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Today, immigrant children are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. child population. From 1990 to 1997, the number of children in immigrant families grew by 47 percent, compared with only 7 percent for U.S.-born children with U.S.-born parents. Currently in the U.S., one out of every five children under the age of eighteen—a total of 14 million—is either an immigrant child or a child with immigrant parents.
The majority of these children have Latino or Asian origins, representing unprecedented cultural and linguistic diversity in public schools throughout the country. Addressing the needs of these "newcomers" in our schools has become a pressing issue facing educators nationwide. To meet the needs of immigrant children, it is critical to understand their educational and psychosocial adaptation. Over the last fifteen years, increasing attention has been paid to immigrant children's adaptation patterns. However, one factor that has been either ignored or left unexplored until very recently in this literature is the issue of gender. While there are some efforts to theorize gender and immigration in adults, scholarly work on gender and immigrant children's development remains scant. In my research, I am particularly interested in gender differences in Chinese immigrant children's adaptation. In my qualifying paper, I critically examined three bodies of literature: adolescent girls' development, immigrant children's adaptation, and Chinese childhood socialization. My goal was to integrate these findings to establish a theoretical foundation for understanding the adaptation and identity formation of Chinese immigrant adolescent girls. The recent work of relational psychologists suggests that adolescence marks a time of "heightened psychological risk" for girls. Research has shown that upon entering adolescence, girls are more likely to lose their voice, more likely to be depressed, more likely to consider suicide, and have lower self-esteem than boys. Carol Gilligan and her colleagues point out that girls' increasing awareness of cultural expectations and gender roles on the threshold of adolescence and the incompatibility between their "inner" and "outer" worlds contribute to their psychological difficulty during adolescence. However, the dominant theme in the research on gendered patterns in educational outcomes strongly demonstrates that girls outperform boys in educational settings across groups. Researchers have shown that from grade school through college, females receive higher grades and obtain higher class ranks than males. On standard achievement tests, boys usually lag behind girls in writing skills and in reading achievement, though surpassing girls in science and math. Furthermore, boys are more likely to drop out of high school than girls. Existing literature on immigrant children indicates that—consistent with the national trend—immigrant girls tend to have higher educational aspirations and a higher level of educational achievement than boys. Researchers have proposed different factors that might contribute to this gendered trend. For example, Carola Suárez-Orozco has argued that girls are usually monitored by parents more than boys, which might prompt girls to focus more on their studies rather than on peer-related activities that might otherwise distract them from school. In her work with Caribbean youth, Mary Waters also suggests that boys seem to experience more difficulty in ethnic identity formation and are more likely than girls to equate doing well in school with "acting white." In terms of psychosocial adaptation, existing literature suggests that, overall, immigrant girls have more household responsibilities, are more vulnerable than boys in response to family-related stress, receive stricter parental control, and seem to have more latitude in ethnic identity formation than their male counterparts. The literature on Chinese childhood socialization suggests that Chinese parents place heavy emphasis on morality and education. Empirical and theoretical work on Chinese immigrant youth focuses predominantly on positive aspects of their educational performance (e.g., the "model minority"), while ignoring the challenges faced by immigrant youth from China—and Asia in general—in their educational and psychosocial adaptation. It is also crucial to note the great diversity in the adaptation of Chinese immigrant students due to differences in language background, length of residence in the United States, and differences caused by socioeconomic status. For example, a suburban high school girl from Beijing speaking Mandarin, whose parents immigrated on professional visas and work as medical researchers, is likely to have a different educational trajectory from a girl of the same age from southern China, speaking Cantonese, attending an urban school, with both of her parents on family reunion visas and working in a Chinese restaurant. Regarding identity formation of immigrant girls from China, researchers have noted the issue of "duality" or "multiplicity"—that is, the incompatibility between the different worlds in which immigrant girls live contributing to potential patterns of divided selves in their identity formation. Du Bois' framework of "double consciousness"—the sense of "always looking at oneself through the eyes of another"—is also important in the examination of identity formation of Chinese immigrant girls. In my dissertation, I plan to expand my focus on Chinese immigrant girls to include both girls and boys, and in so doing I hope to gain an in-depth understanding of the diverse educational experiences of Chinese immigrant children. About the Author About the Research Profile
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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