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Article Excerpt
Currently, little is known about how child-rearing beliefs change as immigrant families adapt to the host culture and about the extent to which these beliefs begin to approximate the American mainstream. This study examined how parents' child-rearing beliefs were associated with the psychological well-being of 360 (180 Asian Indian and 180 European American) adolescents. Asian Indian adolescents reported higher family conflict, ethnic identity achievement, and anxiety, and their parents endorsed training and shaming child-rearing beliefs more than did European American families. Asian Indian parents who had an integrated or assimilated acculturation style approximated the European families' family conflict ratings and their child-rearing beliefs. With exposure to situations that challenge their ways of thinking, immigrant parents develop child-rearing beliefs that allow them to function in both cultures and have positive effects on their adolescent children's psychological adjustment.
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In most societies, adolescents must negotiate the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional changes that accompany the transition from childhood to young adulthood. However, adolescents vary in the extent to which they manifest the positive developmental outcomes that are commonly associated with these changes (Rutter, 1989). At particular risk are children of immigrant parents (Miller & Chen, 2003). When adults enter the United States, they have great hope and high aspirations for a better life for themselves. However, the adolescents who accompany them or are later born in the United States face the challenge of establishing a discrete self-identity and an ethnic identity that is compatible with the values and beliefs of both their natal culture and the American mainstream (Zhou, 1997). In addition, the conflict between adolescents and their parents that arises from disagreements associated with normal age-related changes may be higher among immigrant than nonimmigrant families.
To a large extent, these adolescent challenges are related to their parents' experiences as immigrants. The psychological impact of immigration and acculturation on adult behavior influences adolescents' developmental outcomes through the effects on parents' child-rearing practices and the affective quality of the family environment (Booth, Crouter, & Lansdale, 1999). How parents relate to their natal culture as well as to the host culture can be expected to affect adolescents' ethnic identity achievement and their psychological functioning. Two studies of Asian Indian immigrant families (Farver, Bhadha, & Narang, 2002; Farver, Narang, & Bhadha, 2002) found that when both parents and adolescents had an integrated acculturation style, there was less family conflict, and adolescents had higher academic achievement, self-esteem, and ethnic identity and better psychological adjustment than in families where parents and adolescents differed in their acculturation styles or parents were marginalized or separated from the mainstream culture.
The current study builds on this prior work on Asian Indian families' adaptation by reexamining our data set to focus on additional family factors that were not previously investigated. In addition, we included a sample of European American families to compare the psychological well-being of Asian Indian and European American adolescents and to investigate how Asian Indian parents with different acculturation styles may begin to resemble European American parents in their child-rearing beliefs and family functioning.
Asian Indians are estimated to be 16% of the U.S. immigrant population (after those from the Philippines and Mainland China) (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2004). However, relatively little is known about them. This gap in the literature may be related to the assumption that as one of the "model minorities" that excels in academic, work, and social settings (Kim & Chun, 1994), Asian Indian adolescents categorically manifest positive psychological functioning. Moreover, with few exceptions, existing studies have tended to lump together the distinct ethnic groups that make up the "Asian" designation, thus obscuring the diversity in Asian American adolescents' behavioral adjustment (Liu, Pope-Davis, Nevitt, & Topotek, 1999). Adolescence may be a particularly challenging developmental period for Asian Indian adolescents because they are also confronted with situations that concern their race and skin color, language skills, ethnicity, and identity that may be confirming or disconfirming of the values of their culture of origin (Delucchi & Do, 1996).
Furthermore, as McLoyd (1998) points out, conceptual biases exist in research on minority children and adolescents in general because they are often studied in contexts characterized by poverty, parental unemployment, and low education. Unfortunately, this bias has often been generalized to immigrant populations as a whole, has produced an incomplete picture of the normative development of most immigrant families and their children, and may contribute to an overpathologizing of the acculturation process. The current study provides a counterweight to this research by examining a group of Asian Indian families raising children in relatively benign environments. To avoid confounding social class with culture or ethnicity--a methodological problem common to comparative studies--we held socioeconomic status (SES) constant in two groups.
Children of all cultural communities experience enculturation: the normative socialization experiences that allow them to function as competent individuals in their societies. However, ethnic minority children are also enculturated by their wider communities, the dominant cultural group, and the nature of the interaction between their ethnic group and the dominant culture. Thus, parents are instrumental in setting the tone for their children's behavior, attitudes, and successful functioning in both cultural worlds. Accordingly, our model focuses on the central role of the family in examining the relations among family conflict, parents' child-rearing beliefs, and adolescent adjustment among Asian Indians and European Americans.
Acculturation and Ethnic Identity
Acculturation and ethnic identity are related but separate constructs. Acculturation refers to how ethnic minority individuals adapt to the dominant culture and the changes in their beliefs, values, and behavior that result from contact with the new culture and its members (Berry, 1993). By contrast, ethnic identity involves an individual's self-identification as a group member, a sense of belonging to an ethnic group, attitudes toward ethnic group membership, and degree of ethnic group affiliation or involvement (Phinney, 1990).
Given that ethnic identity is meaningful only in situations where two or more groups have been in contact for an extended period of time (Phinney, 1990), ethnic identity may be more apparent among individuals who live in highly urbanized and ethnically diverse areas of the United States. It is within these settings that immigrants form or re-form a sense of ethnic identity and that European Americans assess their own ethnic identity in relation to the increasing pluralism in their communities. Research findings are mixed as to whether immigrants can be highly acculturated and can strongly identity with their ethnic group. However, Berry's (1993) orthogohal model provides evidence that neither process is linear and both acculturation and that ethnic identity must be considered in understanding immigrant psychological functioning.
Acculturation. Berry (1993) proposed that there are four ways ethnic minorities can associate with their host culture. They can assimilate (identify solely with the dominant culture and sever ties with their own culture), marginalize (reject both their own and the host culture), separate (identify solely with their group and reject the host culture), and integrate (become bicultural by maintaining aspects of their own group and selectively acquiring some of the host culture).
One line of research investigating the psychological impact of immigration and acculturation on family functioning and behavior found that integration was the most psychologically adaptive pattern (Berry, Kim & Boski, 1988). Integrated individuals had less acculturative stress and anxiety than those who were marginalized, separated, or assimilated.
A second line of research, which examined individual acculturation styles to delineate within-group differences, assumes that acculturation produces common patterns of experience as immigrants adapt to life in the United States. Therefore, acculturation was studied as to how it affects immigrant families and children's early socialization and development to produce variations in child outcomes. For example, Patel, Power, and Bhavnagri (1996) found that assimilated Asian Indian parents adopted relatively Americanized child-rearing attitudes and behaviors and tended to encourage those characteristics in their children. Likewise, in a study of Korean American immigrants, Farver and Lee-Shin (2000) found that mothers with assimilated or integrated acculturation styles began to resemble European American families in their child-rearing styles. In the current study, we combined these two lines of research to examine relations among family factors and adolescent outcomes.
Ethnic identity. As early as middle school, minority adolescents attempt to learn more about their background and to explore the implications of ethnic group affiliation (Phinney, 1993). Generally, adolescents (roughly 16 to 19 years old) who have "achieved" an ethnic identity have resolved uncertainties about the meaning of their ethnicity, feel comfortable with who they are, and experience relatively positive psychological adjustment in terms of high self-esteem (Roberts et al., 1999) and academic motivation and achievement (Wong, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2003). For European American adolescents, ethnic identity may not be as salient as it is for minority adolescents. However, studies have found that while European American adolescents rated their ethnic identity lower than ethnic minority adolescents, their ratings were correlated with self-esteem and optimism and inversely related to depression and loneliness in a pattern similar to minority adolescents (Roberts et al., 1999).
Attitudes toward other groups may interact with ethnic identity and contribute to adolescent well-being. By definition, an integrated acculturation style involves a positive orientation toward one's own ethnic group and to other groups, all of which have been associated with positive psychological adjustment (Berry et al., 1988). Some theorists have argued that only first-generation immigrants face the challenge of acculturation, whereas the second and subsequent generations are confronted with forming an ethnic identity (Roysircar-Sodowsky & Maestas, 2000). Therefore, in the current study we focused on immigrant parents' acculturation and the ethnic identity of both parents and adolescents.
Asian Indian Immigrant Families
Due to their experience with British colonial rule, most Asian Indian immigrants are relatively fluent in English and have had exposure to Western values (Ibrahim, Ohnishi, & Sandhu, 1997). Asian Indians who migrated after the 1965 U.S. Immigration Act have been college educated, urban middle-class professionals or students seeking advanced university training. The common pattern for first-generation Asian Indians is to affirm their ethnicity, generally by "reinventing" Asian Indian culture on foreign soil (Dasgupta, 1998). Often, Asian Indian immigrants are more "Indian" than the people they left behind, and they may retain a sense of a culture that no longer exists on the Indian continent. Despite the influence of social class and generation on their cultural identity and worldview, many maintain a traditional value system many years after immigration (Patel et al., 1996).
According to Asian Indian psychologists (Dasgupta, 1998; Ranganath & Ranganath, 1997), a primary difference between Asian Indian and European American cultural belief systems lies in the concept of the self. Asian Indians tend to be allocentric, where the self and the family are integral, rather than have separate concepts, as is characteristic of...
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