Purpose: School is an institution that provides an opportunity to improve children's equity and wellbeing and to bridge the potential disadvantage related to ethnic-or language minority backgrounds. Information sharing between immigrant homes and school can enhance school achievement, support positive identity formation, and provide early support when needed. In this article, the perspectives of immigrant parents, school welfare personnel, and school-going adolescents are analysed in order to understand how they see their respective roles in information flows between home and school. Methodology: The data consists of qualitative group and individual interviews of 34 representatives of school personnel, 13 immigrant parents and 81 young people who have experienced immigration in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Findings: Despite general goodwill, school personnel may fail to secure the flow of information. Due to structural power imbalance, school personnel are often incapable of engaging the parents in dialogical discourse. Young people of immigrant background in turn try to manipulate the information flow in order to protect their family and ethnic group and to cope with pressures from parents. The patterns of information flows in school as a social field reproduce immigrant homes as subaltern. Adolescents act in a strategically important juncture of information flows between immigrant home and school, which indicates that home-school interaction is actually a triad. Social implications and value: Awareness-building among school personnel is vital for equity and wellbeing of children of immigrant families. This triangulated analysis of patterned information flows in school as a social field provides a fresh perspective to those working with children of immigrant families.
Cite: Turjanmaa, Elina & Jasinskaja-Lahti, Inga (2019). Thanks but no thanks? Gratitude and indebtedness within intergenerational relations in immigration context. Family Relations.
This study explored how 1.5-generation immigrant adolescents negotiate their autonomy with their parents in a new cultural context. The studied adolescents are immigrants with African, Middle Eastern, Southern Asian, and EU/FSU background in Finland. The study is built on the ecological framework, which looks at development within the context of social systems. The study combines perspectives of cross-cultural psychology, acculturation research, and developmental psychology to explore autonomy in a transnational developmental context. The data consists of 80 semi-structured interviews with immigrant adolescents aged 13 to 18. Our results suggest that adolescents’ autonomy is negotiated within local family circumstances, while the transnational context becomes particularly crucial in the negotiation categories of peer relations and cultural continuity. Cultural differences in using different negotiation categories are discussed.
In general, parental knowledge is known to support adolescents’ adaptation. Less is known about the role of parental knowledge in psychological (i.e., anxiety) and socio-cultural (i.e., school achievement) adaptation of adolescents with immigrant background, and how parental knowledge and social characteristics (i.e., gender, generational status, immigrant background, and family’ socioeconomic background) of immigrant adolescents jointly influence their adaptation outcomes. This study explores the role of adolescent-reported parental knowledge in explaining adaptation outcomes among first- and second-generation immigrant boys and girls from four different immigrant groups. The study utilizes the national Finnish School Health Promotion survey data (N = 2697, 45% female, M age = 15.6 years, SD = .91) and illustrates the complex relationship between parental knowledge and adolescents’ adaptation.
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