Parenting with an Accent
How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 Sarton Award for Nonfiction
Merging real stories with research and on-the-ground reporting, an award-winning journalist and immigrant explores multicultural parenting and identity in the US
Through her own stories and interviews with other immigrant families, award-winning journalist Masha Rumer paints a realistic and compassionate picture of what it’s like for immigrant parents raising a child in America while honoring their cultural identities. Parenting with an Accent speaks to immigrant and non-immigrant readers alike, incorporating a diverse collection of voices and experiences to provide an intimate look at the lives of many different immigrant families across the country.
With a compelling blend of empirical data, humor, and on-the-ground reportage, Rumer presents interviews with experts on various aspects of parenting as an immigrant, including the challenges of acculturation, bilingualism strategies, and childcare. She visits a children’s Amharic class at an Ethiopian church in New York, a California vegetable farm, a Persian immersion school, and more. Through these stories, she opens a window to a world of parenting unique to multicultural families. Immigrant readers will appreciate Rumer’s gentle message about the kind of ethnic and cultural ambivalence that is born of having roots planted in many different soils, while in these pages non-immigrants get a fly-on-the-wall view of the unique experiences of newcomers.
Deeply researched yet personal, Parenting with an Accent centers immigrants and their experiences in a new country—emphasizing how immigrants and their children remain an integral part of America’s story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There is no formula for raising immigrant kids or for rebuilding a home from scratch in the new land," writes journalist Rumer in her debut, an affirming guide to parenting as an immigrant. Rumer opens with her own experiences of communication troubles and peer judgment upon moving to California with her family as a teenage refugee from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, then digs into the choices immigrant parents face in raising children in the U.S. These choices, she writes, are influenced by traditions and values, a "visceral and unrelenting" desire to share the culture one came from, and American concepts of good parenting. Rumer devotes plenty of time to exploring bilingualism, sharing data on its cognitive advantages, stories of trying to convince kids to use their heritage language, and tips for encouraging bilingualism ("Caregivers, extended family members, and friends" can help with exposure). Rumer dishes up plenty of anecdotes as an immigrant Russian mother of two, and she smoothly integrates the perspectives and voices of other immigrant parents with backgrounds from around the world in a way that feels conversational, but always salient. With a wealth of empathy on offer, this will go a long way toward making parents who face similar situations feel understood.
