Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate diversity in the situations of multicultural families regarding the education of their children and to suggest rational ways of educating children in multicultural families. The participants in this study were 16 mothers from multicultural families typically characterized by an international marriage in which a Korean male had married a non-Korean female. The data were collected using intensive interviews over a course of three months and were analyzed by grounded theory. The results of this study showed that the participants had difficulty in adapting to the styles of educating children in Korean families and that they could not help their children do homework by themselves due to the limited personal relationships, the shortage of information about educating children, and an lack of organized education programs on Korean culture and history. Thus, they solved these problems by depending on different extracurricular activities and thus incurred a financial burden to support these activities. This led to excessive amounts of time and energy to earn the money to support the activities, which gave them few opportunities to acquire information on educating children by, for example, meeting with others. This explained their dependency on different extracurricular activities so as to solve the problem of their educating children. In an effort to seek ways to break this vicious circle, this study emphasized that policies related to educating children in multicultural families should focus on helping multicultural families strengthen their abilities to educate their children fundamentally.