SOCIAL COMPETENCE EDUCATION PROGRAM FOR MULTICULTURAL FAMILIES’ CHILDREN IN KOREA

During the past ten years the number of international marriages with foreign immigrant women in Korea has greatly risen and as a result so has the number of children from multicultural families. The immigrations of foreign women who have come to Korea to marry are not immigrations based on a family unit where the whole family moves but ones done on an individual basis. These women are facing difficulties in adapting to Korean society where people have rather closed-in attitudes towards marriages with other races due to Korea’s homogeneous country ideology.
Interlinked with this challenge in cultural adjustment which mothers who are the primary caregivers face, children in multicultural families cannot experience proper social modeling at early childhood that it has been reported that there is a high possibility that they will be likely to display problematic behaviors when they go to day care centers or kindergartens(Jun et al., 2007).
Moreover, the children’s language skills are very underdeveloped that it is difficult for teachers to teach each thing to them through words.
Acknowledging this, our research team implemented an intervention program for a period of 8 weeks where problematic situations that children from multicultural families could commonly experience in care centers were specifically presented through flash children’s tales to the children. The children from multicultural families themselves solved the presented problems in the tales and practiced socially appropriate expressions (for example: I’m sorry) so that they picked up sociality skills.
In order to examine the effects of this program, the before and after the program Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation(SCBE, LaFrenier & Dumas, 1996) and self-esteem scale (Choi & Chun, 1992) of 40 children from multicultural families from 10 care centers were measured.
Results revealed that after the program the anger-aggression behavior of children from multicultural families decreased in the statistically significant level and their self-esteem and pro-sociality scores increased in the statistically significant level than before the program. This implies that the sociality of children from multicultural families can be enhanced through even merely suggesting social modeling through flash children’s tales.