CHAPTER 11: The Strengths and Skills of Children: Self-Descriptions of Somali and Local Australian Children

In this chapter, we focus on how Somali primary school children describe their personal strengths and school-related skills. They are growing up in relation to both their Somali Islamic heritage culture and the Australian national culture held out to them in their schools.

We used computerized and illustrated paired comparison tasks to investigate the Somali children’s self-descriptions. We compared their self-described personal strengths with those of their local (Australian) peers. We also compared Somali and non-Somali self-described strengths and school-related skills with those attributed to them by their parents and guardians.

The findings indicate that most of the Somali children’s self-described strengths agreed with those of their local peers, although they described themselves as more brave but less loving. Along with their peers, the Somali children disagreed with their guardians about their strengths and most of their school-related skills. Somali guardian/child pairs agreed with each other but disagreed with non-Somali pairs in indicating that the Somali children were skilled in spelling and maths but unskilled in music. The findings suggest that these Somali children were choosing personal preferences from among the values held out to them by both their Somali heritage and Australian mainstream cultures.