Exam 10: Immigrant Families: Resilience Through Adversity

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Research on the impact of parentification on the children of immigrants shows a mixture of positive and negative effects.
Latinx youth were found to report distressful feelings when engaging in language brokering for parents, which was then associated with problematic family relationships, suggesting maladaptive effects of parentification (Peris et al., 2008; Weisskirch, 2007).
Immigrant parents from the former Soviet Union to Israel reported negative feelings associated with loss of status for having their children speak on their behalf, which led to low self-esteem and self-efficacy in youth (Oznobishin & Kurman, 2009).
Studies that have found maladaptive aspects of parentification tend to highlight the overburdening of children, which leads to problematic adjustment among these children (Burton, 2007).
Bajaj's (2008) study, Asian Pacific American youth reported that language brokering provided opportunities to talk with their parents and to participate in family decision making.
Vietnamese youth also reported that the amount of cultural brokering was associated with family adaptability, although it was unassociated with family satisfaction or cohesion (Trickett & Jones, 2007).
Other empirical studies found that parentification promoted the child's self-concepts, ethnic identify, competence, positive social relationships, and academic achievement (Kuperminc et al., 2009, 2013; Pomerantz et al., 2011; Weisskirch, 2005).
Studies have found that for many children of immigrant families, parentification such as language brokering is considered part of normative family assisting behaviors that occur routinely in the household (Orellana, 2001, 2003) and that such family assistance promotes the child's sense of role fulfillment and subsequently helps them cope with challenges they face in mainstream society (Fuligni & Flook, 2005).