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".

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.