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This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants in their twenties, thirties, and forties are navigating and remembering their parents' traumatic, war-inflected pre-migration histories. In particular, it considers how immigrant children are giving back for their parents' challenges and sacrifices while also making choices for themselves with respect to career, love, and marriage. It also shows how the immigration experience is connected to American-born and/or American-raised adult children to the Korean War experiences of their immigrant parents. Finally, it examines how adult children recognize their own feelings around obligations and duty to their parents as they reflect on their own dreams, passions, and needs for self-care.

This chapter deconstructs the issue of immigration and immigrant parents' involvement in education. Based on a sociological study of second-generation Dominican and Colombian young adults and their parents, it reframes parental involvement by examining the world of parents as immigrants. It shows that the experience of immigrant families is shaped by the social isolation of parents and an emerging immigrant cultural identity of marginalization. This identity persists long after arrival and cuts across social mobility paths, although it is experienced in different ways according to social class. The chapter describes a poignant “sense of being alone in America among the immigrant parents” that bears upon their children's sense of being on their own in American schools. It argues that policymakers need to consider how best to incorporate newly arrived immigrants and immigrant children, particularly strategies for immigrants to develop strong affiliations in the multiple domains of their lives in the United States.

This chapter talks about the relationship between Filipino immigrant parents and their daughters. It argues that gender is a key to immigrant identity, and a way for racialized immigrants to claim cultural superiority over the dominant group. The author uses epigraphs, or statements, by a Filipina immigrant mother and her second-generation Filipina daughter. These suggest that the virtuous Filipina daughter is partially constructed on the concept of White women as sexually immoral. The chapter also shows that their enforced “morality” and the sexuality of women are essential to the structuring of social inequalities. These narratives indicate that racialized groups also criticize the morality of White women as a resistance strategy, or a means of asserting a morally superior public face to the dominant society. The chapter is primarily concerned with understanding the actions of immigrant parents instead of the reactions of their second-generation daughters.

Professionals are mandated to follow the “best interests of the child” principle while working with children and their families. However, the meaning of the best interests of the child in the context of migration has not been investigated thoroughly. Focus groups with immigrant parents from six countries explored parents’ perceptions concerning the best interests of their children. Despite much overlap, parents from different countries often had different concerns and perceptions. This chapter reveals a gap between child welfare professionals’ and immigrant parents’ descriptions of the “best interests of the child.” While child welfare professionals are concerned with principles of safety, permanency, stability, and bonding, immigrant parents were concerned with education, culture, and tradition. Implications for child welfare policies and practice are discussed.

This book examines the ability of schools to integrate children of low-status immigrants. It presents the main results and conclusions from a four-year international study that looked into the impact of host-society educational systems and processes on the so-called second generation of immigrants. The book investigates how immigrant-origin children are faring educationally in six countries that have received substantial immigration since the middle of the twentieth century: France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. In analyzing educational opportunities for children of immigrants, the book takes as its point of departure the moral and practical imperatives for academic integration. The focus is on children from immigrant groups that are defined by the low educational attainments of immigrant parents, the low-status occupations in which they are concentrated in the receiving society, and the ethnic-outsider status they occupy.

This chapter explores and challenge the perception that immigrant parents demonstrate a kind of caring and advocacy that differs from dominant majority parents. It situates the case of one Salvadoran parent in the larger context of research that documents the differing communication practices of immigrant parents and teachers who teach their children. Teachers may misinterpret communication practices and participation in school events as a lack of caring. Using the story of Margarita, a Salvadoran parent of three children, the chapter demonstrates the experiences of one immigrant parent interacting with rural teachers to show how Latina/o parents are involved and actively advocate for their children’s academic futures. It concludes with a call to educators to adopt new visions of working with immigrant parents in jointly constructed activities where both parents and teachers assume shared roles of learning to solve problems, and to learn to work across diverse experiences.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants view their cultural identity and practice cultural traditions while also reclaiming and re-making their culture and interpreting it in new ways that provide meaning in their Korean American contexts. Focusing on the work of women in continuing and remaking Korean culture, the chapter considers the Korean American children's experiences of familiarity with cultural rituals and their meanings as well as degrees of identification and attachment to their cultural heritage. It also sheds light on the immigrant children's journey towards a formation of cultural and ethnic identity beyond the pivotal college years. Although the cultural experiences of reclaiming and remaking what is Korean vary, the chapter shows that Korean American children have strong desire to retain the value of respect towards elders and to care for their immigrant parents in old age.

This chapter focuses on the childhoods of adult children of Korean immigrants, with particular emphasis on the pressures and challenges they experienced growing up as their parents pursued the “Korean American dream” of financial and social stability, with much of their dreams pinned on and invested in their children's educational achievements. It also examines different types of care work, especially emotional work, that the children provided to their immigrant parents in childhood. It shows that these immigrant children often found themselves brokering their parents' interactions with official worlds during their childhoods. Korean American children and teenagers also provided care and solace to their immigrant parents by getting good grades, working in family businesses, and managing family relations.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants work to be present for their aging parents, with particular emphasis on the interrelationships among ethnicity, culture, and gender that shape expectations, attitudes, and practices concerning care giving. It considers how immigrant children become more aware of changes and losses happening in their parents' lives, including retirement from work, selling businesses, marital difficulties, and death of close friends and family members. It shows that adult daughters, both near and far, are more acutely aware of and responsive to changes happening in their parents' lives, and that they maintain close ties with their immigrant parents even as they are cognizant of and empathetic to changes their parents experience as they age. This chapter also examines the negotiations that take place between spouses and among siblings in providing financial and other types of support to aging parents.

This book explores the experiences of adult children of Korean immigrants in the United States who have supported their parents working long hours while trying to navigate language issues, racism and discrimination. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 137 adult Korean Americans conducted between 2006 and 2012, the book focuses on how immigrant children interpret the past and current concerns and cultural values of their parents as they make their own life choices. It analyzes the types of work that these children do for their immigrant parents over their lifetimes and how this work, especially cultural brokering and care work, shifts and changes during different life stages, including childhood, college, marriage, and child-rearing. In the context of Korean and many Asian immigrant families in the United States, the book also examines ideas of filial piety as they relate to the documented everyday experiences of racialized immigrants—experiences that include prejudice, racism, and institutional barriers.

This chapter focuses on the intergenerational costs and benefits of linked lives, and especially how adult children of aging Korean immigrants find meaning through caring across lifetimes, while functioning at maximum capacity. It considers the model minority image within the context of the social, cultural, political, and familial pressures that come with the responsibility to care for immigrant parents. It also examines how immigrant children find meaning in care work based on their parents' histories and sacrifices and shows that they were able to adapt and learn how to be flexible and balance caring for themselves and others as their aging parents grow more reliant on others. Furthermore, it explores how the role of Korean Americans as an intergenerational bridge could be extended to supporting a social reform agenda focused on aging and health care. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications and the importance of community and support in the face of the cultural, political, and structural challenges facing older Korean immigrants and their adult children.

We examine the national origins, legal status, length of residence in the country, educational achievement, present occupational situation, and income of immigrant parents on the basis of ILSEG’s parental survey. Results are compared systematically with those obtained by the Spanish Immigrant National Survey a few years earlier and by the CILS parental survey in 1995. Despite the differences in national settings and time, immigrant parents in Spain are quite similar in terms of human capital, length of residence in the country, and present occupational status to their counterparts in the United States. They are also similar in their high educational ambition for the children, regardless of national origin or human capital background. Differences emerge in the transmission of such high aspirations to second-generation youths, which are much higher in the United States than in Spain. Other aspects of the economic and psycho-social adaptation profile of immigrant parents in both countries, such as perceptions of discrimination and co-ethic solidarity, are further explored.

This chapter examines how legal and social structure affects the exercise of family life, noting that the right to family life is a crucial bedrock of a just migration policy. It first provides an overview of attachment and belonging as key components of childhood, arguing that delays and other, more enduring legal obstacles to reunion unsettle the bedrock of family life on which children are meant to be raised. It then considers the difficulties facing refugee families and immigrants who leave home to improve their economic prospects, along with the different hurdles to family reunification for children left behind by immigrant parents. It also discusses children's right to family reunion, European human rights law, and children's reunification with parents in the United States. The chapter concludes by looking at smuggling as a means of family reunification.

This chapter examines the conflict over food that pitted New York-born Italians against their immigrant parents during the period 1920–1930. It begins with a discussion of how food became a symbol of both domesticity and ethnicity for Italian Americans in East Harlem by focusing on the domestic conflicts that arose between first- and second-generation Italian immigrants, and particularly the food conflicts in the immigrant home. It then explores the factors that fueled the clash of values and tastes between immigrant children and their parents, including the former's fascination for a modern popular culture that disregarded immigrant ways of life as backward and inferior, and the parents' desire to own a home—which meant mobilizing all of a family's resources, including children's paychecks—and sacrificing other investments in social mobility such as education. It also considers how food and food rituals were used in the construction of the Italian American family, with its emphasis on solidarity, strong gender roles, a commitment to work, suspicion toward abstract ideas, and an appreciation of the limits of happiness.

This chapter examines how, during the period 1930–1940, Italian immigrants in East Harlem articulated new food-based strategies aimed at controlling the mobility of immigrant children by delaying their embrace of middle-class values. It considers how the family table became a place for negotiating generational conflicts between immigrant parents and their American-born children by expounding on the so-called generational contract, whereby children were granted much greater autonomy in public in exchange for showing allegiance to the family through regular participation in the gatherings centered on ritual food consumption that brought families together. The chapter asks why immigrants insisted on such family food rituals in exchange for relinquishing control of their children's public life, and why younger Italian Americans agreed. It shows that the Italian American family's ritual Sunday dinner was not only about eating but also about the discursive articulation of nation and ethnic identity in the diasporic private sphere.

This chapter explores how adult children of Korean immigrants navigate health care options for their parents, paying attention to the personal limitations and challenges that they face in caring for chronically ill or frail elders. The lives of Korean immigrants are intertwined with those of their adult children as many parents face challenges that include language barriers, prejudice and discrimination, lack of information regarding illness, health, and health care services, and difficulties interacting with health care providers and institutions. Furthermore, many Korean Americans lack insurance due to high rates of self-employment. This chapter considers the ways that immigrant children fulfill the roles of advocate and intermediary in order to secure health care and wellness for their immigrant parents, along with their own struggle to find ways to care for themselves and balance their lives.

This chapter addresses the education experiences and outcomes of children of full or partial foreign parentage who grew up in Japan. It highlights some of their education strategies and practices and discusses how migration channels, parents' socioeconomic situations, and cultural backgrounds affect such practices and children's education achievements. Immigrant parents, regardless of their class and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, share an eagerness to advance their children's education. They strategize among different educational options and choose those they believe can produce better outcomes as well as match their mobility goals. However, the educational outcomes of the children vary widely, across national groups and along class lines. This has to do with the variant cultural, social, and economic resources that can be used to advance children's education. Meanwhile, the easiest educational choice available to them, Japanese public education, falls short in facilitating immigrant children's education mobility. The different choices of educational institutions in Japan include Japanese schools and “foreigner schools.” There is also the option of transnational education.