A change in context often brings with it a sort of earthquake for families, changing their roles, their relative authority, and their internal dynamics. When parents come from rural areas and are illiterate, or suffer from health problems or experience serious psychological problems triggered by the move and the start of their new life in Italy, major shifts can occur in interfamily relationships. Children typically learn Italian more quickly than their parents and, since they attend school, they quickly build networks of social relationships. The same happens through their engagement with sports or parish activities. Their parents, on the other hand, in addition to generally struggling more with language studies, often take adult courses that may not start right away, and where the other students are primarily other immigrants, with very few Italians. Adults who need mental or physical healthcare will spend a great deal of time at health facilities, leaving them unable to attend courses or form personal relationships outside of the circle of Caritas social workers and volunteers. Jobs are undoubtedly good tools for building social networks, but it always takes months to access the job market, and even then only those who have mastered a middle-school level of Italian, or at least enough of the language to be able to understand the work they will be doing, can successfully find work.
Therefore, it has often happened that children take on the role of cultural and linguistic mediators for their parents, and become the “creators” of social bonds with the society outside the circle of Caritas social workers, volunteers, and mentor families.
These dynamics have led children to take on, often involuntarily, parental roles and responsibilities, creating conflict with their parents and the painful redefinition of the relationships within the family. This has triggered depression in some parents, who come to feel that they are a “burden” to their families, rather than “leaders.”
Caritas social workers and host communities have often become aware of these dynamics, which affect both single-parent families and families with both parents. Some host communities tried to work on these family dynamics with the crucial assistance of mediators and psychologists or psychiatrists. In a small number of cases, these professionals specialized in issues faced by immigrants and immigrant families.
One of these mediators described family dynamics as they had shifted a few months after one family’s arrival: “When [someone] asks to speak with the mother, he [the son] acts as the interpreter with the mother to other people.”
Many host communities have described similar situations, as one volunteer described, speaking about the relationship between one single mother and her three children: “The oldest son is 17. For me, he’s my point of reference, because he is best able to translate and act as a mediator between us as Italians and them as Eritreans.”
Some beneficiaries have agreed to describe how they experienced this forced transformation of their relationships with their children:
I know some [Italian] words, I thought it was easy… [But] especially when I read articles, “femminile” and “maschile”, etc., it’s very difficult. But my children are perfect… I take them with me to the pharmacy. And they’re like “What did they say? Medicine? Okay.” They are very fast. I don’t understand why or how.
