That was our official visual introduction to the world.”

Mamme Per La Pelle was also a board member in planning People2March, the phenomenal response to a racist manifestation supported by the Italian government few months before. The latter, called “Italian people first” (#primagliitaliani) was held in Rome on December 8th, 2018 and gathered around 40 thousands participants. People2March, taking place in Milan on March, 2nd 2019, witnessed 250 thousands taking part under the slogan “People first” (#primalepersone). Mamme Per La Pelle opened the march with a banner saying “The world we want is a story in full colours”, held by adoptive and multicultural families. Adriana remembers that day, “It was like seeing the entire world in a street. It was a powerful message”

The association has ambitious plans for the future, starting by kicking off local chapters to expand their network. “We are trying to build a national network of mothers, through local chapters. We want to promote inclusion, diversity, cultural richness. We are launching several activities.”

Since the best medicine against racism is education, they have a project ready to launch in schools. Adriana says, “School is the forefront of society, a classroom is a scale representation of the world. We need to teach that diversity is always valuable.
“The project will pilot in May 2019 in two selected schools and hopefully will be adopted by many more throughout Italy in the following school year. The project called “Ugualmente diversi” (“Equally diverse”) includes several initiatives, depending on the group’s size and the kids’ age. One activity is an open dialogue forum moderated by an expert. During the discussion some kids have a chance to speak out about their experiences with bullying. Other sections use creativity and art, like watching and discussing movies, theatre and dance workshops, and more. The events, centred on the topic of inclusion, can be one-off or regular.

I have no doubt Mamme Per La Pelle will give a powerful contribution to change the perception of diversity in Italy. My hope is to see a similarly strong response in other countries around Europe, including Finland, to racism and intolerance. I firmly believe most people share the vision that diversity is valuable, and every person on this planet has a right to human dignity and equal opportunities.

Disclaimer: the interview to Adriana Pumpo was carried out in Italian language. Her words were translated into English to the best of my ability, but may carry the risk to slightly distort the original message. The interviewee is not responsible for this.

The post Italian mothers have a powerful response to racism: Mamme Per La Pelle appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

My guest today is Kasia aka Kathy, who is currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark with her family, she is the founder of Active Action a company that facilitates workshops for Expat spouses/partners and provides consulting services. Kathy is also a writer and contributes on a regular basis to The International Denmark.

Kasia  was born in Poland, and due to very difficult times in the 80’s her parents decided to leave their homeland and go to USA. There, Kasia spent her formative years until her twenties when she decided  to go back to Poland, which she never really left behind. While living and working In Poland, she met her husband, who interestingly comes from a culturally blended family. Kasia moved to Denmark, where they settled and started a family.  Kasia’s  journey is a fascinating example of exploration of cultures as well as self-determination.

Can you share an overview of your background?

I was born in Poland, my parents are both Polish. Life just takes us on all these journeys. For my parents, it was what happened in Poland: the political changes and life itself made them think about what they wanted for their family. That, took us on a journey first to Germany and then to the United States as political refugees. From the age of 10 to 23 I lived in Chicago. I always felt a very strong tie to Poland, it was really, really such strong pull I had. Maybe it was because I had good memories as a child, I was very close with my grandparents. Because we started moving around when I was a child,  I am a Cross Cultural Adult, a Re-pat and an Expat, all in one.

You were in Germany for how long?

It was a year and a half, but I was very lucky in the sense of schools and teachers that I met. In Germany, I went to a special class for international kids. It was a small class, about 20 of us, with all sorts of international backgrounds. We had a great teacher, her job was to teach us German so that we could actually enter the German schools. I learned German in less than a year. When I found out that I could go to a German school, we got our visas and we moved to the US. Once again I had to start all over…

How did your family communicate?

My parents were quite strict with speaking Polish. When I became fluent in English I thought, this is great, now I can speak it also at home. My parents said no no no. They kept Polish as the family language. I’m very thankful because I had friends whose parents were more lenient  and left the mother tongue language behind to practice English. This of course had consequences.

My parents were very good about giving me a strong cultural base. We kept to our Polish traditions for example, celebrating the holidays in a traditional way. It wasn’t easy because our family was back in Poland, and for a long time the holidays were almost a sad thing. We couldn’t visit because at that time communism was raging in Poland. If we were to go back, we wouldn’t be able to leave again. I think all of us felt nostalgia and missed our families so, we often celebrated holidays like Christmas and Easter with other Polish families.

Did your friends belong to multicultural families or were they well rooted in the American identity?

It was mixed, American as well as some first generation kids. I had 2 very, very good friends who were also Polish. Then I had some Mexican and German friends who were first generation. For them it was it was similar since they were speaking Spanish at home, ate Mexican food, celebrated different holidays.

The United States allowed me to experience so many cultures and religion. I am grateful for growing up with such a diverse group of friends. I was always very proud of my traditions and my background.

When you were 23, you went back to Poland. Why?

When I finished high school, I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to do in life. Initially, I was interested in becoming a physical therapist, there was an opportunity to study physical therapy in Poland and after obtaining the degree go back to the United States. That was the original plan, but then my dad fell sick and after a while my parents decided to move back to Poland for him to easily access medical care.

It would be about a year before they could move away from US. In the meantime, I decided to change my studies and  pursued Cultural Studies in Poland.

When you moved to Poland, did you find yourself proficient in Polish? Speaking Polish at home compared to the university vocabulary must have been different, was it hard?

It was my first huge challenge. I remember when I stepped into the university speaking to my new colleagues was fine. But we went into a class and it was called the Sociology of Culture. The professor started speaking, and I thought, I don’t understand anything. I remember that I was actually trying to take the notes in English because at that time I was more comfortable with academic language in English. I thought, Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? I bought myself a Polish – Polish dictionary and I spent so much time just preparing and going over notes. I had friends that would help me out and they would give me their notes. The first year of my studies was a big struggle. I had to focus a lot on filling this gap.

You were studying in Poland, what happened next?

While studying, I started working. I was able to do a lot of translations, working as an interpreter. I found out there was a school for translators where you could get a diploma and become a certified translator. I was studying two different things at the same time, while doing a bit of work on the side. When I got my Master degrees in Cultural Studies and as a certified translator, I was hired as a teacher. This was another challenge because it was not something I had done before. My first teaching job was at a big corporation, a Portuguese company that had opened a chain of stores in Poland. I really enjoyed teaching and working with people. Later, I opened my own business, teaching corporate English. I was very busy and worked long hours. I had a nice apartment, I had a nice social life, but I was alone. And, you know, when you put it out there things happen. I met my Danish husband in Poland shortly after. Things happened quite fast, we were pretty sure that we wanted to be together. It was difficult because his background is in construction, engineering and architecture. For him to be in Poland would have been very difficult because he would have to know the Polish building laws and speak fluent Polish. We thought that it would be better if I moved to Denmark and that’s what we did. And it was the hardest thing ever.

How come?

Well, first and foremost I had a lot of expectations. Looking back, they were not at all realistic. I think it was typical and something many internationals/expats struggle with. The first year, we travelled back and forth – the joys of a long distance relationship. You never get a clear picture of everyday life when you are in a holiday mode. The reality was very different from my expectations.

We started our lives in Odense, the third largest city in Denmark. However, 10 years ago this city was very different from what it is today. Back then, there was not a lot of interest in the Internationals and what they were struggling with. It was tough and I felt alone. Through Danish classes I was able to meet some wonderful friends. I also decided to study in Odense because I felt completely burnt out and wanted to do something for myself. Studying in Denmark was great, but I did not meet as many people as I hoped. My fellow students were a bit younger and in a different place in their lives.

The most difficult time came around when I finished studies and I started looking for work. I was looking for a specific job that would fit, my basic knowledge of Danish, my qualifications and was in the city where I was living. When I arrived in Denmark, I went from working all the time to my husband being the sole breadwinner. This was a drastic change that made me feel like I was not contributing. Living in a new country with a new language – not an easy one is hard. When you add to it unemployment , it gets even more tricky.

When I started looking for work, I thought it would be easy: I was highly educated, had experience and spoke a few languages. It was probably a year and a half of trying to find work. I went through all the whys. Why don’t they want to hire me? What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? I mean, it was a very negative mindset, and I was heading for severe depression. Then my husband and I came to a conclusion that we would give it six months, and if I didn’t get hired we would move to Poland. Sometimes, we have to look at things in a different perspective.

I started to apply for a lot of different jobs and actually started listening to the advice people were giving me. They told me I was doing things “the Polish way”. Some people told me to visit potential workplaces in person. The first one I went to, I got an interview right away. In the end I landed a job, which I had not held previously, but I had the skills that were needed for this position. I think it is important to be aware that as expats we often have to step out of our comfort zones. I began working as a Marketing Specialist in an International company. I was very happy to finally be employed. So much so, that I was willing to commute to the other side of Denmark. We eventually moved, so that both of us had  the same commuting distance in different directions. I was there for over 2 years, and then I got pregnant. When my year of maternity leave was coming to an end, I started feeling like I didn’t want to go back to work. So I gave up the job that I searched for so long. I stayed home with my daughter for three years. While I was on maternity leave I founded an international moms’ group. I really wanted to have other women who are internationals around me. I felt a need to have like minded women who could relate to one another, discuss raising kids, what challenges we were going through, especially as expats without family support.

When we signed our daughter up for preschool, my husband received a job offer in Copenhagen. His parents live there, and we thought it was a good time to make a transition. Once again, It was my time again to think about what I would like to do. What a gift, to be able to find something you love and call it work.  I knew I wanted to be my own boss again and I wanted to help other internationals so, I founded Active Action.

What does Active Action do exactly?

Active Action supports companies, organisations and institutions in order to increase attraction and specifically retention. Through our workshops, programs and consultations we provide the tools which enable Internationals, their employers and communities to find mutual understanding and solutions. Active Action is all about smoother transitions, acknowledgement, raising cultural awareness and providing solutions for each International and their families, for the employers and employees, for the municipalities and organisations welcoming newcomers.

Basically, Active Action is all about supporting Expat Spouses/Partners so that they have smoother transitions into a new host country and that they obtain the tools and knowledge to lead thriving lives abroad.

When you do the workshops, who are your customers?

My customers range from international companies, universities that hire large amounts expats and internationals to municipalities and embassies. I also provide consulting services.

Going back to your family, what languages do you speak at home?

My husband and I speak English to each other. My husband speaks Danish to our daughter and I speak Polish to her. I understand Danish and my husband has taken Polish classes, he understands most of what I say. Understanding one another’s mother tongue is a huge advantage and this way no one is ever excluded from conversations.

You are native in two languages. Did it make it easier for you to learn Danish? Does it affect the way you express yourself?

Take for example my name. When I came to Denmark, I would use my Polish name but people would just butcher it with the worst pronunciations. I started using my American name, which is Kathy, much easier. But honestly, when people ask me, I say you can choose whichever you want, they are parallel for me. I feel like I have a split personality because I feel equally comfortable in both. My whole life I was kind of two people, my Polish self at home, with my family, but then I also always had the international me, when using English.

Learning Danish as an adult was actually quite difficult. I don’t have any difficulty expressing myself in English and Polish, now Danish is a different story…

Overall, would you say being raised in a multicultural environment was an asset for you? Why?

Growing up in a multicultural environment was one of the greatest gifts I have received in my life. It has shaped me into the person I am today. It made me interested in different cultures, languages, cuisines, travel and people. I also learned to communicate, be friends with, work with and live among various nations and religions. I am open, tolerant and respectful of people and curious about the world. I think it was wonderful to grow up and have friends from all over the world. I think that is partially the reason why I live abroad myself. Now, my husband and I are able to give this gift to our daughter.

No doubt Kasia will be up for the challenge of helping expat spouses integrating in the Danish job market, thanks to her personal experience, professional expertise, and incredible drive. Once again, it’s inspiring to witness the openness that derives from getting to know new places and cultures. If you want to follow Kasia’s work and story, like Active Action Facebook page or follow her on Instagram.

The post Growing up in a multicultural family. Parallel identities: Kasia’s story appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

“It all started when they found the train…”. What is the concept behind your app and how did the idea start?

The Brain Train is essentially me combining all my passions into a game that my younger self would have thoroughly enjoyed.
Growing up, I loved encyclopaedias – especially ones related to oceans and dinosaurs. I read them over and over until their spines were worn and their pages faded. At the time, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, it would have been a toss up between a marine biologist or a palaeontologist!
I also had a deep love for Usborne puzzle adventure storybooks – books with vividly illustrated puzzles built into the storyline. I built up quite a remarkable collection of them!

Probably not common at my age, I found myself preferring to browse through Discovery Channel, National Geographic and Animal Planet first, before “settling” for cartoons if I didn’t find anything interesting. My family calls me Nature Boy till this day!
Now, you probably think that I was the model child all parents wish they had. Unfortunately for my parents, I also discovered the joys of video games. All these interests fell to the wayside as video games outcompeted all other ‘productive’ passions and hobbies. Thankfully, my parents managed to keep me in check, but I do look back on all the hundreds of lost hours with some regrets on how much more I could have done and learnt.
Which brings me to the inspiration for The Brain Train. Parents these days have it even worse. Their kids are getting exposed to screens at a much younger age, whether they like it or not. Books are losing to screens. It’s inevitable. And then it hit me, let’s embrace this new age and use technology to our advantage. Let’s create a game that parents would approve of, and more importantly, actually benefit our kids. And so we have The Brain Train.

You have an incredible diverse team of creators, developers, and more, all scattered around the world. How did you get in touch in the first place and what working values make you stick together?

That’s one of the things I love about this experience. It’s getting to know and work with such an amazing, talented group of people. Initially, I hoped to work with local talent, but I soon realised that I was missing out on the wealth of creativity, experience and brilliance from across the continents. It took resourcefulness to make this dream happen; Google and Skype took care of the rest.
I started out without programming experience, so my journey began with lots of reading and research about the art of creating video games. That being said, much of this journey could not be learnt from a book and required plenty of trials and errors, or learning from the specialists themselves. I am a medical doctor by profession; my background in science and research combine well with the team’s experience in art, animation and game development – all of which are essential in creating this multi-faceted game.
In terms of values that I look for in a team member, integrity stands out from the rest. I have full faith in them giving their best efforts, and I firmly believe in fulfilling my end of the bargain no matter what. In addition to this, the most important quality I look for in a team member is flexibility. I tend to have a clear big picture in mind, but working out the finer details requires some trial and error. This ability to change direction at the drop of a hat will be essential to our success, especially in a field as fluid as education. It helps that we are perfectionists here and won’t stop till we get it right!

How many people are currently involved in the project?

At present, not including myself, we have five artists/animators, eight programmers, one writer, one editor… and growing!

What is the target age of users?

Anyone above the age of 6! The younger ones can enjoy it with parents reading the story and facts to them.

What languages will the app be in? Will it be accessible to pre-schoolers?

English at the moment, but we plan on translating the game to other languages if there’s a demand. Furthermore, we will be giving our game to non-profit organisations and disadvantaged children all over the world, so we definitely have plans to translate the game to other languages as required.

What is the development timeline, when will we be able to play with The Brain Train?

Our Kickstarter has started on the 29^th of January 2019 and based on our estimates, we’re looking at an App store launch date of end 2019!

Will there be a beta-testing programme, if someone is eager to start playing?

Yes! Each Kickstarter backer will eventually get a copy of the prototype (beta version) to test and provide feedback. This prototype will be regularly updated with more gameplay elements to test as deemed required.

Can you anticipate any details of the game, for instance, will interaction among gamers be possible? Is there a rewarding system inside the game?

This game is planned to be the first episode of many, and each episode will be designed as a stand-alone. Each episode is essentially a full complete adventure – no cliff-hangers, we promise!

For this first episode, the game is designed to be played individually. Gameplay that allows interaction between players requires a large back-end database server to store each player’s progress, which is too expensive for now… but that doesn’t mean we aren’t open to it in the future.

For now, the gameplay goes a little like this:
The player follows along with the characters on their incredible adventure, solving visual puzzles with the characters along the way to progress through the storyline. Depending on the environment that their adventure takes the characters through, the player will be able to interact with elements within a scene and learn fun facts about them. For example, if the Brain Train characters were travelling through an underwater scene, the player could then tap on a shark or an anemone and learn fun facts about them. Each fact will be paired with a Nat Geo-like photograph of that element in real life, giving the player something to relate to in the real world. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the variety of environments (and therefore the variety of things) players can learn about. Imagine an adventure to space, or back in time to the dinosaurs or the pyramids, or even an adventure through the modern world and picking up practical life skills like the best way to do household chores, finances, first aid and home fixes!

Will the content of the game grow in time or has the adventure a finale?

We have big plans for The Brain Train. One episode can only fit in so much content, so we will be spreading out the learning topics across more episodes to come. We want to create episode after episode for as long as we are able to financially sustain it. We hope that The Brain Train will be more than just a game; it’s a whole universe for children to experience and dream about. It’s all very grand and exciting!

What makes The Brain Train unique?

Academic-related children’s educational apps are a dime a dozen, all aimed at improving a child’s chance at academic success in school. However, here at Thinkofmagic Studios, we believe in teaching children how to not only survive the game of life, but to get a head start and thrive. We are firm believers in the benefits of general knowledge, while the importance of learning essential life skills is self-explanatory. There are very few apps out there with a focus on general knowledge, and those that do, do not package it in a fun and engaging way. Much like throwing an encyclopaedia without pictures to a child, he won’t read it… these days, even a beautifully illustrated encyclopaedia doesn’t cut it. It’s the time of The Brain Train.

***

Big thanks to my guest Caleb and to all his team for sharing their motivation and efforts in my blog. If you want to support them and make The Brain Train really possible, go ahead and support their Kickstarter campaign as a funder or simply shout out to your friends about it. You can follow Thinkofmagic Studios and The Brain Train on Facebook. Looking forward to playing it with my kids!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like:
Let’s get more girls into coding | My interview to R for #codinggirls
April’s favorites: empowering kids & time to relax
Stressed parent? You need a FamilyBoost

The post Learn through play: introducing The Brain Train appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

We reconnected not long ago and I found out that she had radically changed her career and her lifestyle. We met over lunch and I got so hooked on her inspirational story that I asked if I could share it here on my blog.

Meet Stefania. (Pic: Stefania Yoga & Wellness)

Stefania lives with her Finnish husband in Helsinki. They have two lively young children who speak Italian and Finnish. Until last year, she used to work in sales in a design company, struggling to balance a full-time job and family – I know very well what that’s about! She didn’t feel fulfilled at her workplace, but couldn’t easily see any alternative. Then one day, after a snowboarding accident, she was forced on a sick leave and got some time to think what her next move would be. The stress she accumulated in the previous years and her health issues put her moods down, but she found genuine solace in practicing yoga. She questioned her lifestyle and forced herself to define what her life purpose truly was. What was her place in the universe? This part fascinates me terribly, as I recently did the same thing and I know how deeply liberating the passage is. Not long ago I read the fantastic book by Rachel Hollis Girl Wash Your Face (if you haven’t yet, log in to your Amazon account and buy it, I’ll wait for you). Rachel does a great job at inspiring and empowering fellow women and she always says write it down or say it out loud. There’s an incredible power in formulating in words what your goal or purpose is. You may need help in pinpointing it – I know I did – because it may be buried under loads and loads of negative thoughts, undermining comments, anxiety, feminine natural tendency of self-sacrifice. But once you find your life purpose, once you say the words and they click perfectly, you cannot go back. It may take some more time adjusting your life to pursue it – my current phase – but for the first time you know exactly what direction to head to and what is side-tracking you.

Pic: Stefania Yoga and Wellness

Back to Stefania’s story, she reacted promptly and embarked on a life adventure. She left her secure job, kicked-off her trainings as a yoga teacher, a nutrition and health coach, and started her own company. Beside that, she started living by what she was preaching. She modelled her own lifestyle based on what she was learning, began living mindfully and empowering others to do the same. We recently became “Headspace buddies” and poke each other to make sure we both meditate daily. I have attended her yoga class Gentle Flow at the studio Saga Yoga and I loved it. Her calm voice guides you, her warm sense of humour reminds you not to take life too seriously. Before attending her class, I was nervous. Yoga sounded like something a “pregnant-in-heels” kind of mom would do, while I am in sweatpants on my best days. In her class, I didn’t feel out of place. It was intimate, relaxed, and I loved that she gave us the opportunity to adapt every exercise to our needs (and flexibility!). When I shared more about my health issues, she gifted me with precious advice and allowed me to transition from a powerless and passive state, to feel I still had a chance to be in charge of my body. Her holistic and individual approach can really shift the game.

Stefania currently has a regular mother-baby yoga class at Bay Helsinki on Mondays 9:30-10:30 for new mothers. I think back of when I had my daughter and I would have loved an activity where I would meet other moms and where I would be able to feel in charge of my body as well as take care of it. She also offers classes to corporate clients. Think how amazing it would be to break or conclude your work day with a hour yoga! You also have your team day activity served on silver plate here. She works also as an individual health coach. Her clients simply want to feel good, maybe they have some small joint pain they cannot get rid of, or they don’t feel well and don’t know where to start to feel better.

Mother and baby yoga class. Pic: Stefania Yoga and Wellness

I am so impressed and inspired by how Stefania took charge of her life and did not simply turn her head the other way. That’s what I wish also for myself and, frankly, for all of us who don’t feel fulfilled with their lives but are too confused or scared to do something about it. It’s never too late to take ownership of you life!

If you feel Stefania can help you, you can reach her through her website, her Facebook page or her Instagram account (follow her, her posts are uplifting!). You can also attend one of her classes at Saga Yoga (maybe we’ll meet there) and Bay Helsinki.

Many thanks to Stefania for allowing me to share her story. I hope you will find inspiration in it like I did.

The post From design to yoga and well-being: my friend Stefania’s story appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

(continues from part 1)

Paola: If you decide to parent in a foreign language, does it have to be your native language?

Soile: There is a very strong consensus among researchers that parents should parent in their native language. When we parent in our native language we are not parenting in a foreign language, no matter where we live. Our native language is not foreign to us. That is what matters in bilingual parenting.

My professional opinion is that it is a very bad idea to attempt parenting in a foreign language, meaning in a non-native language. Usually people attempt parenting in a non-native language because they want their child to gain the cognitive and linguistic advantages of bilingualism. This is extremely unlikely to happen. It is good to remember that it doesn’t necessarily work even for people who attempt to parent in their native language while living abroad.

Furthermore foreign languages learned at a later age are often learned to a far higher standard than languages learned as native bilingual’s weaker languages in early childhood. This is a tabu and many bilingual parents will be angry that I say so. However, anyone of us can verify in our local language minority community by comparing adults’ foreign languages to native bilinguals weaker languages. It becomes pretty soon obvious that the majority of foreign language learners easily beat the majority of native bilinguals.

Keeping it up in a foreign language would be very hard anyway as children grow. For all these reasons, please believe me, it is best to parent in our native language, for reasons of love and life. And when you do, aim really high and put a huge effort into it.

P: Is success of bilingualism mainly about the language I use with my child?

S: Human children require almost twenty years of parental care. Such burden has to be share and that’s why human families are based on the relationship between two mature adults. The language the couple communicates in is the language that is the core of the entire family system.

If  the parents love each other in the  the language of the place where they live, it’s much harder to raise bilingual children. It is very different from the couple sharing the minority language, like in your family and in mine. In both our families the couple relationship is founded on Italian, while we live in Finland and in the UK respectively. .

Then there’s the whole family language: every family needs a language that brings the whole family together. Families that don’t have that have various emotional difficulties because there’s always one person who is going to be left out from the moments when the family feels togetherness.  

Then you have the siblings’ language. Children spend much more time talking and playing with each other than in one-to-one conversations with a parent. Sibling language is almost universally the local language. The language used by siblings   can change multiple times in the course of a lifetime. It can change literally within days when there is a shift in one child’s language balance If siblings use the minority language with each other you are doing extremely well. Keep it up.

Finally there is the language of individual parent-child relationships. It occupies a minor part of bilingual family communication time. At the same time that is where we make big progress and resolve problems. In bilingual family consultancy these one-to-one parenting moments are where most of the interventions I design for families take place.

P: Why do siblings  switch the language they use together?

S: It’s about what is the easiest language, for that particular combination of people in that particular moment. When two people interact, their language choice depends on several considerations, such as the speaker’s own language skills, the conversation partner’s language skills, situation, social expectations and habit.

The sibling the is private to the children. The only way we parents can influence the language choice  it is to support the minority language to develop very, very well for all children in the family

P: Since you are a sociologist, I want to go off script and ask you, what is the relationship between language and culture?

S: That’s a gigantic question, there’s a library about it. I want to tell a personal story from a teacher training situation. I was at a secondary school lecturing on migrant children in the classroom. One of the teachers challenged me saying, “Is it really necessary for these Pakistanis to know Urdu?”. Later in the same lesson we talked about a real case of a British kid who had grown up in Japan. The child was a Japanese native speaker and had poor English language skills, I was asking “Would this British kid be accepted?” and the same teacher said “Of course not, everyone would say he’s a foreigner”. So yes, you cannot understand a culture in any other way but in its own language.

P: I want to jump from here to another topic since many of my readers are parents who have adopted internationally. Even my own son was adopted from India. Is there value in teaching adopted children their birth language to complete their identity?

S: This is a serious one. I would like to note for the record that I am not competent to advice on adoption and adoptive families. I can only offer general reflections based on my understanding of multilingual and multicultural families. I suppose it depends. We would be  looking at how old is this child and what is his or her current level in the native language. One should go through proper family consultancy on an individual basis to think it through.

Should I (re-)introduce my adopted son to his birth country’s language?

However, there are  some studies about Korean children adopted to France. t was found that in the adoption process children lost their native language Korean and they acquired native French, which is not to be taken for granted. They were fully switching to a new native language. Later some of those children in their teens tried to go and learn Korean in a classroom and found absolutely no benefit from the fact that they had been Korean native monolingual as young children.

It’s hard to see how the adoptive family would have the necessary resources and linguistic competence to support a  functional bilingual language development in their adoptive child’s birth language. Would it be a benefit or a burden to the child?

From the point of view of any  child, it means much more to have one meaningful person in their life speaking a language than being bombarded with a truckload of stimulation. Learning a language is about loving someone. Given that, in the case of an adopted child if there were  someone who is genuinely part of the family or a close friend who shares the culture of origin, then it would be fantastic and I think it would be beneficial to have that relationship. Still it would be unlikely to lead to a very high level of bilingualism.  

However, it would take huge commitment from the family and from this someone. It would need to be a long-term relationship, someone who really keeps on being meaningful to that child for decades.

P: I would like to ask you about Bilingual Potential. What is it and what services do you provide through it?

S: Bilingual Potential is an ethical business that applies my PhD research for the benefit of bilingual and multilingual people.   

In 2009 I won a grant from the Kone foundation and I could study bilingual families full time for four years. What a treat. I wanted to find out why is it that most  families struggle while some seem to come miraculous to do extremely well. I followed some ordinary bilingual families with school-aged children longitudinally for 2 years observing them in community settings and visiting them in their homes where we carried out recordings of natural family talk and did some assessment tasks.

That study changed my understanding of bilingualism entirely. I discovered quite a lot about the everyday social processes through which a language is lost or kept going. I thought, this cannot be hidden in an academic publication. I had previously done lots of community projects, I had  been working with schools, at that point I started doing it directly with families.

What parents learn about bilingualism can truly affect the outcome. From 2011 I started working as a consultant for families, face to face or via Skype. I developed five different specific leading methodologies tailored for bilingual children, corresponding to five big key problems where bilingual development usually fails.

At some point I decided, that this was going to be my actual job. In summer of 2015 I founded Bilingual Potential as a company. Bilingual Potential is an ethical business dedicated to advancing every child’s right the languages of their parents as defined in the Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I do Bilingual Cake training for parents and teachers. I do private family consultancy, the most of all to activate speech in minority languages that children do not speak. I do consultancy for organisations schools or businesses, or corporate seminars for international companies with a globally mobile or international workforce.

Soile’s book Bilingual Cake will soon be published. Follow her on Facebook!

The Bilingual Cake book is coming out in the near future. Throughout the rest of 2018 news about the Bilingual Cake book and information about new services will be appearing on the Bilingual Potential website.

P: Potentially some of my readers may be interested. Can you give some details?

S. I will focus here on family services with private clients. Most bilingual family consultancies happen via Skype. I have clients from different countries in Europe, as well as in USA, Canada, , Australia. Sometimes parents seek advice right at the beginning, with the first baby. These consultancies consist of just one appointment where we talk about starting out as a bilingual family, making considered language choices and setting up routines that stay functional for a long time. If parents want to go into a little more depth we do a training on how to interact with a baby to support language development.

However the most common type of consultancy is a bilingual speech activation. This is my speciality. This is intimately connected to the life changing discoveries from my PhD project. Most of my clients have a child who has never begun to speak one of the family languages, or has stopped speaking it. We bring that language to life.

There are currently two bilingual speech activation packages. One is for toddlers aged 18-30 months focussing on vocabulary development and transition to two-word sentences in both native languages. The other is for children aged 3-5 with a normal healthy language development in their dominant language, who have a fading weaker language or do not currently speak their weaker language. We always aim for turning this stark unbalance into two native like languages.

Speech activation consultancies work like a pulse. We have an initial series of appointments. Then we have a break and many families return for long-term client relationship where periodically we do a new intensive spurt to always keep working to achieve two native languages as children grow and the goalposts keep moving fast forward.

Then there are the multilingual consultancies for families with more than two languages, multiliteracy consultancies for children with two well developed languages at ages 5-7, speech activations at ages 6 and older, and complex cases.

In complex cases children have emotional, social or developmental problems that often require working with other professionals such as Speech and Language Therapist, Paediatrician or a Developmental Psychologist. These cases tend to involve language delay also in the child’s stronger language.

Employers can also buy family consultancy services in bulk for their international staff.

***
If you feel your bilingual family may need an intervention or you want to lay good grounds for successful bilingual parenting, Soile is the expert you are looking for. I left the interview enlightened, wiser, and fascinated by how wide and colourful her knowledge is. Soile is very active in divulgation and shares plenty of interesting resources on her LinkedIn profile, her Facebook page, and her website. Thank you Soile, for the enriching conversation and for helping my readers in their bilingual family journey.

Note: Soile’s portraits in this post are artwork of Eva Slusarek. 

The post Bilingualism in children | Interview to Soile Pietikainen | part 2 appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

Paola: Maybe you could start from introducing yourself.

Soile: My name is Soile Pietikainen, I’m a sociologist specialised in bilingual family interaction. I’ve been working at this for about 23 years altogether. When I came to London for the first time in 1992, I worked as an au pair for a family where there was a British dad and a Finnish mom. They had children aged 6 and 8. Their mother had always been at home as a housewife. They needed an au pair, because she had gotten a job. She had always spoken only Finnish to her children, she’d been very consistent with it, but her children didn’t speak any Finnish at all. Literally.

P: Really?

S: Yes, that’s very common. But back then, I didn’t know that just a small minority of children learns the language only one parent speaks to them. I had grown up in a small town in Finland in Northern Savo and hadn’t met more than 5 foreigners in my entire life at that point. I had read of bilingual people only on a magazine talking about diplomats’ families. The journalist was admiringly talking ‘Oh these children who speak all these languages’, I was quite envious. Then I went to London to this family and I understood there’s something else to this. Lots of families had the same situation regardless of language: there were many foreign parents who had been speaking a language to the children and the children didn’t speak it, and by the time they started primary school almost all of the families had entirely given up. Back then I found it interesting, I was curious, but I didn’t really bother that much until five years later. In ’97 I was studying for sociology major in Torino (Italy) and focusing on sociology of migration. I was one of two foreign students and we were instructed to do our third year dissertation research on the immigrants of our own ethnicity. This left me with more questions than answers.

P: So this all started twenty years ago…

S: Yes, I became aware of this problem in ’92 and I became seriously aware of this in ’97 and that’s when I started properly studying academic research into bilingualism.

P: During my parents’ generation, general public knew that bilingualism was dangerous for the kids, for the child development? They’d say, stick to one language because kids need to know one well. If you mix more than one, kids are confused.  Is this true now? And what did research say at the time?

S: If we look back to the linguistics of early 20th century, studies were generally not empirical in the as we define empirical results today. They were based on data and often on longitudinal family case studies of individual people and lots of it was speculation. So the evidence that was chosen for discussions by early linguists about bilingualism seemed to indicate that children would be confused by two languages. These ideas persist in the public debate and in people’s minds for a very good reason: there are real bilingualism phenomena that at surface level look exactly like confusion, but they are not. I wrote about it recently on LinkedIn with a headline: Bilingual Parenting Q&A – Are children confused by two languages?  

But then we go into politics, I’m a sociologist after all, so everything in society has a power struggle going on. In medieval Europe the international language was Latin and the Catholic church was the linguistic powerbroker before the European nations as we know them were born. For centuries it was known that men of the elite needed multiple languages and they were actively taught multiple languages. Women of the elite were not because one language is quite enough for a woman, she’d become too powerful if she had money, status and languages. That is why it was also better make sure her money was handled by a man. For poor people it was different. If you go back 400 years  Europe was populated of many languages, like Africa or Asia today. There were a huge number of regional languages with names we have never heard of. Trade required speaking the languages of other regions.  

When the concepts of nation state and borders were born, there was a power issue, because the state wanted people to have just one language, the one that the king commanded. And later in order to introduce the factory production model of goods during the industrial revolution, you would have to be able to control workers in one language, hence the entire mass schooling system introduced in late 19th century was geared towards destroying linguistic diversity, on creating one national language so people would have an identity attached to the power of the state  and could work in large mass production workplaces

Now we fast-forward to the 20th century. The push to a monolingual nation state intensified because of the increasing democracy through universal suffrage, first for men, then for women. Suffrage and schooling lead to a widening readership of newspapers. Then along came broadcast media. All these large scale social phenomena reduce linguistic diversity. The same is now happening globally because of the Internet.  In the first half of the 20th century there was a general idea that bilingualism would cause complications to children.

But in 1960s there was a turning point when in Canada, there were some studies that were done with a modern type of empirical research framework. Those studies were suddenly sharing that in fact bilingual children had advantages over monolingual ones. This was big news and marked the start modern bilingualism research.

P: What kind of advantages?

S: I never talk about the advantages of bilingualism, because no one should do bilingual parenting  because of its potential advantages. Bilingualism should be motivated by life and love. Too many times I have helped people who have done damage to their child with an unnecessary bilingualism experiment motivated by seeking the cognitive or linguistic advantages.

If things are not working out, parents, please seek help before problems accumulate. The earlier we can correct unwise parenting choices the better. Correcting the course of action si a sign of courage and integrity. Don’t hesitate to seek competent help.

P: Why should parents introduce kids to more than one language?

S: It’s a different thing to teach children foreign languages and a different thing to parent in our native  language. This is an important distinction. Teaching children foreign languages is not bilingual parenting.

What makes a good reason for a child  to be parented bilingually? It is that your life has more than one language. There is a limited number of social functions that require a person to develop bilingual competence in different languages. These are:

• Both parents’ native languages for parent-child relationships
• The language that bring our nuclear family together
• The language in which the child’s entire schooling will take place
• The dominant language of the society of long-term residence

We need to be responsible and set priorities in parenting. Especially with 3 or more languages and especially when families move between countries it is crucial that at least one language develops to a native like proficiency level and remains a lifelong cornerstone of our child’s life.

In 1997 I had an encounter in Italy that  marked me. I interviewed a man in his twenties, son of Italian and Finnish parents. He happened to have the exact same language mix as I do: Finnish-Italian-English trilingual with French and Swedish as foreign languages. I switched language three times during the interview to find  language in which he would be at his ease. I realised he wasn’t proficient in any of our three shared main languages. He spoke all of them like a foreigner.

I remember thinking, oh my god, this person is not going to feel at home anywhere. Every person in the entire world is going to treat him as a foreigner. He is never going to be relaxed and be himself in any language. It was utterly heart-breaking and I thought, I cannot allow this to happen to anyone, definitely not to my own children.

P: To summarise, parents should be careful not to introduce too many languages, but focus on cultivating those for which there is value in the life of the child, and especially target one for them to become native speakers in.

S: Yes, absolutely. It is good to aim very high with up to 2-3 languages if they all are genuinely necessary, but one language stills needs to rule supreme. Challenges also vary from family to family. For instance, challenges for an immigrant family permanently living somewhere, are different from those of an expat family moving every few years without integrating into any one society.

In the stable migrant situation, strongest language is the local language and the risk is  minority language loss.

Whereas for globally mobile  families, the main risk linguistically speaking is multiple underdeveloped languages. In such situation it’s much less likely that the family language is lost because that’s the only anchor representing continuity and national identity. However, the family language needs to develop into a fully developed native language with the kind of literacy, intellectual, and artistic development that you’d wish for. This takes far more than speaking the language in everyday life.

The situation where you have two immigrant parents with the same native language, the chances of succeeding with bilingualism are the best.

P: If I think of my own situation, I expect the real challenges to come with school age and with me having to teach my children how to write and read in the minority language. How to tackle those?

S: You are on the ball. You will need to go through a process of learning to read in two languages. One parent needs to take responsibility for the biliteracy learning over about 2-3 years at the beginning of primary school. But that is another long story. Let’s start from the step that comes before.

When we come to the age of about 5 or 6, literacy becomes a huge thing. Now, literacy development doesn’t start with learning to read, but it starts with hearing books and that can start at age two months. Hearing written language read to you is absolutely a cornerstone of bilingual development. If you take a picture book for the age group of 3 to 5, it often has more formal language than many  adult TV programs. It has more advanced vocabulary and grammar sophistication.

Literature is absolutely essential and you can think of it as divided into three types of written texts: proper poetry for children, fact books, and narrative prose. You need to use them every day, we’re looking at multiple readings sessions every day, always ending before the child is  fed up. Never insist on reading when children are not receptive. End with a kiss and a hug and let them hop away happy. They will love to be read to over and over again.

When you come to the age of about six, monolingual children have developed the  foundations of their spoken language in the native language. From age six to age twenty, there is a major language development that happens because of schooling and literacy. That’s where bilingual families often really underestimate the situation. They think that if the child speaks at home, then that’s going to be enough for native language. For that we need all of that intellectual and literacy development that comes from school and we start that with reading to children from very early age and it continues with learning to read and write in two languages.

P: How do you facilitate that?

S: It’s about books. . I got in regular touch with second-hand book stores in Finland and I got quite recent books in Finnish. It was a good deal for me because I got an enormous discount and I was able to diversify on topics. You can think of it as  substituting in your own home the entire society.

For instance, in this reading thing, what really matters is that the time when the children are sitting in your lap becomes the best time of their day. Then the book content becomes interesting.

With my kids, the big jump in literature happened with the Harry Potter books. We were reading one chapter per night and alternate with other kinds of books. The Harry Potter books were used like a treat to introduce other books. And of course I totally loved reading them!

We have also been quite active in the Finnish community in London for many, many years. It’s great if you have meaningful human relationships with other people. Again this is an important distinctions: we need to differentiate between weak and strong network ties. Exposure to a community using the minority language has virtually no positive impact on any individual child’s bilingualism. Meaningful deep human relationships with individual people who use the minority language has a big impact.

P: Is it effective to expose children to other languages? For instance, does showing your child cartoons in French contribute to teaching French?

S: Remember that distinction between foreign language teaching and bilingual parenting? This is an example of foreign language teaching. If a child with normal first language development watches videos or goes to a playgroup in a foreign language, that’s absolutely fine. It will not damage them in any way. They will experience what it is like not to understand a language. They will learn some meanings and practice producing new sounds.

It is important to understand that this will not lead to bilingualism. First and foremost because we only learn languages in meaningful two-way conversational interactions. This is well proven: you cannot learn a language from a screen. Good programmes can add a lot of value to a language that is already developing thanks to great conversational interaction and books being read to the child in real life reading sessions.

Will foreign language videos and playgroups benefit children’s foreign language learning in the long term? I don’t know. Recently I was looking for research evidence on this specific point, but could not find any. Colleagues specialised in early Second Language Learning could help. Based on what I know about Bilingual First Language Acquisition I would hazard a guess that the effect would be short lived. Children would forget within a few months after the activity stops.

In addition, there is anecdotal evidence from the bilingual family context that people who had a failed attempt at learning a parent’s native language during childhood, struggle more than adult foreign language learners  if later in adulthood they want to learn it properly. I have no idea if a similar risk might or might not apply to early foreign language learning. However, for such reason, I am not uncritically ecstatic about introducing languages early, without having structures in place to keep an incremental learning process going through childhood. . .

My current research project is about adults who grew up in bilingual families. When the book eventually comes out this experience of forgetting and trying to relearn a family language will be a major theme.

***
The final part of the interview can be found here. Stay tuned to find much more about bilingualism and bilingual parenting. To get in touch with Soile, visit her website or like her Facebook page.

Note: Soile’s portraits in this post are artwork of Eva Slusarek. 

The post Bilingualism in children | Interview to Soile Pietikainen | part 1 appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

Paola: Hi Anna, it’s great to meet you. Can you explain more about Nicehearts and its mission?

Anna: Nicehearts was founded in 2001. We have three big projects at the moment. The first is Wahva Nainen (“Strong woman”, red.) where we offer services to immigrant women, like helping with Kela (the government agency for social assistance, red.) or with the TE toimisto (public agency for employment, red.), helping with translating documents and official things, maybe with finding jobs and whatever the customer needs. Then we have a project for young girls aged 12 to 18 in Tikkurila (Vantaan Tyttöjen Tila, red.), where we give young girls a safe space where they can bake, watch movies or spend time. We offer sexual advice or help them with typical puberty issues. It’s focused on young girls of any background. Finally we have our big project “Neighbourhood Mothers”. The idea originated from Germany. For example the Berlin area is a big multicultural melting pot. There they started thinking about how to reach families and people who are not usually reached by the official government structures. The idea was to use women as a bridge between cultures. They would get trained as a Neighbourhood Mother to go back to their neighborhood and start to help other people and families in whatever they needed: children education, information about  the healthcare system and so on. We brought the idea to Finland with some variation. We organise 2 day training for Neighbourhood Mothers, then there’s a “practical trial” of about two months where people can try out things and organize events and engage and encourage their community, empower other women to participate and start to be actors.

Pic courtesy of Nicehearts.

P: Do you organise events or do the trained Neighbourhood Mothers?

A: We organise the training for the benefit of the woman who takes part, because maybe she has an idea in her mind she wants to bring to reality, so we help her with that. Then this  woman will start to have her own network and in the “practical phase” Nicehearts supports her. For example in building up the events she wants to organise. Ultimately the network can help the Neighbourhood Mother to  get employed somewhere because she is going out there and showing what she can do.

P: What is the goal of the association?

A: Our goal is to empower women and girls, to show them that they are the ones who can influence their own situation. Immigrant women from cultures, where women usually do not have a strong position in society, don’t have the feeling that they can influence anything in their lives and this is what Nicehearts wants to do, by for example planning different events.

P: Is the majority of the staff Finnish or what is the cultural distribution in the organization’s staff?  

A: The permanent employees at Nicehearts are Finnish except our Neighbourhood Mothers‘ training coordinator who is from Philippines and our regional coordinator from Helsinki who is from Namibia. Then we have two interns from Finland. I have started as an intern too and I’m from Germany. One of my friends from Nepal also did the internship. Then of course we have the volunteers which are the actual Neighbourhood Mothers and they are from all kinds of countries: Russia, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Germany, Poland. All kinds of women, people with different languages or abilities. It is really great for us because if something comes up we can go to one of our Neighbourhood Mothers and ask “hey, there’s someone who needs help, are you able to help her in your language and explain this to her”.

Pic courtesy of Nicehearts.

P: Is the official language of the association and events Finnish?

A: Yes, the working language is Finnish. The training now is only in Finnish, very basic Finnish. Our training coordinator is very good. When I attended the training two years ago I was amazed by how much I could understand when she was talking. You can follow if you have a basic understanding of the language. Recently we decided to try and have one training in English.

Nicehearts is a Finnish organization so we encourage people to speak Finnish. Most of us speak also English and we help in the language the customer needs. At the same time we also want to give women the space where they can try out Finnish language, without any judgement. For example I myself have been here about two years now, I’m trying to talk Finnish at work but if it doesn’t work then I can talk in English and no one is judging. We try to motivate women to go out of their comfort zone.  

P: Do you actively promote cultural integration in Finland?

A: Partly we do. Our aim is to get the people out of the homes, not forgetting about their cultural background but to find a way to use what they already know from their cultures and use it to get integrated into Finnish culture. That is not always an easy process but the main thing is building bridges. In some immigrant communities, women are mostly staying at home with the kids, they barely speak Finnish language and they have a really closed culture. To bring those women out of the homes in the true sense of the word and let them participate in Finnish culture is what we want to do. Then women hopefully start to feel useful and the feeling of helping others motivates them further. We welcome other cultures. For example we organise a lot of dancing evenings with dances from India or Iraq, or cooking events where we have flavors from different countries. But we also have law evening, for example, where women can get information on their rights and ask advice on divorce, job contracts and any other situation they need help in.

P: Who are the women who are the right target for this initiative?

A: For the Neighbourhood Mothers training our target are all women and not only mothers. We use the term “mother” as a person who helps, guides, mentors others and gives support. The target group is all women from Finnish as well as immigrant background who want to do something and want to help. They should be unemployed because they are the ones who need support, empowering and uplifting actions. It’s fine also if they are doing an internship or an integration training. The Neighborhood Mothers training is also part of the integration process.

Pic courtesy of Nicehearts.

P: Is there a target age?

A: Over 18 for Neighbourhood Mothers but any age for Nicehearts.

P: On the initiative of NM. Anything you feel proud of that you’d like to share?

A: After 3 years we have a bit over 200 Neighbourhood Mothers in all Finland. We think it’s crucially important that’s when you come here as an immigrant there are some actions and structures you can rely on. It’s really important for a woman who just arrived in the country that there’s a network of women who support her. For us it’s really important to get that connection to another culture so that we can target our services better and we better understand what is going on in the integration process. When I come from Germany I experience a different integration process compared to a woman who comes from Iran or Turkey.

P: Do you feel there’s also a blending of cultures as a result? Or do you observe that some ethnic groups or groups with the same cultural background tend to stick together.

A: There are cultural groups which are hard to target or reach, like groups with a strong religious background. In those cultures women don’t have a good status and they are mostly kept away from everything. We can see in our trainings that those are also women who go to training, but don’t follow up. It’s due to a big cultural difference. It’s really hard to stay in touch with them, and once you reach them it doesn’t mean they stay in contact forever.   They may not have the time or their energy because they have children and family obligations. Our challenge for the future is to reach especially those women and to find better/easier ways for them to stay engaged

P: You mentioned kids. Someone may read this post and think “It would be nice to go but I have to look after my kids”. How about that?

A: Nicehearts is one of the few organization which offers childcare during training. We have 2 really amazing child carers at the moment. They have really great ideas what to do with the kids and they cover all ages. It’s sometimes challenging but they are managing great. They plan activities and crafts with the kids, so they can also take something home, it’s really exciting for them.

P: I bet this makes a big difference for some trainee/women. Where can people find Neighbourhood Mothers and Nicehearts?

A: Our home page www.nicehearts.com. Then we have a Facebook group for Neighborhood Mothers. I am also contact person and people can contact me. Nicehearts also has a fan page, and Neighborhood Mothers too. For more background information on the whole project and our activities, check out our magazine we published beginning of 2018 https://joom.ag/NJd.

***

I am deeply grateful to Anna for her time and to all the staff and volunteers of Nicehearts for making Finland a more welcoming place for girls and women!

If you feel you can benefit from these actions or know someone who does, do not hesitate to share this post or Nicehearts‘ page. As you heard from Anna, it’s not so simple to reach all groups, so word of mouth can work miracles.  

The post Neighbourhood Mothers: empowering immigrant women in Finland appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

Here for the first time I host the testimony of a father: Jesse, living in Finland like myself. Jesse’s story is very interesting. When his wife’s family and his blended through their marriage, he became step-dad to a lovely adopted boy. On top of that, they are a proud foster family and even a support family. Hear more in Jesse’s words in this new podcast episode.

The post Adoption Conversations – episode 7. Jesse, adoptive parenting by chance appeared first on The Elephant Mum.

If this is your first episode of Adoption Conversations and you want to know more about the podcast, please hop to this guest post on Fulltime Tired where I explain what I’m trying to achieve with all this. Beside here on my blog, you can find the podcast on your favourite podcast apps: ITunes, Google Play, and Overcast.

If you enjoyed the episode, you may want to listen also to:
Ep. 3 Interracial open adoption with Nita Champion
Ep. 4 Supporting adopted children with Jodie Hampshire
Ep. 5 The voice of adoptees with Haley Radke

The post Adoption Conversations – episode 6. My interview to Bridget, birth mother in reunion appeared first on The Elephant Mum.