Parental Roles And Relationships In Immigrant Families

This insightful volume presents important new findings about parenting and parent-child relationships in ethnic and racial minority immigrant families. Prominent scholars in diverse fields focus on families from a wide range of ethnicities settling in Canada, China, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. Each chapter discusses parenting and parent-child relationships in a broader cultural context, presenting within-group and cross-cultural data that provide readers with a rich understanding of parental values, beliefs, and practices that influence children’s developmental outcomes in a new country. For example, topics of investigation include cultural variation in the role of fathers, parenting of young children across cultures, the socialization of academic and emotional development, as well as the interrelationships among stress, acculturation processes, and parent-child relationship dynamics. This timely reference: • explores immigration and families from a global, multidisciplinary perspective; • focuses on immigrant children and youth in the family context;• challenges long-held assumptions about parenting and immigrant families;• bridges the knowledge gap between immigrant and non-immigrant family studies;• describes innovative methodologies for studying immigrant family relationships; and• establishes the relevance of these data to the wider family literature. Parental Roles and Relationships in Immigrant Families is not only useful to researchers and to family therapists and social workers attending to immigrant families, but also highly informative for persons interested in shaping immigration policy at the local, national, and global levels.

Researchers recognize that theoretical frameworks and models of child development and family dynamics have historically overlooked the ways in which developmental processes are shaped by socio-cultural contexts. Ecological and acculturation frameworks are especially central to understanding the experiences of immigrant populations, and current research has yielded new conceptual and methodological tools for documenting the cultural and developmental processes of children and their families. Within this broad arena, a question of central importance is on how gender roles in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and families. Gender Roles in Immigrant Families places gender at the forefront of the research by investigating how it interplays with parental roles, parent–child relationships, and child outcomes.

Although many researchers agree on a general definition of acculturation, the conceptualization and measurement of acculturation remain controversial. To address the issues, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) sponsored a conference that brought together scholars who work to define and develop assessments of acculturation, and who study the impact of acculturation on families. The goals of the conference were to evaluate both the status of acculturation as a scientific construct and the roles of acculturation in parenting and human development. The goal of this volume is to advance the state-of-the-art. Acculturation and Parent-Child Relationships: Measurement and Development is a must-read for researchers, students, and policymakers concerned with cultural factors that affect the lives of parents and children.

Immigrant children and youth are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. However, relevant public policy is shaped less by informed discussion than by politicized contention over welfare reform and immigration limits. From Generation to Generation explores what we know about the development of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian children and youth from numerous countries of origin. Describing the status of immigrant children and youth as "severely understudied," the committee both draws on and supplements existing research to characterize the current status and outlook of immigrant children. The book discusses the many factorsâ€"family size, fluency in English, parent employment, acculturation, delivery of health and social services, and public policiesâ€"that shape the outlook for the lives of these children and youth. The committee makes recommendations for improved research and data collection designed to advance knowledge about these children and, as a result, their visibility in current policy debates.

How do some families successfully negotiate the linguistic, cultural, and psychological challenges of immigration, while others struggle to acculturate? This timely volume explores the complexities of immigrant family life in North America and analyzes the individual and contextual factors that influence health and well-being. Synthesizing cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, the book addresses such key topics as child development, school achievement, and the cultural and religious contexts of parenting. It examines the interface between families and broader systems, including schools, social services, and intervention programs, and discusses how practices and policies might be improved to produce optimal outcomes for this large and diverse population.

When migrants reach their new home, we often interpret their settlement and integration as an individual process driven largely by the labour market. But family plays a crucial role. Putting Family First investigates the experience of immigrant families settling in Greater Toronto, from newcomers’ initial reception to their deep involvement in and attachment to their receiving society. Contributors explore such themes as the policy environment, children and youth, gender, labour markets and work, and community supports in order to illustrate how the family context can be mobilized to facilitate the successful integration of newcomers.

This book compiles a series of empirical and conceptual chapters based on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory as the framework for understanding the overlapping and intersecting contexts that influence different populations of migrants in the United States and Canada. According to Bronfenbrenner’s model, individuals engage in activities and relationships that directly impact them, including families, schools, and jobs (microsystems), the interrelations among microsystems like family-school (mesosystems), contexts that have an impact on the individual through indirect influences (exosystems), and the overarching cultural milieus in which members share values, beliefs, and lifestyles (macrosystems). Within this edited volume, family, school, work, media, policies, culture, and sociohistorical contexts are examined to understand their influence on immigrant groups. This edited volume also considers immigrants across development and ethnic groups to provide a comprehensive resource on the issues that currently affect immigrant groups.

Recent research suggests that good relationships between parents and their children’s providers or teachers could lead to positive outcomes for children and families. Positive, mutually respectful, and collaborative relationships between families and schools and education providers and teachers contribute to young children’s school readiness, increase positive family engagement in children’s programs, and strengthen home-program connection, a critical factor to children’s school success. Bridging Family-Teacher Relationships for ELL and Immigrant Students is a comprehensive reference source that focuses on research-based pedagogical practices for teaching young English language learners (ELL) and immigrants. It specifically looks at strategies across the curriculum including social-emotional development, parent involvement, language development, and more. While highlighting major themes that include academic engagement and achievement among ELL and immigrant children, factors affecting partnerships with schools and home, the impact of home environments on school readiness, and student performance, this book shares pedagogical practices across different subjects that use partnerships with families of ELL/immigrants. It is intended for classroom teachers (early childhood and K-12), parents, faculty, school administrators, academicians, professionals, researchers, and students interested in family-teacher relationships.