The Importance of Family

Francisco, almost 3

Eva, aged 1

I visited Oregon last week and stayed with a friend and her family in Corvallis.  My friend, Doris and her husband, Juan Pablo (J.P)., have two young children, Francisco, almost 3 and Evangelina, 1.  Doris is a professor at Western Oregon University and J.P. is a successful winemaker at Silvan Ridge Winery near Eugene.  (I have written more about them in my post on June 19th.) They were very gracious about hosting me at their lovely home in Corvallis.  I enjoyed staying with them and sharing life with them, their darling children and Doris's mother, Doris.  It has been a long time since I have spent time with such young kiddos on a daily basis.  It humbles me to think about the hard work child rearing is.  I returned home exhausted and grateful to know these darling and beloved children!  The circumstances of this family are very different from the families that I read about in the book I will describe.  My week with Doris and J.P. and their family is very similar and very different from the families I have been studying.  The values of familia and respecto were very evident in their home and in the way they are raising their children.  The core values seem to stretch across Latino groups and are present regardless of the circumstances.

I have been struggling with how to write about an amazing book I just finished and have decided not to take the book review approach on the blog.  I was oozing details when I first wrote about the book on this blog and saved it to think about as I traveled back from Oregon.  I will give impressions and save the book review for a different venue.

One of the questions that I asked at the beginning of my sabbatical was how immigration and specifically the status of being undocumented impacted parents and children.  I know there is not a simple answer to that question.  Dr. Rebecca White, faculty with the ASU Latino Resilience Enterprise group, recommended a book to me when I was with her in late March.  I have been reading it and am finally finished.  The book is Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children by Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Russell Sage Foundation, 2011.  Dr. Yoshikawa is now Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, and University Professor, New York University.  The book is based on longitudinal studies of 380 young children and their parents in New York City.  The children were part of two birth cohorts.  Case studies of seven families informed this book.  The families represented by country of origin are China (1), Dominican Republic (2) and Mexico (4).  Most children were between three and thirty six months and the rest were between ten and thirteen years.  The authors found it was not possible to study young Chinese children immigrants because they were sent to China to stay with relative caregivers, usually grandparents, during the years between birth and 5.  The whole story of how that happens and what the impact is on the parent-child relationship is not part of what I will share.  I highly recommend the book to those who are interested in learning more about the Chinese families.

Skilled field workers visited the families 6-12 times over a six to nine month period.  Visits alternated between structured interviews and participant-observation methods.  The complete methodology is described in the appendix.  

Yoshikawa starts the reader out by describing three mothers on New York City's A Train, famous for the song many of us know.  He describes three of the mothers in the study, one Mexicana, one Dominicana and one Chinese.  Two of the three are undocumented immigrants.  The Dominican mother is documented and the other two are not.  He is able to paint a rich picture of the lives of all three women and the conditions under which they raise their children.  A conceptual model is presented in the first chapter that is outlines the parental (un)documentation status and the developmental contexts of children (p. 18).  The author examines the impact on child development by looking at:

• Premigration factors as they impact undocumented status 
• Involvement with (or avoidance of) Legal and Illegal Authorities.  The legal authorities may be gatekeepers for publicly funded programs for which their citizen children may be eligible or labor regulators or even law enforcement for protection.  The illegal authorities might include smugglers, coyotes, etc.  
• Social ties and work.  The networks include grandparents and the presence of older adults/generations, the proportion of adult contacts who are undocumented and the social support available.  Work issues examined are wages, benefits and job duties.
• Home environment and parental involvement and child care (home or center and quality)
• Children's developmental trajectories for learning, cognitive development, social-emotional growth and health.

Through detailed descriptions of the lives of the seven families he highlights in the book he explains the differences and similarities these mothers, fathers and children have in growing up in the margins in New York City.  Each of the families have a number of co-ethnic adults in their lives but only the Dominicans have extended families who are very involved in the lives of their children.  The Mexican families co-exist in the same residence but often are not involved with the children or each other if they are not the actual parents and couple.  They share space, work different shifts, come home very tired each day after very long and underpaid work days.  The Chinese infants leave for China and the parents work crazy hours at subsistence wages to pay back loans for the cost of coming to the US.  

Yoshikawa presents data that compares not only the children in the small sample of seven but also data from the study of 380 children.  His conclusions are as follows:

• All of the parents studied deeply cared for their children and all were interested in helping their children learn.  The field workers found that parents with less resources had less toys, books, etc for their children than parents with more resources.  Previous work the author had done showed the impact of psychological distress and depression on parental behavior.  The group measured for that in this study and did find a small effect, more noticeable at 24 months than at 36 months.
• The overwhelming differences noted in cognitive development at three years of age between the children whose parents were documented and those whose parents were not documented were related to working conditions and whether or not the child went to center based child care.  To put this another way, poor working conditions (lower wage jobs and lower job autonomy), and the type of care the child experienced (home vs center care) made a difference in the cognitive development of the child and showed differences at 36 months of age.  The children of undocumented parents who were unable to access center based care and child care assistance because it required proof of identification scored significantly lower on test of cognitive skills than the children in the study whose parents earned more and who attended child care in centers with trained and certified staff.  

There are many details that I would love to share but at the risk of losing you in them I will say that having undocumented parents has a distant impact on children's cognitive and emotional development.  Not only do the children exist in settings that are less conducive to cognitive development and success in school, they can also suffer anxieties about their parent's lack of papers and/or be concerned about their parent being deported.  I witnessed such anxiety in two children of a woman we have had the pleasure to work with in our county.  I will never forget the faces of those boys as I was trying to hire their mother.  No one on our team knew the status of this mom.  It was an embarrassing and potentially threatening situation.  When I realized she did not the paperwork I needed to hire her I quickly assured her I would not tell anyone in authority.  Her boys were hanging on our every word and the looks on their faces told the story of fear and concern they had for their mother.  This was one of the experiences that led me to studying immigration and its impact on the family.

Time to go for today.

Practicing selfies to make Francisco happy about me taking his picture!

Thanks for reading!