hankyoreh

Annual Increases in Number of Students from Immigrants Families.

“I went to a lot of different places, but none of them would take [my child].”

An international resident of South Korea in [her] thirties was rejected by several different day care centers and kindergartens where she attempted to send her child. “We’re worried [the child] won’t be able to fit in with a different skin color,” one child care institution told her. “The child care costs will probably be too high,” another said. “We don’t have any African children here,” said a third. The resident finally managed to place her child at a center 40 minutes from their home, at a cost of 460,000 won (US$430) per month.

“It’s tough. It’s expensive, and [for my child] is so far away,” she lamented.

South Korea’s day care centers and kindergartens are off limits to may foreign children due to local parents’ prejudices about skin color and international residents’ social status. The Gyeonggi Institute of Research and Policy Development for Migrants’ Human Rights (director Oh Gyeong-seok) recently released findings from a study of 2017 basic rights conditions for foreign children in Gyeonggi Province, for which 145 foreign parents of foreign children were surveyed.

Of the 145 total foreign children, forty-seven were enrolled in elementary school. Among the 98 children aged five and under attending child care institutions, 21.7% were placed in a center that accepted foreign children after failing to win placement at another domestic child care center, the results showed.

Around three out of ten respondents said they had experienced being rejected by a domestic institution, with 13% reporting that they had placed their child with their current center because of the presence of other foreign children or children from their home country. Another 22.4% of foreign children below school age did not attend a domestic child care center at all – over ten times the 1.7% rate of child care center nonattendance for South Korean children.

Once they are finally placed at a center, the biggest struggle for foreign children is communication (36.7%), followed by making friends (16.7%), discrimination (13.3%), and bullying (10%), the results showed.