Immigrant Families And The Parent Child Relationship Essay Sample

For centuries, the United States has been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the world. According to the American Immigration Council, nearly 50 million immigrants from various countries around the world reside in the United States, with 2.5 million of those being children. Immigrant families, both first and second generation alike, face many unique challenges daily. From everything from discrimination, to assimilating into a new country and culture, or fear of deportation for illegal immigrants, the challenges that immigrant families face daily can make family life difficult. However, laws and legislation such as The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), protects immigrant children who were illegally brought into the United States at a young age from being deported. While the United States has welcomed millions of immigrants, in recent decades, issues have arisen over how to limit the number of illegal immigrants from crossing the border unlawfully. One of the other major issues that many immigrant families face is discrimination and beliefs of members of a culture that may make it particularly difficult to assimilate into the culture. Assimilating to the culture of the United States or other nation that a family may have immigrated to can be difficult for families, while trying to learn and be a part of the new culture that they are now a part of while still maintaining the cultural views and beliefs that they have known their entire lives.

One of the biggest challenges that immigrant families face is adapting to a new culture that is often very different from the one that they have always known . While often immigrant children and children of immigrant families are able to better adapt to the new culture that they are now members of, while parents typically maintain ethnic and cultural traditions that do not align with the new cultural experiences that their children and themselves are now a part of  (Costigan, 2006). While the transition from one way of life can be difficult for families, maintaining  Gaps between the acculturation of immigrant parents and their children have also been found to cause greater family conflict, which can lead to youth maladjustment (Huq, 2006). Another study found that first generation immigrants often placed a higher value on family relationships than second generation immigrants did, which in most cases, led to family conflict (Chuang & Gielen, 2009). Across various studies, the fact that gaps between acculturation between parents and their children lead to greater conflicts between families. Across multiple studies, immigrant families experienced disagreements and conflict due to acculturation and the differences in how parents and children adapted to the new cultures that they are now living in. While across the multiple studies families from different cultures and ethnic groups were studied making the research more reliable across cultures, one downfall of the research designs is the lack of understanding how and if the parents and children adapted to the new culture before the study . Understanding how acculturation can affect the relationship between parents and their children can help both children and parents to understand the challenges of adapting to the different cultures and values and see and understand the challenges that they are each facing.  Support programs for immigrant parents have been proven to help strengthen relationships between immigrant parents and their children, with children whose parents participated in the support program reported far less family arguing, and parents that received the support reported improvements in the quality of their relationship with their children, problem solving communication, and family functioning (Hamari et al., 2021). Providing immigrant parents with the support that they needed helped to improve the parent-child relationship. Understanding the mental stress that immigration can have on parents and providing them support during a difficult change in their life that they are experiencing is important to maintain both the mental and physical health of not only the parents, but their children as well. Through

As immigrating from one country can be difficult for both parents and their children, many immigrant children and children of immigrant parents struggle with mental health issues when upon immigrating. Differences in acculturation between children and their families have often been linked to depressive symptoms in children, and cause the child feelings of isolation (Costigan, 2006). However, discrimination that families face can also contribute to depression in children of immigrants, as studies show that children whose immigrant parents faced discrimination are more likely to show signs of depression (Deng & Li, 2021). While children often show carry signs of depression and other mental health issues, parents also had feelings of depression and isolation after immigrating. While various aspects of the immigration process can be difficult for both children who immigrated to a new country, as well as children of immigrants, families who participated in parent support programs were found to have positive outcomes for mental health. After the support programs, fathers were more likely to see and acknowledge the depression that many of the mothers in the program carried, while both parents reported higher feelings of happiness, and fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation (Hamari et al., 2021).

While the knowledge of immigrant families to the United States and other countries around the world, the effects of immigration and acculturation that the families face is not common.  After reviewing the research and learning about challenges that immigrants face both in the United States and within different countries and cultures, culture plays a role in the integration and acculturation of immigrant families. Learning about how immigrants to different countries besides the United States are accepted and how they integrate into the country that they immigrated to shows that culture plays a role in immigrant families. Furthermore, after reviewing the research, most of the research that was reviewed tended to be deficit-based. Most of the research focused on the issues that the immigrant families faced, rather than their strengths and how they were able to adapt to the culture and ways of the culture in which they immigrated. Overall, the research that was reviewed shows the issues and challenges that many immigrants families face. Through making intervention programs more accessible for immigrant families, the relationship between parents and their children could be strengthened, and beneficial for the mental health, and relationship between the family.