The Home Environments of Adolescents Whose Parents Legally Immigrated to the United States: Findings from the New Immigrant Survey

Abstract

Adolescent well-being depends on the quality of their experiences at home. Data from the New Immigrant Survey were used to describe the home environments of 982 children ages 10-17 whose parents legally immigrated to the United States. Thirty-four indicators of home conditions were clustered into 5 domains: (1) discipline and socio-emotional support, (2) learning materials, (3) enriching experiences, (4) family activities, and (5) expectations. Results revealed variation in how frequently adolescents experienced each home environmental condition. As expected, there were differences in the likelihood an adolescent would have most-but not all-experiences connected with home life based on parents' level of education. The home experiences documented for children of recent legal immigrants were similar to those documented for children of native-born families in other studies.

Vulnerable and Resilient: Legal Status, Sources of Support, Maternal Knowledge, and the Family Routines of Mexican and Central American-origin Mothers in Los Angeles

“…Drawing from this multidisciplinary scholarship and the perspectives of family strengths and family resiliency (McCubbin and McCubbin 1996; Walsh 2003; Defrain and Asay 2007), we conceptualize family routines and maternal knowledge as part of the seemingly invisible assets that families, including those with undocumented immigrant parents, use to maintain individual and family functioning despite experiencing significant vulnerabilities. The results presented here extend the literature on immigrant family settings for children across multiple age-related developmental stages (e.g., Hardway and Fuligni 2006; García Coll and Marks 2009) and on the intersection of legal status and family life at different stages of human development (e.g., Yoshikawa 2011; Brabeck and Sibley 2016; Bradley et al 2016; Yoshikawa et al 2017). More broadly, the study also expands understandings of the heterogeneous experiences of Mexican and Central-American immigrants in the United States, and how immigrant families engage in practices that promote family well-being and resiliency (e.g., Yoshikawa 2011; Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Abrego 2014; Philbin and Ayón 2016).…”

“…Employed mothers working more hours might share some of these challenges, relative to mothers without outside employment or those working fewer hours. Mothers with lower levels of education and income, and with more children in the household exhibit compromised family routines and/or less parental knowledge (Spagnola and Fiese 2007; Padilla-Walker et al 2011; Bradley et al 2016). Binary indicators represent whether the mother was a single parent (1 if single parent, 0 if not single parent), her education (1 if mother did not complete high school, 0 if completed high school), and whether the family was poor (i.e., under the 2000 federal poverty threshold for a family of a given size).…”

Parenting Children and Adolescents (PARCA) scale English to Spanish translation: An investigation of measurement invariance.

“…Despite efforts to achieve full cross-cultural equivalence on the PARCA, nuances in terms and concepts might contribute to differences in the degree to which English- and Spanish-speaking parents weight their responses to certain items (Conrad-Hiebner, Schoemann, Counts, & Chang, 2015; Ortuño-Sierra, Chocarro, Fonseca-Pedrero, Riba, & Muñiz, 2015). For example, Item 6 (“Involve your child in age-appropriate household chores?”) was the strongest source of scalar noninvariance, which could be due to lower expectations of Latino families for engaging children in daily household chores (Bradley, Pennar, & Glick, 2016; McHale, Updegraff, Shanahan, Crouter, & Killoren, 2005). Traditionally, Latino mothers perform basic household tasks, such as cooking and cleaning.…”

Cultural Shift from Interdependence to Independence

“…Asian populations include all the immigrants from Asian countries and far East Asia. Among these populations even though the Asian Indian population is less, yet, as the Asian immigrant populations are increasing enormously (Bradley et al, 2016), so do Asian Indian population, therefore, there is a need to investigate their experiences based on the differences in their ethnic culture and the mainstream American culture. This research selected the participants based on their interest and voluntary participation., the research involved five first-generation AIIP who are residing in a large Mid-Southern urban area located in the United States of America using a convenience sample and a snowball sampling procedure.…”

“…As explained by Pinquart & Kauser (2018), Asian Indian immigrants practice authoritarian parenting styles which emphasize interdependence and insists their children listen without questioning whereas Western cultures practice authoritative parenting styles which emphasize independence and allows their children to be autonomous. According to Bradley et al, depending on how rapidly the acculturation and enculturation processes are taking place (Bradley et al, 2016), after immigration, immigrants try to accommodate the new culture cognitively, at the same time assimilate and try to fit in the new culture with their ethnic cultural values. This can define their strategy for both acculturations as well as enculturation processes.…”