In Ethnic Neighborhoods, It’s the Grandparents Who Look After Kids : Old-Fashioned Child Care

When it comes to child care, it pays to be ethnic in Los Angeles.

Most American couples who want children have to wrestle with the problem of child care if both husband and wife are breadwinners. Their parents either work or have daily social activities. Private sitters are expensive. And some parents have qualms about day-care centers.

But in Latino, Armenian, Asian, Middle Eastern or other ethnic communities, the dilemma is virtually non-existent because most prospective parents know grandma and grandpa are ready, willing and available to take care of the grandchildren.

For example, when Atanacia Mattioli’s grandchild was born, there was no question that she would raise the baby girl while her daughter and son-in-law worked. Same with Gulen Poladian, who moved from Canada to Reseda to be with her son and daughter-in-law when they had their first child.

Mattioli, who is Argentine, and Poladian, who is Armenian, are part of a flourishing generation of ethnic grandparents who have assumed the role of their grandchildren’s caretakers so that their children can earn a living. You see these immigrant grandparents, men and women in their 50s and 60s with a young child or two in tow, at neighborhood grocery stores, shopping malls and parks throughout Los Angeles. They usually speak in their native tongue and they walk slowly--they have a lot of time on their hands.

They also seem to have a lot of energy, running after a toddler on the loose, feeding a hungry infant, changing diapers. . . . That, they say, is because caring for their grandchildren is a labor of love, not a job.

“I do it for my children. I want them to be happy,” said Mary Karamardian of Tarzana, an Armenian women who reared five children and now, with her husband, cares for her working daughter’s two youngsters.

“My in-laws worked in Vietnam. My mother-in-law was a career woman and a live-in baby-sitter took care of my husband and his six brothers and sisters. So taking care of their grandchildren is special for them,” Huong Pham of Alhambra said of her husband’s parents.

“I wouldn’t want anyone else to take care of my granddaughter,” Mattioli said. She not only quit working as a seamstress to care for her 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter, Nicole Valenzuela, but she moved from Eagle Rock to Arleta to be near her. Every morning Mattioli takes the bus from her apartment to her daughter’s house 20 blocks away to baby-sit Nicole. She also cooks for the family and performs other household chores while her daughter, Rosana Mattioli, works as production coordinator for the WEA Latino record label and son-in-law Jesus Valenzuela, a professional composer and singer, is on the road.

This kind of service is not common among the general population, say psychologists and social observers. American grandparents tend to be active, regularly playing tennis, going on cruises or participating in club activities.

“In the non-ethnic population you can’t find a grandmother available to look after the children, not just for working parents but for parents who need a respite,” said Irene Goldenberg, a family psychiatrist at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “They’re either working or engaged in various activities.”

But most grandparents from abroad have brought Old World values with them; traditionally their lives revolve around the family and the home. They raised one set of children and now it’s time to raise a second. Another factor is that they’re on foreign shores, and many of them can’t work because they’re too old or don’t know English, so they tend to stay at home.

The advantages of having a grandparent look after the children are numerous.

“Their values and attitudes are consistent with those of the parent,” Goldenberg said. “They’re not paid help.”

“They might not be as modern as we are, as liberal as we are, but they have good moral values. And I want my child to have that,” said Mary Karapetian of North Hollywood, who works full time as special projects coordinator for a large law firm and leaves her baby girl in her mother’s care five days a week.

Karapetian said she wouldn’t trust her daughter to anyone else. “It’s hard for me to imagine parents leaving their child at a day care center,” she said. “No matter how much research you do, no matter how much you’ve heard about a place, they’re still strangers.”

One Asian mother observed how her eldest daughter, who was left with an Asian sitter five days a week for a year and a half, didn’t start speaking until the age of 2 1/2. “She was just left in a playpen. No one would communicate with her. My youngest daughter started speaking at the age of 1 because my father came and took care of her from the moment she was born. He would talk to her. He loves her.”

Ethnic grandparents are instrumental in the education of their grandchildren, especially in the teaching of the native language, traditions and culture. Most immigrant grandparents speak to grandchildren in their native language and teach them folk songs. And they care for them with old-country practices. For instance, if Mattioli’s granddaughter hits her head or a limb somewhere, Mattioli will press onto the sore area a sliver of butter with the flat side of a knife to prevent bruising. “I guess it works,” daughter Rosana said.

These grandparents may be slowing down the melting-pot process of the United States as they pass on their cultures to their grandchildren, but in many instances parents want their children to at least learn the native tongue of their forefathers. Karapetian, for one, said she would like her 8-month-old daughter to speak Armenian when she grows up.

“I’m counting on my mom teaching my daughter Armenian,” Karapetian said.

Vietnamese-born Pham wants her son to learn her native alphabet. “I like to read books. There are good books in Vietnamese,” she said.

Poladian, a former Armenian schoolteacher in her native land of Syria, has started instructing her 2 1/2-year-old granddaughter Susie in the English and Armenian alphabets. Poladian bought sets of plastic letters in both languages and has written Susie’s and her brother’s names on the refrigerator. Every day, she and Susie review the letters and learn new ones.

“Sometimes ABC, sometimes ayp, pen, keem,” Poladian said. “We never go down the stairs without counting, 1,2,3, or meg, yergoo, yerek.”

Although she’s constantly teaching her granddaughter, Poladian said, she never sits Susie down and says, “OK, now we’re going to learn . . .” She uses subtle opportunities to educate Susie. For instance, Poladian taught Susie various shades using colorful foil-wrapped chocolates the childlikes.

As Poladian sees it, she’s “doing both baby-sitting and educating. Children become more attached to you when you’re teaching them a song or a game.”

Susie is with Nenee all the time. “She does everything with me,” Poladian said. “She gets on a chair and washes the dishes with me, she cooks with me, she takes baths with me. She likes me more than her mother.”

Indeed Susie’s eyes light up when she sees Nenee. Mattioli’s granddaughter, Nicole, also is very attached to her abuelita, as are many grandchildren of immigrants.

“My daughter responds better to my mom,” Rosana Mattioli said. “When I sing a song, I have to sing it over and over before she gets it. My mother has to sing it only once.”

The grandparents, too, are devoted to the young ones. “My mother says she enjoys my daughter more than she enjoyed me,” Rosana Mattioli said. “She says, ‘I love my daughter, but the love I have for my granddaughter is special.’ ”

Mattioli and her husband pay the rent for her mother, who is separated from her husband, so that she can watch Nicole full time. But most ethnic grandparents don’t need or want any financial assistance from their kids. Many say they would be insulted if they were paid. Most either collect Social Security or live with their children. The majority say all they want is a large, close-knit family with lots of children and grandchildren to continue the family lineage.

“Both my parents and my husband’s parents wanted me to have another baby after my son was born,” said Pham, who works at Kaiser Permanente’s regional headquarters in Pasadena. Pham became pregnant with her second child less than a year after giving birth to her first one. “In my culture, having children shows prosperity; it also means you are blessed,” she said.

Poladian periodically urges her son and daughter-in-law, who have two children and own a dry-cleaning business, to bring another one into the world. “I’ll take care of it. Go work, have fun. I’ll take care of my grandchildren,” she will tell them.

But in these times, when the pressures of a job and everyday life are stressful, many working couples aren’t eager for a crop of children, even if grandma and grandpa are willing to look after the little ones.

Too, disagreements can and do erupt between grandparents and parents over how to raise the children. Many parents complain that their children are being spoiled by the grandparents.

“There can be problems having to do with the fact that your view of raising children may be different than your parents,” Goldenberg said. “You give up a certain amount of freedom when you ask parents to become full-time sitters.

“You don’t have a say in how your child is raised because your mother is not paid help. You can tell a housekeeper, ‘No, I don’t want the kids watching television in the afternoon. Turn it off right away.’ But you can’t tell your mother that.”

“My mother has a strong personality. She forgets I’m the mother of Nicole,” Rosana Mattioli said. “When it comes to deciding what kind of baby food my daughter’s going to eat or whether she should go to nursery school, we get into fights.”

Karapetian has had to insist that her mother not pick up the baby every time she cries. “My mom holds her too much. She doesn’t want to let her cry. She wants to pamper her. Well, when I come home from work and the baby wants to be picked up all the time, it’s not fair. So my mom doesn’t do that anymore.”

Still, Karapetian and thousands of other ethnic mothers admit that they couldn’t survive without their parents’ assistance in raising their children. “You don’t know what kind of a help they are. They’re incredible,” Karapetian said.

“My mother would cook for me when I was pregnant with Andrew,” Pham said. “She stayed with me the first three months after I had Andrew.” Now Pham’s mother and mother-in-law take turns caring for the 13-month-old boy while she holds a full-time job as an information specialist at Kaiser.

The role of caretaker among the ethnic population is not solely the grandmother’s. Another Kaiser employee’s 76-year-old father takes care of her 3 1/2-year-old girl from sunrise to sundown, and he fetches her 5-year-old sister from nursery school at noon.

“He didn’t raise us. In Asia men don’t take care of kids. But he takes this as a challenge, to raise my two young children,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.

“I want to have a son. My father says, ‘Bring him. I’ll take care of him.’ I think I will,” she said with a giggle.