Recently, most existing research or policies limitedly define multicultural family as international marriage family, foreign worker family, or North Korean refugee residents. The limitation of this existing research is its failur to appreciate fully and reflect the actual needs of the recipients of the policies. This is mainly because the researchers ignores the diversity of motivation for immigration, backgrounds, and problems among thes families. Therefor, there is an immediate need to examine the current status of multicultural families in consideration of different subcategories for successful implementation of the related policies.
The presented study aims to understand better the current status of the children of a multicultural family. This study will focus on the private child-care centers in Seoul. Based on the findings from the study, this research will provide some suggestions for creating new policies that effectively support the childcare of these children.
The Current Status of Multicultural Childcare of Korea.
In the order to understand the current status of mulicultural childcare in Korea, the researchers reviewed immigration history and trends in Korea and the current status of multicultural childcare. This research could identify several implications for the future direction of multicultural childcare as follows:
1) The society needs to overcome the close-mindedness as an ethnic homogenous country and build a multicultural coexisting community that allows immigrants to share a common sense of belonging.
2) The society needs to resolve the human rights conflicts that immigrants experience during immigration process and help them restore/retain their cultural identities.
3) The isolated multicultural education programs used at (childcare) centers for the cultural adaptation and adjustment of minority children should be discarded.
4) The society needs to respect the childcare rights of these families who desire to keep their cultural identities and native languages.
5) It is necessary to systmatially support them with language education for better social adjustment.
6) Teachers need professional development to raise awareness of multicultural families in the population.
7) Additional fundamental studies need to examine regional characteristics as well as the number and status of multicultural families in the region. The data compiled from these studies will aid in budget planning.
8) More specific and practical plans for multicultural childcare are required. Some examples include increased support for families, expanded experimental schools, and campaigns and public promotion of cultural diversity.
The current childcare status of the children from international marriage famillies
1) The Aspects of Educational Opportunity
(1) Mother's adaptation into the society is critical for the educational support of the children.
(2) The parents who do not have close friends and cannot talk with family members need some help to get advise when they are in trouble.
(3) They encounter difficulties with gathering information about parenting.
(4) The teachers who have multicultural family children in their classes do not understand the cultural diversity or have appropriate professional development.
(5) Most of the teachers appear to bo overwhelmed with increase of multicultural family students and understand that prepartory training is needed.
(6) Teachers believe numerous issues need immediate improvement for multicultural education.
2) The Aspects of Childcare Processes
(1) Mother tend to make decisions about a child's education.
(2) The children satisfied with the relationship with eheir teachers in general. However, the quality of child-teacher relationships or the degree of perceived personal attention and care from the teachers appear to vary among groups depending on the nationality of mothers and whether teachers received proper professional training or not.
(3) Efforts for better parent-teacher relationships and information sharing are needed.