Family time. Caribbean style in a European way

It has been a while since I updated this blog, and it has a reason, no excuse, but a valid reason.
In 2013 my daughter was born, and my wife and I are raising her alone in The Netherlands. This takes quite some dedication and time. We do it with love and enjoy it. Now she is almost 2 years old, and we have entered her in daycare and soon she will enroll in pre-school. This will provide us with some free time.
Since our daughter entered our lives we often talk about the difference between living and raising a child in the Caribbean compared to in our case Europe. We have visited both Aruba and the Dominican Republic to let our families meet her. The biggest difference between the two regions is the role a family plays in your child's life and upbringing. In the Caribbean I feel much more dedication from relatives, and a more pro-active approach. In Europe people love the child, will help out from time to time, but it is more an exception to the rule.
In Europe things are structured and organized. What they expect you and your child to do from birth till her 18th birthday. And the child will enter into this system, which has its benefits and downsides. Time will tell in our case. We do miss our families even more now that we have a child and realize even more the value of having, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. To be fair, the problem in Europe is that relatives often live far apart from each other, making it more difficult to just drop by or letting you bring over your child to them. In the Caribbean, distances are shorter, and very often relatives live next to each other or in the same neighborhood/village.
Therefore I think it has also to do with the geography of the Caribbean, having a positive effect on family situations. From a European perspective one could argue that the proximity of relatives brings a lot of social control and pressure. Relatives who meddle in your family situation for example.
As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. I Think raising a child in both regions has benefits and challenges. For now, we are making the best of the European advantages and coping with the "missing" Caribbean culture. I just wonder what culture my child will tend to go for more. Nevertheless I think having both, she will be able to reap the benefits of both. Time will tell.

Traditional Caribbean upbringing....should we return to this?

Next month I will become a dad and over the last couple of months I have been pondering on how to raise our child. Therefore the inspiration for this blog.

My Wife is from the Dominican Republic and I am from Aruba, so both of us have a Caribbean background and upbringing. However, we have been living for some years now in Europe and have adapted a bit to this lifestyle and culture. The children in Europe are brought up quite free and modern, and I am not sure I agree with it all the time. So lets revisit our own childhood and reminisce about the values we have been taught by our parents and family. I will limit this to the age of 5 to 10 years old because I think that that is the most important period where your parents had the most influence on you as a growing little person. For me this period ranged from the mid 1981 to 1986.

For us children of that period the most important people teaching us values and providing guidance and behavior corrections were: Father, Mother, Grandparents, Aunts, uncles, older cousins (older than 18, which in the Caribbean is normal, because our grandparents had up to 10 children so your the age difference between your parents and  your oldest uncle/aunt could be up to 10 years).
Outside of the family sphere, teachers also had a big influence and enjoyed a great deal of respect by both you and your parents.

One of the most important things we were taught was that you always respect your elders. This included never talking back. I remember the phrase: when the big coins speak, the small change shuts up (typical Aruban saying: ora placa grandi papia, placa chikito ta keda keto)
And when we did want to say or ask something we had to address them with either their family title followed by their name. For example: Aunti Judith, may I.... And when it was not family you used Sir or Miss/Mrs. followed by their name. These rules were also applied in school when communicating with teachers.
Also elder family members of your friends were spoken to in this way (when you were in their yard, playing, ripping out their plants and drinking water directly from their garden hose or water tap sticking out of the ground at the back of their house).
And if memory serves me well.....even the village drunks and hobo's were treated with a certain respect...(whenever you got caught by them after yelling crazy things at them while hiding in the bushes).

Having covered the basics on how to speak to people when allowed to speak to them, we get to the language you are allowed to use. In these days I agree that it is difficult for parents to monitor and try to get their children not to use profanity. It is all around us and seems to have become standard lingo. But back in the day.....I remember our school teachers washing our mouths with soap (for real). and at home the ol' belt, rubber flip-flop or flat of a hand came into the equation. Sometimes it as enough to just show us these props and we would know what to do....shut up and apologize (and run away outside and play....far away).

There are many other things that you might have experienced or miss in this short blog about these values we were given by our peers. There is however, one, which I have struggled with as a child and still struggle a bit with as an adult. And I am not sure how I will tackle this with the upbringing of my own child. This was the fact that we were not allowed (or expected) to question anything. For me this was a problem in elementary school, where early on I started questioning certain things we were taught or told. At this point I understand that for a child around 5 years old this is normal behavior. This is when we start making sense out of the world around us and ask questions to try and make sense out of it all. And as mentioned before, it was not expected that we went on and on in those days. We would have to accept and make do with the one answer we were provided with. Because of course, we could not reply with an additional question, because....one does not talk back to grown-ups.
On the other hand, when sometimes I see toddlers or children talk to grown-ups nowadays and being replied to as if they were equal conversational partners. One can argue that the boundary between childhood curiosity and a child being ill mannered, is fading. Where do you draw the line? At this point I think that I will engage my child in a "grown-up" way, but making clear that when daddy says its enough.....it is enough (no need to props to evoke fear).

If you have any stories or things based on this topic to share, please do so. I think it can be very useful for us to learn from each other and celebrate wisdom we posses handed over to us from our elders.