Open Collections

Arquillano, Esther

University of British Columbia

Canada has previously and continues to be built on the immigration of individuals from diverse backgrounds. Immigrating to a new country involves adapting to a new culture and set of norms (Beiser, 2009; Chuang, 2019; Vezina & Houle, 2017), where parents and children may face trauma and be at risk for developing physical and mental health issues (Beiser, 2005; Chuang, 2019; Pritchard & Ramos, 2018). Emotion-related skills play a key role in combatting these issues and increasing children’s future success, suggesting the importance of supporting the development of emotion-related skills early in childhood (Gagne et al., 2018). However, parents from a non-Western country resettling in Canada may have different perceptions and understandings of emotion that can impact the development of a child’s emotion-related skills. There is little research on how Iranian parents who are immigrants or refugees in Canada perceive the construct of emotions and the role of emotions in their parenting. Thus, in this study those aspects will be explored with Iranian Canadian parents. This exploratory qualitative descriptive study employed semi-structured interviews and photos as elicitation devices to understand the perceptions Iranian parents who are immigrants with young children hold regarding the construct of emotion and their perception on emotions in their parenting. A total of four parents with children between the ages of six and eight living in British Columbia and Ontario who immigrated to Canada at least five years ago participated in the study. A thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2006) of interview transcripts was used to identify patterns within the data and generate in vivo codes to describe the lived experiences of the participants. Analysis of semi-structured online interviews with each participant revealed that parents perceived emotion experiences to vary based on an individual’s age and environment and that the role of emotions was for protection and parents served as role models and teachers of emotions. These themes revealed that emotions exist everywhere and have cultural influences and that protecting their children was important when dealing with and sharing emotions. Moreover, each participant revealed that the environment they found themselves in impacted the emotions they experienced.

Text

2022-10-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82909

Early Childhood Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/