Cultural Values In Nigeria

Families around the world serve as the first method of introducing children to the norms and values of their society. Though the early imprinting of cultural values and norms can influence a person’s behavior well into adulthood, the introduction of a new cultural value system at any age can drastically change a person’s belief and actions. The introduction of a new cultural value system, especially if different to the first value system a person knows, can cause a person to question what they have always accepted as factual and cause a change in their behavior and beliefs that can be deemed threatening to their original value system. In the case of my interviewee “J”, she grew up in Nigeria, a country with conservative, traditional patriarchal …show more content…
This allowed for her to cultivate her son’s interest in cooking, and work around her oldest daughter’s disdain of the kitchen. By Nigerian normative values, an interest in cooking is reserved for women, and if they disliked it, they were still expected to do it while men should never be in a kitchen otherwise he is seemed as emasculated by his wife. She reflects on the way she raised her children and the backlash she would have received from her family and the community around her if she were still in Nigeria. She would have been seen as raising her children like “white people do”. The freedom to move away from redefine gender roles for her children would have been seen as a western parenting choice and a move away from traditional …show more content…
Men are expected to be the breadwinners, are the head of the household and rule the home with a proverbial iron fist while women are homemakers, whether or not they work outside the home and are submissive to the rule of their husbands. While in Nigeria, when J did not agree with her husband, she was often forced to bite her tongue to prevent arguments. She explained how lucky she initially felt that he cared about her enough to take her to the USA with him, and that he never had extra partners. It is still common for men to have multiple wives or partake in extra-martial affairs in the country. Though many wives will not initially agree to the extra wives or know about the extra partners, they don’t have the ability to do much about it. It was also common for many men will leave their wives behind and find a new spouse abroad and only visit their first wives once or twice a year. She explains that men can get away with this even though the wives will know what they are doing because of the way men have been raised to think about women. Men are often thought to value women in the same way her brother was thought to value his sisters. She never asked her husband for help even when she was overwhelmed with managing work and her household duties because for him to help could suggest that his wife was in charge of the household. In order to