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.

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.