The Effects and Changes in Parenting of Asian Families - Essay Example

The Effects and Changes in Parenting of Asian families After Immigration to Western societies Introduction The transition for immigrant families from one cultural framework to another is a long-term project of mutual adjustment. How parents and adolescents construct their ideas and the images they carry around with them influences their attitudes and behaviors toward each other. Research on family stress emphasizes the importance of perceptions about how families manage stressful events in their lives (Boss, 1991). Few families have more long-term ambiguous stressors than those who are refugees forced from their homes with very limited resources to help them manage through decades of adjustment. If the perceptions of parents and children are dissonant and based on lived historical experience or current realities, then their ability to manage the stresses of forced migration will be diminished even further. If the perceptions of each generation can be made more congruent, then it is likely that both parents and their children will see each other as resources rather than as additional stressors. To understand this problem, Asian parenting styles and characteristics need to be studied. Warmth and dominating control offer two important dimensions of parental style that may be universal, and against which the meaning of specific practices might be elucidated. The use of these styles as touchstones was an important strategy which can be used in understanding data from new western cultures. Findings & Data Analysis Immigration of Asian families to Western Societies usually involves major changes in parent–child relationships. The results of some studies have shown that the relations between immigrant parents and their children are vulnerable to the risks commonly associated with immigration, especially during the adolescent years (Nguyen & Williams, 1988). On the one hand, during adolescence, children become more cognitively sophisticated and think differently about what their parents can and cannot control in their lives. This developmental shift is compounded by the process of acculturation for immigrant adolescents, making them more likely to downplay their parents’ values and modes of behavior and adopt values and modes of behavior from the new society. Immigrant parents, on the other hand, may resist change in their traditional values. Some scholars suggest that despite years of living in the country of resettlement, many immigrant parents preserve their ideas about child-rearing, their expectations, norms, rules, and beliefs (Nguyen & Williams, 1988). The research findings suggest that family values that center around household chores, family obligations, and family roles in particular remain stable regardless of the length of resettlement. For adolescents, however, the length of time in the new country can have a significant impact on their acceptance of traditional family values (Nguyen & Williams, 1988). If Southeast Asian immigrant adolescents shift values and attitudes toward the host country and Southeast Asian parents resist change, then one could hypothesize that adolescents’ ideas and parents’ ideas about what constitutes “good” parents and “good” adolescents will also diverge. In the present research, the extent to which immigrant Southeast Asian parents and adolescents agree on what it means to be a good parent and a good adolescent has been explored. American definitions of what constitutes a good parent have been well documented in the literature (Magen, 1994; Raina, Kumar, & Raina, 1980). Studies on White, middle-class families in the United States have consistently shown that good parents create a welcoming emotional climate for their children, and they tend to be warm, responsive, affectionate, involved, and firm. Usually it is believed that good parents practice behaviors that promote independence and autonomy in children. Good parents endorse practices that emphasize control over children’s behavior, a democratic disciplinary style, and involvement in children’s activities. Steinberg (2001) suggested that good parents practice effective parenting that brings about desirable child outcomes, such as “self-reliance, achievement motivation, pro-social behavior, self-control, cheerfulness, and social confidence” (p. 10). Studies performed in different nations, however, show that definitions of good parenting vary across cultures. For example, Magen (1994) conducted a study with parents and adolescents in central Israel and found that spending leisure time together, expressing feelings, showing respect, sharing decision making, and providing for children were considered qualities of good parents. When Magan compared the parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of a good parent, she found that the adolescents were more likely to define good parents as more understanding, supportive, respectful, and enabling of their independence. In another study, conducted with a group of 200 Kenyan children (mean age of 11.8), in which Addleman (1999) asked for their views of good parents, the children said that good parents provide for physical needs, teach the children to help parents, punish and have authority over children, are kind, teach right and wrong, and send the children to school. In the United States, a good child is defined as one who is independent, intellectually curious, competent, achievement oriented, self-reliant, assertive, communicative, social, and empathetic. Conformity, family loyalty, family responsibility, and obedience to authority are valued less (Steinberg, 2001). Results of cross-cultural studies comparing American parents’ perceptions of good children with perceptions of parents from other countries have shown that American parents tend to value a sense of humor, sincerity, self-confidence, and independence in thinking more than being affectionate, obedient, and altruistic (Raina et al., 1980). Shek and Chan (1999) studied a group of Hong Kong Chinese parents about the qualities they valued in children and found that more than half of the respondents (63.3%) considered academic-related attributes to be most important. In addition, about 61% of the respondents mentioned family-related attributes, including fulfillment of family responsibilities. Another 41% of respondents mentioned conduct-related attributes, including “not acquainted with undesirable peers” to be ideal. Dybdahl and Hundeide (1998) found that the most frequently mentioned qualities valued in children by Somali mothers and children were obedience, helpfulness in doing household chores, industriousness, attendance in school, and non-aggressive behavior. In spite of important differences, like different languages, cultures, and social backgrounds, previous results suggest that all Southeast Asian groups share similar history and experiences of immigration, assumptions, and philosophies about human relationships. They all lack familiarity with customs and practices in the United States. Furthermore, some scholars suggest that they share common beliefs with respect to traditional parental socialization of children (Detzner, Xiong, & Eliason, 1999). Thus far, little empirical research has been done to compare and contrast parenting and family values among different Asian families groups. Studies of Southeast Asian families suggest that what is considered good behavior for adolescents who grow up in Asia in general tends to include collectivistic qualities, such as family obligation, filial piety, and communal reciprocity, which are qualities embedded in the Asian culture (Cooper, Baker, Polichar, & Welsh, 1993). Within this collectivistic tradition, good children are judged on the extent to which they carry out family expectations and responsibilities instead of the extent to which they can think for and assert themselves. Good children are expected to accept authority without question, conform to the rules and standards of good behavior in the respective community (Nguyen & Henkin, 1981), be properly mannered, and abstain from drugs and premarital sex. Southeast Asian adolescents who grow up in the United States, however, tend to be influenced by values of individualism, equality, and self-expression. Their ideas about qualities of good parents and good adolescents are expected to be different from their parents’ ideas. Traditionally, good parents included those who carry out their culturally expected parental roles, such as providing for and making decisions for the family, caring for, nurturing, and teaching the children (Nguyen & Henkin, 1981). For example, Nguyen and Henkin studied change and continuity of cultural values in 800 Lao and Vietnamese adults and found that about 80% of the participants agreed that in their home countries the men are the head of the family and “make all critical decisions and oversee the general welfare of the family” (p. 165). Women are in charge of the children and family matters inside the family, such as carrying water and wood, pounding rice, cooking, and making clothes. Other scholars (e.g., Xiong, Detzner, & Rettig, 2001) studied Southeast Asian parental roles and responsibilities and found that parents are expected to provide for the physical needs of children, teach proper behavior, protect and restrict children from hanging out with “bad” friends, monitor their activities, understand children’s situations, and help them select proper friends. Although these studies are helpful, they are based only on the parents’ perceptions of the parental roles. Little has been done to contrast parents’ and adolescents’ perceptions of what makes someone a good parent and a good adolescent and how this may be influenced by immigration. Focus Study: Parenting Styles in Bengali & Pakistani Families In Bangladesh there is no information about the ‘meaning’ of parental knowledge of their adolescents’ activities, which, as most researchers in the past were influenced at least in part by parental supervisory practices and monitoring (Kerr & Stattin, 2000). Their meanings can be examined by considering the degree to which parental knowledge was associated with parental warmth vs. parental dominating control in boys and in girls. It is found that for girls, parental knowledge was strongly associated with parental warmth, but not with dominating control. In contrast, for boys, parental knowledge was associated with parental dominating control, but not with warmth. It can be proposed that these findings reflect the dramatic gender differences in the degree to which girls vs. boys are protected and supervised, elucidating culture-specific societal values with regard to such parental practices. In Pakistan the central issues of the research involve parenting and adolescent outcomes. One can be particularly interested in the meaning of autonomy-granting by parents in this culture. The meaning and associations that this style holds in a culture where obedience to parents’ wishes is expected and valued is of significant theoretical interest. Self-determination theory (Ryan & Lynch, 1989) would hold that such behaviors are essential for the internalization of parental values, even if those values include obedience to parents’ wishes. In contrast, Markus & Kitayama (1991) propose that internalization of values is not a goal in collectivist cultures. They suggest that the behavior of individuals in communal cultures is influenced by ‘external’ expectations; parental practices that emphasize ‘internals’ would be largely irrelevant. It is found that autonomy-granting was highly associated with warmth for both boys and girls. However, in causal models of how parental attributes relate to their children’s outcomes, parental autonomy-granting played an important positive role for boys, but not for girls. These findings allow for an effective representation of societal forces in middle-class Pakistan today. There has been a dramatic increase in public awareness of the need to empower women in this culture where traditionally they have little control over their own lives and can be subjected to significant abuse. On the other hand, the central life domain for females remains the home and family. Overall, parental practices associated more strongly with girls’ than boys’ outcomes. Warmth played a significant and direct role in their life satisfaction, unlike parental autonomy-granting. Furthermore, there were some signs that parental autonomy-granting may have a negative effect on their interpersonal relationships. In contrast to the girls, middle-class Pakistani boys live in a world where the sense of agency that might result from high levels of parental autonomy-granting provides an advantage to their social adaptation. Although the importance of assessing for and understanding gender effects has been emphasized in Western cultures as well, in Islamic cultures, such as Bangladesh, the findings demonstrate that gender appears to create virtually a second ‘culture within a culture’. Ethnic subgroups within single cultures (e.g. Chinese and Filipinos in the Philippines, Hindus and Muslims in India) may also show dramatic differences. Similarly, differences are likely to exist in cultures where class differences are large, as it is found in the qualitative study of mothers in Pakistan (Zaman & Stewart, 2001). Whereas these caveats have been outlined previously and their impact demonstrated (e.g. Kohn, Naoi, Schoenbach, Schooler, & Slomyczynski, 1990), sub-analyses based on socio-economic background are rarely provided. When two cultural groups are compared, matching for social class would be particularly important. For example, in the recent special issue of Developmental Psychology (1998), several studies mention the diverse socio-economic status of their sample. However, with the notable exception of Bornstein et al. (1998), they do not provide information regarding differences within their samples based on social class, nor do they examine associations between social class indicators and outcomes. Conclusion The findings of the research suggest that policy makers and service providers should differentiate between cultural groups and generations when designing interventions or support systems for Southeast Asian families. Not all Southeast Asian parents perceive their children’s attributes or absence of attributes in the same way. Similarly, adolescents perceive parental attributes in diverse ways. A careful examination of similarities and differences between groups and generations adds complexity to the understanding of immigrant families. Having divergent ideas about what constitutes a good parent and a good adolescent is one of the major contributing factors to parent–adolescent conflict in immigrant families. The research findings can be a helpful resource for practitioners who work with Southeast Asian immigrant families and may encourage them to ask alternative questions concerning intergenerational conflict and stress in their ongoing assessment and treatment. 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Autonomy and the parenting of adolescent girls in Pakistan. Presented at the annual meeting of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Winchester, July, England. Read More