"Education is important but...": Low-income Kurdish migrant mothers' beliefs about child education and child labor

Ozge Sensoy Bahar, MSW
School of Social Work
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
osensoy2@illinois.edu

 Abstract

This qualitative study with 7 low-income Kurdish mothers from Istanbul, Turkey draws on parental ethnotheories to explore their attitudes toward child education and child labor in relation to other contextual factors that might affect parental decisions about their children's educational pathways. While all mothers wanted their children to pursue higher education, contextual factors, including household size and child birth order affected their decision-making. The study suggests a complex and non-linear relationship between parental ethnotheories and decision-making, underscoring that decisions made on child labor and education can best be understood in the context of other family factors.

Keywords: Turkey; child labor; parental beliefs; Kurdish mothers; qualitative

Ozge Sensoy Bahar, MSW, is a doctoral student at the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She received her MSW from Columbia University. Her research interests include international social work, child labor, forced migration, low-income ethnic families' experiences with migration, with a particular focus on women in developing countries.