Leaving Haiti to settle in North America brings many different challenges for parents. While parents struggle to make ends meet, they have to constantly worry about the impact of the American culture on the values they learned in Haiti. The constantly changing limits of sex, drugs, and gender are great source of frustrations for parents who lived in a country where conversations about sex were limited; drugs usage were low or non-existent, and gender lines were rigid.

The cultural difference is an important factor that affects teenagers and Haitian parents. Haiti is a conservative country. Conversations about sex are so infrequent that often young women get pregnant without fully understanding the biological events that lead to pregnancy. Many girls limit the number of sexual partners for fear they would be considered damaged goods. It is not uncommon to hear a woman called a “slut” because she had 3 sexual partners.  Even without statistical evidence, we know that many Haitian men seek “a virgin” to marry or to settle down with.

With such an upbringing Haitian parents tend to have some set of rules and practices to ensure that their children, especially their daughters, remain “marriage material” or “respectful”.

Drugs is present in Haiti but mainly within selected groups.    In a country where the majority of people are poor and need more calories, drugs is definitely not on the top of their lists. Furthermore, people doing drugs are not well respected and often called losers.

Gender is probably one of the most heart-wrenching topics for Haitian-American parents. The Haitian culture defines gender very rigidly based on biology. The North American culture sees gender more like a personal choice.

Therefore, Haitian parents moving to the western countries are finding it hard to adapt to these new concepts.  Haitian parents then start to create rules to protect the values they grew up with. Children of Haitian descent are often confused about the polarity of the values from their parents and the values the school and media are promoting. The result is a constant fight between parents and children about basic things like sleeping over at a friend’s house, going to parties, dress code, and traveling alone.

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