The big task

There is much debate surrounding the best way to aid young English Language Learners in transitioning  into US classrooms and keeping up with their classmates during the critical elementary grades.

A recent report from the Foundation for Child Development reports that:

"Research on the effects of early English immersion programs for ELL students...suggests that children in [English immersion only] preschool programs tend to lose their ability to communicate in their first language, start to prefer the English language, frequently develop communication problems with their extended families, and experience depressed academic achievement in English."

There are a myriad of reasons for how and why fluent bilingualism may support immigrant children; but especially compelling is the notion that bilingualism is at its core, a matter of keeping families functional and connected.

One striking piece of evidence comes from work by Mouw and Xie (1999) who find that bilingaul Asian American first and second generation adolescents have a pronounced academic advantage over their monolingual peers. But this effect was only significant when parents were not fluent in English.

Global vertigo

 Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-founder of immigration studies at NYU, says we are in an "age of global vertigo".

Immigration flows across the globe have created separations between parents and their children, and between nuclear families and extended families, often for a prolonged period of time.

In a study of recently immigrated adolescents, Suarez-Orozco, Todrova, Louie (2002)  find that 85 percent of the sample had been separated from one of both of their parents for an extended time.  This contributed to a host of difficulties including increased depression and academic decline.

With the average waiting period for relatives of permanent residents ranging from 6 to 19 years (as in the case of Mexican-born individuals), families are forced to make tough decisions regarding when each member can migrate and children are left with little choice at all.

Across the divide

Recent work has shown that the higher levels of parental monitoring and stricter rules set by immigrant parents play are a strong, positive role in helping immigrant adolescents  maintain lower levels of delinquency and higher grades.

But as immigrant adolescents rapidly acculturate into American schools, a gap between parents and their children begins to form.

A recent study found that while many adolescents from Chinese immigrant families were performing well in US schools and showing very low levels of behavior problems, as acculturation proceeded these adolescents and their parents "suffered increased emotional distance, increased conflicts, and less communication"(Qin, 2006).

In a recent NPR report on intergenerational conflict, a Chinese-American teenage girl explains that while she may see, understand and even agree with the parenting styles of her parents she wishes that her mother could better understand the American teenager--and in doing so, better understand her.

Listen to this story which recently aired on All Things Considered.

What makes a good student?

Children of Mexican immigrants face many obstacles to a successful transition into school.  Language barriers, low parental education, and high rates of poverty translate into lower test scores throughout the elementary school years.  But evidence from researcher Robert Crosnoe shows that socially and behaviorally these children are at the top of their class.

According to teacher reports of a national sample of kindergartners, Mexican immigrant children had better mental health, got along better with others and look a lot better in terms of self-regulation than their White, African-American, Asian-American and Latino-American peers whose parents were born in the US.

Crosnoe points out that while,  "People tend to think that doing well in school is all about IQ and cognitive development...there's a lot more that goes on to it than that. You have to have the capacity to sit there and learn and control yourself."

These abilities pose children of Mexican immigrants to make the most of the school experience.

"Psychological well-being doesn't begin to outweigh the burden of severe poverty", Crosnoe adds. "And Mexican immigrant families have the highest rate of poverty of any immigrant group in the US. But strong mental health at least cuts away a slice of that disadvantage."

Listen to the full story which aired on npr's "Day to day".

Support is a two-way street

Immigrant parents have extremely high expectations for their children's educational pathways and research has shown that children internalize these expectations and use them as motivation to succeed.

But family is a complicated influence. In research by Fuligni and colleagues they found that while feelings of family obligation aided children in school, family obligation behaviors (amount of time spent helping family) could have the opposite affect.

In a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center on "Latinos and Education" we again see a conflicting influence. While Latino parents were more likely to say that children should go to college after school than other parents, the most common response for why Latino young adults did not continue their education was that they needed to support their family.

It seems reasonable to believe that when families are better supported through policy we will see less of a gap between educational expectations and educational attainment.

Great expectations

Ruby Takanishi, the president of the Foundation for Child Development, has spent her life working to translate research into positive policies for American children. In an interview with New America Media this past week she discusses several types of expectations.

On expectations for the new administration:

"The fact of the matter is that immigrant children are not on anybody’s agenda, except in a negative way."

On expectations of immigrant parents for their children:

"...it’s really hard to find any immigrant family that doesn’t have extremely high aspirations for the education and future of their children. It doesn’t matter if they are getting a Ph.D., or if they have less than a fifth grade education. There is an enormous faith and belief in education that may be an important selection factor for the groups that come to the United States instead of going to another country."

On the ability to capitalize on expectations:

"Different immigrant groups have different amounts of social capital. Some immigrant groups are very well organized to do this, others are not. In the groups that don't have enough social capital, it’s an opportunity for other immigrant serving organizations to step in and fill that gap."

Dr. Takanishi has co-edited a book Immigration, Diversity and Education, which was released this Summer.

Surprising behaviors

This past year our lab has been looking at a phenomenon termed the immigrant paradox.

The immigrant paradox refers to findings that as youth acculturate, many developmental outcomes decline (e.g. grades, academic attitudes, risk behaviors), rather than improve as one might predict.

Behavioral outcomes, both in children and in adolescents, show the most consistent evidence of a paradox. In a recent review of the literature we found that across externalizing behaviors (e.g. acting out), substance abuse, delinquency, and incarceration/arrest foreign-born children and adolescents were significantly less likely to engage in negative behaviors than their later generation or more acculturated peers (see graph above).

These findings have been echoed in research in adulthood. A 2006 article using census data and a national study on immigrant individuals finds that across ethnic groups incarceration rates are dramatically lower for foreign-born individuals than for native-born.