“If We Can’t Do It,Our Children Will Do It One Day”

Abstract

This study examined migration narratives of West African immigrants for the connections between experiences of loss and educational aspirations for their children. The qualitative design consisted of three interviews per family in which parents (N = 20, 12 families) were asked to narrate their families’ migration histories. Transcripts were analyzed using grounded theory followed by thematic coding. Discussions of loss were markedly proximal to discussions of children’s education. Schooling was described as providing upward mobility but conflicting with education at home, which was seen as fostering traditional values. Discussion contextualizes findings using Hobfoll’s conservation of resources theory and Kagitçibasi’s family change theory. Implications include salience of loss to educational aspirations and school-family partnerships for immigrants.

Keywords

education family immigration parent aspirations parent expectations upward mobility West Africans

Introduction

The experience of migration has been characterized as a twofold process of “looking backward” to what has been left behind while “looking forward” (Lee, 2010, p. 160) to new possibilities, hopes, and expectations afforded by host countries (Lee, 2010; Sluzki, 1979). Migration is universally marked by a series of psychological stressors (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Sluzki, 1979; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001), including the difficulty of having to come to terms with the separation and loss associated with leaving a native country while simultaneously adapting to a new, unfamiliar environment of a host country (Hollander, 2006; Mbanaso & Crewe, 2011). The magnitude of migrants’ loss varies based on the circumstances of migration and level of deliberation that goes into planning departure. Physical uprooting from native lands is associated with ruptures in social networks and cultural connectedness, and losses in material assets that cannot be transferred to host countries are particularly salient among migrants who leave in haste to escape armed conflict and ethnic or political persecution (Ryan, Dooley, & Benson, 2008). The losses experienced through migration and the acculturative demands in the new host country are often hypothesized to exacerbate adaptive resources and provoke a range of stress responses (Smart & Smart, 1995).

At the same time, migration narratives are often interwoven with hope. Individuals and families who migrate to the United States vary in skill level and educational background at the point of entry but typically share a common objective of access to better economic opportunities, political freedom, and social mobility—the American Dream (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). For immigrants from developing nations, these objectives are also closely associated with the desire to offer their children greater opportunities for growth, advancement, and prosperity (Chuang & Gielen, 2009), and immigrant families consistently refer to education as both a goal in itself and the conduit to upward mobility (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2012; Portes & Rivas, 2011). These hopes and expectations may thus be framed as positive psychological adaptations to the stressful environmental demands of migration and acculturation (Berry, 1997). A widely cited phenomenon referred to as immigrant optimism (Kao & Tienda, 1995; Portes & Rivas, 2011; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995) attests to these common ambitions and positive expectations. Many voluntary migrants believe that the host country will provide viable opportunities for their social advancement and that their endured sacrifices and hard work will translate into upward mobility for themselves and/or their children. These conceptions have been hypothesized to influence parents’ socialization practices via their positive aspirations for their children and their children’s achievements and success (Kao & Tienda, 1998; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995).

Parents’ educational aspirations are suggested to have direct and indirect effects on children’s subsequent achievement motivation and educational achievement (Raleigh & Kao, 2010). Immigrant parents regularly express higher educational aspirations for their children than U.S.-born parents, including the expectation of college graduation (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2012; Raleigh & Kao, 2010). In a longitudinal study of the college aspirations of immigrant and native-born parents, Raleigh and Kao (2010) found that immigrant parents across all ethnic backgrounds consistently expressed higher aspirations for their children and that this trend persisted over time, as compared to native-born parents. Interestingly, among the Black participants in this study, foreign-born parents were four times more likely to express higher college aspirations for their children and to maintain those aspirations over time than native-born parents.

Researchers likewise consistently note that immigrant youths enter school with higher expressed academic aspirations and the desire to achieve than their native-born counterparts (Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Kao & Tienda, 1995; Raleigh & Kao, 2010). In a study of 309 recently arrived immigrant students between the ages of 9 and 14, Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (1995) found that over three-quarters of participants gave positive characterizations to school-related sentence-completion tasks. In comparison, less than 30% of U.S-born, European-descent students made such positive statements. Over 81% of this immigrant cohort reported that they hoped to go to college after completing high school. Notably, high educational aspirations are more often stressed in families that value the continuation of cultural connections to their country of origin (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Raleigh & Kao, 2010). It has been suggested that “cultural capital” (Throsby, 1999), such as bilingualism and values that foster close family bonds, affords students an instrumental advantage via greater access to information networks and social support systems (Rumberger & Larson, 1998). Upkeep of the native language also promotes family cohesiveness and provides a means by which strong intergenerational and community values and expectations about achievement can be transmitted to and honored by youth (Crosnoe & Lopez Turley, 2011).

These themes are echoed in a body of literature that has pointed to a perplexing phenomenon coined the “immigrant paradox” (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009, p. 4), in which many less acculturated first-generation immigrants display better outcomes than their native-born counterparts (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009; Suárez-Orozco, Rhodes, & Milburn, 2009; Tienda & Haskins, 2011). Despite new immigrants’ commonly lower socioeconomic standing in the United States, their children are often physically and psychologically healthier, have higher achievement-related beliefs, perform better in school, and engage in less risky behaviors (Fuligni, 1997; Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995; Szalacha, Marks, Lamarre, & Garcia Coll, 2005). Conversely, many immigrants see their circumstances decline with years of residence in the United States as well as over successive generations (Crosnoe & Lopez Turley, 2011; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Some have suggested the mediating effects of optimism (Portes & Rivas, 2011), family values (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009), family obligations (Schneider & Lee, 1990; van Geel & Vedder, 2011), and multiple caretakers (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001) in serving a protective function among children of immigrants. The downward trends might be explained by the erosion of these positive dynamics as families acculturate and “Americanize” (Gandara & Contreras, 2009). These studies counter the traditional perspective that immigrant status poses a developmental risk (e.g., Aronowitz, 1984) by proposing that immigrant optimism and the associated educational aspirations may serve to promote positive social and behavioral adjustment among children and youth, including educational achievement (Crosnoe & Lopez Turley, 2011; Garcia Coll & Marks, 2009).

In aggregate, these findings suggest that the various push and pull factors that motivate migration and influence families’ adaption to the host country play a significant role in shaping the academic trajectories of their children (Hagelskamp, Suárez-Orozco, & Hughes, 2010). While several studies have focused on family processes, social capital, and migration motivations to explain children’s academic trajectories, few have examined the role of parents’ migration-related losses and its relationship to the achievement expectations that they have for their children. An exploration of immigrant parents’ educational expectations and aspirations as adaptive responses to perceptions of loss may provide added insight into influences that underlie immigrant children’s educational experiences.

Although the concepts of “educational aspirations” and “educational expectations” are distinct in that the former refers to future academic ambitions whereas the latter refers to realistic educational goals given past experiences, they have often been aggregated in the literature because they are closely related and because respondents often fail to make semantic distinctions between the two (cf. Feliciano, 2006). In the current study we use both the terms aspirations and expectations in order to account for their interconnected meanings and to express the idea that these processes may be operating in tandem.

The current study explores the connection between migration-related loss and educational aspirations within a sample of West African immigrants in New York City. Most studies that target immigrant subgroups have centered on Latino, Afro-Caribbean, and Asian populations, as they are represented in larger numbers in the United States. African immigrants have received much less attention in the empirical literature.

African Immigrants in the United States

The past decades have seen a surge in migration from Africa to the United States. For West Africans, the primary push factors include escape from economic hardship, war, and ethno-political conflict (Dryden-Peterson, 2011). The number of immigrants from Africa has increased more than 40-fold in the past half century, from 35,355 in 1960 to 1.4 million in 2007 (Migration Information Source, 2013). Attention to the educational socialization and trajectories of African families warrants closer attention, given that children of African immigrants represent some of the fastest growing immigrant subgroups in U.S. public school systems (Dryden-Peterson, 2011). The largest number of African immigrants currently resides in the New York metropolitan area. In 2010, one in five Black immigrant students in New York City public schools Grades 1 through 8 was born in Africa. While the number of Black students overall declined rapidly between 2000 and 2010, the number of students born in Africa steadily increased (Doucet, Schwartz, & Debraggio, 2011). Little information is available regarding the academic performance of African students. The practice in the literature is to compare the performance of U.S.-born Blacks to foreign-born Blacks—namely, not to disaggregate non-U.S. Black children by country or region of origin. These studies often portray foreign-born Blacks as model minorities with generally higher levels of educational attainment (Kent, 2007; Massey, Mooney, Torres, & Charles, 2007; Pierre, 2004; Rong & Brown, 2002). There is a small literature that notes that this bias has also been applied to students from African nations (Doucet et al., 2011; Louie, 2004; Pierre, 2004).

The concentration of Black immigrants in U.S. urban centers has placed families in close proximity to neighborhoods marked by adversity and racial segregation. This reality complicates minority immigrants’ ethnic identity construction in the host country, as Americans’ pan-ethnic view of Black minorities subjects Black immigrants to the same experiences of racial stratification and negative representations by mainstream society as African Americans. Rong and Brown (2002) posit that children of Black immigrants (i.e., Afro-Caribbeans and Africans) have succeeded in U.S. schools despite poverty, racial discrimination, and immigrant status—the so-called “triple disadvantage” (p. 255). Black immigrants are also more likely to have and to maintain disproportionately higher college aspirations for their children than native-born Blacks (Raleigh & Kao, 2010).

Rong and Brown (2002) suggest that the strong desire for upward mobility has led many Black immigrants to emphasize and over-assert their national origins and cultural differences in an effort to distance themselves from native-born Blacks to evade racial labeling. This effort is hypothesized to originate in an attempt to circumvent the societal obstacles that come with Black status in the United States. Assimilation for Black immigrants thus denotes assimilation into an already marginalized segment of society with little opportunity for upward mobility (Pierre, 2004). Rong and Brown propose that Black immigrants’ varying patterns of ethnic self-identification have profound implications for educational outcomes in that they influence students’ perceptions of access to opportunities in general as well as perceptions of whether or not efforts are justly rewarded. Critics counter that ethnic identification is not as much of a choice as Rong and Brown suggest and that the conflation of race, ethnicity, and class in the United States inevitably has negative consequences for Black immigrants (Pierre, 2004). However, the body of literature consistently proposes that many immigrant minorities leverage their optimism and aspirations to elicit greater academic achievement in their children. It is thus widely held that the perceived promise that educational success holds for upward mobility has led many Black immigrant parents to emphasize the importance of schooling despite evidence of structural disadvantages for Black minorities in the United States.

Theoretical Framework

Two theories are particularly salient for understanding parents’ achievement expectations in the context of migration. The first is conservation of resources theory (COR; Hobfoll, 1989, 2001). COR posits that humans are fundamentally motivated to gain and protect valued resources and that the actual or potential loss of these resources is a primary source of stress. Resources may include such material objects as clothing and housing or such psychological and social attributes as self-esteem and companionship. Hobfoll (2001) describes resources as “desired goal objects” (p. 349) that are both objectively and culturally construed as valuable. Individuals from different cultural subgroups will thus vary in the kinds of resources that they pursue. COR suggests that the actual loss or threat of loss of these resources motivates individuals to invest their energies into recovering them or into cultivating other resources as a way of offsetting their loss. The current study uses COR as a framework within which to conceptualize the strategies that immigrant parents employ to make up for migration-related losses and the value they ascribe to particular resources that are available to them in the new host country.

The second theoretical framework is Kagitçibasi’s (2005) model of culturally idiosyncratic family socialization patterns (see Figure 1). Kagitçibasi (2005) provides a lens for understanding parental expectations as embedded within “systems of cultural priorities” (Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2008, p. 183). This model eschews the bipolarity of independence versus interdependence (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Singelis, 1994) and instead proposes two orthogonal dimensions—agency (autonomy vs. heteronomy) and interpersonal distance (relatedness vs. separation)—from which four possible family models (independence, interdependence, psychological interdependence, and hierarchical neglecting), family orientations (self-reliance, order setting control and autonomy, obedience, and neglecting), and self-construals emerge. Each situates the family within a sociocultural context that results in prototypical patterns of socialization and dominant value orientations. In the current study, Kagitçibasi’s model provides a fitting framework within which to explore how cultural priorities underlie parental goal setting, family interaction patterns, and achievement-related beliefs.

Figure 1.

Agency, interpersonal distance, and the types of selves and families.

Kagitçibasi’s (2005) model may additionally extend an understanding of COR theory within a sociocultural context (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001) wherein families with particular cultural orientations have shared meanings and values that they ascribe to different resources. Each of the quadrants in Kagitçibasi’s model represent a figurative “comfort zone” within which families prefer to operate. When threatened, as is often the case in the acculturative process (cf. Berry, 2005; Wong & Wong, 2006), the particulars of families’ comfort zones may help explain levels of stress and compensatory measures that they take to reduce that stress. An integrated framework of how stress generation and stress reduction operate within culturally specific family systems is thus directly informed by an understanding of parental values, choices, and practices in the context of migration.

Current Study

The purpose of the current qualitative study was twofold: (a) to explore salient themes in the ways that West African immigrant parents frame their experiences of loss and educational aspirations for their children and (b) to explore whether and how parents’ educational aspirations for their children are associated with their migration-related losses. We expected that findings would add insight into the processes by which forced and voluntary families from West Africa adapt to their host country, as well as the mechanisms by which their aspirations for their children emerge from their losses to shape their children’s educational trajectories. A two-stage qualitative design was utilized (described in detail in Methods). The first stage took place prior to the development of the current study goals and applied a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser, 1992; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). With little research on this population to guide a priori expectations of the central themes and issues, grounded theory provided a systematic framework from which to generate an open understanding of how and why West African immigrants in New York develop and enact particular meanings. The second stage employed thematic coding (Boyatzis, 1998; Roulston, 2001) to address the current study goals, using themes drawn from the literature on educational aspirations of immigrant families (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2012; Hao & Bonstead-Bruns, 1998; Kao & Tienda, 1995; Portes & Rivas, 2011; Raleigh & Kao, 2010; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995) to extend the initial grounded analyses. The aforementioned conceptual frameworks were introduced during the second stage of analyses.

Methods

Participants

Inclusion criteria were selected in order to comprise a purposeful and meaningfully homogeneous sample of West African immigrant parents. These criteria included being born in West Africa, being Muslim, being parents of school-aged children, and having at least three years of residence in the United States. We decided to exclusively sample Muslim participants in order to be able to explore recurring themes in their migration and family narratives without confounding the examination with religious variations in parental mores, as childrearing and family life in general are often influenced by religious doctrine. In order to ensure variability in migration narratives between those who left their countries of origin to escape political persecution (i.e., forced migrants) and those who left primarily for economic reasons (i.e., voluntary migrants), participants were purposefully recruited from two sources: community-based organizations serving West Africans in the United States and a hospital clinic serving asylum seekers with many West African clients. The final sample consisted of 20 West African fathers and mothers between the ages of 22 and 66 (M = 44.4) from 12 families who had resided in the United States between 4 and 22 years (M = 11.5). Four families were recruited at the clinic and eight through community contacts (four families were referred by an Imam, and four families were recruited at a health fair held at a community based organization). See Table 1 for demographic details.

Table 1

Participant Demographics

Variable	n
Sex
Female	10
Male	10
Ethnicity
Fulani	16
Mandingo	3
Sou Sou	1
Country of origin
Sierra Leone	6
Guinea	8
Liberia	2
Côte d’Ivoire	2
Mauritania	2
Immigration status
Forced	17
Voluntary	3
Education
Koranic school only	5
Less than high school	7
High school	4
Some college	1
College	2
Missing	1

Note. N = 20.

Procedures

The study design comprised three in-depth interviews with each family (one joint interview with both parents and one interview with each parent separately), held at locations of participants’ choice. All participants were asked for and provided written informed consent. Eleven participants chose to do interviews in English, three in French, and for six we used a Fulani interpreter. Two native French speakers (the second and third authors) conducted the interviews in French. The third author then transcribed these into English. The interpreted interviews were conducted by professional Fulani interpreters, and only the English translations were subsequently transcribed. In the first interview both parents were asked to jointly narrate their migration histories. This began with an open-ended request: “Tell me the story of your family, starting in your home country and leading up to your life here in the U.S.” The interview guide continued with prompts purposefully designed to structure narratives into premigration (e.g., “What are the things that make you remember your life in your home country the most?”), migration (e.g., “Why did you decide to travel to the United States?”), and postmigration (e.g., “How did you cope with living in a culture that was different from the one in your home country?”) and to elicit subjective experiences of events and conditions. Each parent was then interviewed separately within two weeks of the first interview to review family narratives and relate migration narratives to specific challenges that they and their families had experienced since migration. Specific attention was given to family conflict, acculturative experiences, and hopes for the future. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Procedures were reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board of the New York University School of Medicine where the senior (last) author was at the time.

Data Analysis

Analyses were conducted in two stages. The first stage used a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser, 1992; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to identify salient themes. Investigators began by reading the first three families’ transcribed narratives, recording their initial impressions and generating a list of open codes. Subsequent team meetings then led to a discussion of insights and biases vis-à-vis the data, recognition of baseline sensitizing concepts, and a comparison of open codes. Investigators then generated an agreed-upon list of axial codes that were used to code all transcripts. Each transcript and field note file was coded using ATLAS.ti software (ATLAS.ti Scientific Software Development GmbH, 2009) by two investigators, who also wrote memos on text they felt was particularly salient. These coders then met to finalize consensus versions of each coded file.

After grounded analyses were completed, Stage 2 of the analyses applied thematic coding (Boyatzis, 1998; Roulston, 2001) to select codes and memos that were generated in the first stage and that were identified as relevant to the current study goals. Thus, themes related to educational aspirations and expectations of immigrants, as well as our conceptual frameworks, were drawn a priori from the literature only in the second stage of analyses. Text coded as “Loss” (i.e., any reference to loss experiences or consequences of loss; may include loss of future opportunities), “Child” (i.e., any reference to child or children), and “Education,” (i.e., related to schools and academic achievement) was reexamined using thematic coding. The text was identified using the query and co-occurrence operators in ATLAS.ti. Related text chunks and memos were then each examined by two investigators in order to generate a set of salient themes (Ryan & Bernard, 2003). Criteria that determined whether an idea was deemed a theme included (a) frequency of occurrence within and across families, (b) the emotional impact of the language participants used (e.g., via repetition and emphasis of words), and (c) the themes’ relatedness to extant scholarly literature. Disagreements were addressed via consensus building among a team of four investigators by relating the themes back to the original research questions.

We examined the salience of loss and children’s education to one another through two different approaches. The first involved qualitatively reviewing analytic memos and field notes associated with text coded as Loss, Child, and Education. Content and topics were noted and cross-referenced with text. The second involved examining textual proximity between the codes Loss, Child, and Education. We began the latter by identifying instances of Loss codes and looked for the nearest instances of the overlap between Child and Education codes. We then counted the number of exchanges in conversation between them; a difference of 1, for example, implied that between a parent’s mention of loss and a mention of their child’s education the interviewer made one utterance or remark, whereas a difference of 0 implied that the codes Loss, Child, and Education co-occurred within the same narrative without interruption. Exchanges in conversation ranged from simple interjections (“Yes” or “Uh huh”) to more elaborate questions or comments.

In order to maximize the confidence in findings, we applied several strategies for rigor (cf. Padgett, 2008). These strategies included verification, triangulation, and auditability. Verification involved reviewing migration narratives collected in participant couples’ interviews in later individual follow-up interviews. The data were triangulated with the use of multiple interview formats (i.e., interviews with the husband-wife pair and individual interviews), purposeful composition of participants (i.e., mothers and fathers, forced and voluntary migration histories), the use of multiple coders on each transcript during grounded theory analyses and on identified text chunks during thematic coding, and the use of two methods to identify the salience of themes. Lastly, investigators maintained an audit trail that included dates of interview schedules and content of team meetings.

Findings

Findings are presented in summary form, with quotes following transcription conventions described by Agar and MacDonald (1995), which indicate interruptions with double-slashes and verbal emphases by underlining. Participants are identified by gender and age (e.g., “M42” is a 42-year-old father).

Migration-Related Losses

References to past losses generated four dominant themes: (1) loss of material assets, (2) loss of status, (3) loss of culture, and (4) loss of familial and communal networks. The latter two often overlapped with each other. Table 2 lists all identified themes of loss and their frequencies.

Table 2

Types and Frequencies of Themes Within Loss Code

Loss Themes	n
Family and communal networks	26
Assets	13
Culture	12
Status	9
Hope	4
Time	4
Agency	3
Educational opportunities	3
Country	3
Trust	2
Self/soul	2
Memory	1

A 42-year-old father from Sierra Leone described how conditions in his home country led to the loss of property, valued assets, and subsequently the hope of being able to restore a life of normalcy:

M42: But when the war came in there, [sighs] I can’t begin to tell you, that was a real, that’s a destruction. Destruction of properties, destruction of life, destruction of hope, destruction of everything. . . . Things that your great grandfather, your father fight for so long, in a single day or in a single minute, everything just vanish. (Interview, December 20, 2010)

References to loss of status often emerged from discussions over lost assets. The same man continued:

M42: I do miss my country so much. So much. [quietly] So much. I didn’t say my family were rich, but, [quietly] we were not that poor. Nah. Not that poor. My father was a diamond dealer. So we got a lot of houses. We live the life that anybody wants to live in. (Interview, December 20, 2010)

Almost all parents associated residency in the United States with a sense of mourning over the loss of their culture and the regret over cultural discontinuities. A 43-year-old mother from Mauritania referenced the way in which her children’s rigorous school schedules limited them in their ability to maintain their religious practice of daily prayer:

F43: // We lack the time to practice prayer because . . . when we get home to do the five prayers together, is difficult for them . . . the children don’t understand the homework . . . [whispers] it’s too tiring. Five times, it is hard. (Interview, December 15, 2010)

Parents frequently voiced challenges with adapting their rearing practices to that of the host culture. A father and voluntary migrant from Guinea expressed his concern:

M66: Raising children here is not easy. You cannot raise a child the same way you raised them back home, you cannot discipline them the way you discipline them back home. So it’s difficult to adjust to the way you raise a child here. (Interview, June 1, 2011)

The accompanying analytic memo also references the underlying sense of loss in this father’s narrative:

The sense of loss and bereavement is implied in not being able to perform cultural parenting practices. (Analytic memo, M66)

Parents likewise referred to a sense of social alienation and loss of communal support due to physical separation from kith and kin, as well as cultural differences in the ways people related to one another in the United States. A father from Côte d’Ivoire stated:

M35: I discover it’s not the same culture, because it’s not easy to trust. And get the friend, it’s not easy . . . it’s like a prison because you just communicate with those guys coming from the same country. . . . It’s not like Africa. You know in Africa you can meet today, tomorrow, and then the relations it start growing. But here it’s not the case. Everyone is belong in his community. (Interview, April 9, 2012)

Parents’ Educational Aspirations

The salience of education across all narratives was well represented by the statement of a 49-year-old father of five from Sierra Leone:

M49: What do I expect from [my children]? I expect from them to try hard and get good education since I don’t go to school. And do very well. Do well in school, do well by themselves when they grow up. I expect them to go to college. (Interview, March 22, 2011)

A 43-year-old mother from Guinea described the importance of formal schooling in guaranteeing their upward mobility:

F43: Well, the most important thing for me, for my children, is school. Because with education you can do anything. You can get a good job, you can be a doctor, you can, uh, there are a lot of good jobs, but in order to get them you have to have an education. So that is why I focus on school. (Interview, July 25, 2011)

This was similarly reflected in the comments of a 35-year-old father from Côte d’Ivoire:

M35: You see, now, for me, I never accept my brother or my kid coming here, let him do the taxi, let him do something else. I’m going to push him to go to school. I’m going to push him to do it. If he don’t want to go to school, then I’m going to push him to say, “Okay, go looking for certificate, looking for a job, like electricity. There’s a lot of certificate you can get.” (Interview, April 9, 2012)

Several statements suggested that parents used the term education to extend beyond the context of formal schooling to something transmitted in the home via the family’s cultural heritage. A 40-year-old father from Guinea described what he expected of his children in the United States. His references to “acting proper,” the home, and school reflected his understanding that learning and socialization are situated in multiple contexts:

M40: As of right now, at this moment, the way I imagined my kids or the way I would want them to be is, uh, a bit similar the way I grew up. . . . I would like them to act proper. What I mean by that is basically, they will go to school and they will come back home. (Interview, January 6, 2011)

A 29-year-old mother from Côte d’Ivoire whose son was sent back to the native country to continue his education echoed the perspective that strict rearing and disciplining practices transmitted in the home are aligned with a “good education.”

F29: Education here and for us is different, that’s why I had my son leave. . . . He is back there. He’s studying but he comes here all the time, stays with me and then goes back. Because what I saw here with the children and back home is different. . . . It’s different because here . . . you cannot discipline your child like that. . . . You see, we are used to disciplining our children . . . and if you can’t . . . if your child is not afraid of you, that’s not good. A child must know that you are their mother. . . . It’s because of that the education of children here, it’s not easy. (Interview, May 9, 2012)

Passages like these highlighted parents’ socialization goals for children as well as their attempts to negotiate the demands of the new host culture with the traditional values of the heritage culture.

Salience of Loss to Educational Aspirations

The salience of parents’ losses to their educational aspirations for their children was evident in (a) the content of memos and field notes and (b) textual proximity. Memos frequently highlighted the prevalence of experiences of loss, the centrality of education to children’s socialization in the United States, and the importance of their children’s educational success to relieving their families from hardship.

A 35-year-old-father from Côte d’Ivoire was asked about his strategies for coping with stress in the United States, upon which the interviewer memoed:

Future narrative as coping with present: When [the interviewer] asks about how M35 deals with stress, M35 responds that he thinks about future opportunities for his children. He delineates American secondary school and university; university in US is good, secondary school is not. He has sent his children to Ivory Coast to study in secondary school. (Analytic memo, M35)

This memo aligns with COR theory in that educational success for one’s children is deemed a fitting compensatory response to both pre- and postmigration stress. Another memo for this father accompanies his statement that he intended to push his son to receive an education instead of having to settle for subpar work.

M35 describes the status loss that people like himself go through upon arrival. The problem becomes that the people who have been here a while have not really hooked into opportunity, and then you don’t have anyone “who can advise you.” M35 trying to explain how status loss gets entrenched within communities. (Analytic memo, M35)

A 66-year-old father from Guinea invoked President Obama’s life history when asked about his expectations for his children. This narrative echoed his vision of the American Dream:

M66: My real wish for them is that because we’re in this country, which is a country of opportunity, is for them to get an education because that is the foundation for everything. When you have parents who try to do their best and just want you to concentrate on your education because this is a country of opportunity, and if you concentrate on your education, there’s nothing you cannot achieve in this country and the simple example that I would give would be the president of this country. His father came here and just because his father came here, he had him here and because he had um, supervision and was able to take advantage of the opportunities of education and today he’s the leader of this country. So everything is possible and that is what I wish for my children. (Interview, June 1, 2011)

The corresponding memo highlighted the inherent paradox that parents’ expectations for their children appear to be unaffected by adverse realities in the United States:

In America everything is possible: The unrealistic expectations that family members have for those living in U.S. are also passed down to the children. Parents who know how hard life is here for them talk about the U.S. as if it has endless opportunities for their children—why doesn’t the reality that it’s difficult here for them also transmit down to the expectations they have for their children?? (Analytic memo, M66)

In contrast, for some other parents the American Dream was often not as readily available. A sense of loss of know-how and proficiency was reflected in the narrative and accompanying memo of a father from Sierra Leone:

M42: You don’t know the procedures in New York, when they say “America,” you think as soon as you [snaps twice] come down here [snaps twice] everything’s gonna be okay with you. That was not my experience at all. (Interview, December 20, 2010)

Everyone wants to come to America but the expectations are not the same as reality. Perhaps this is exacerbated when coming from war-ravaged contexts? Looking hard for resources to take the place of loss experienced during war, you are disappointed when you find that you don’t know how things work. (Analytic memo, M42)

Parents occasionally provided economic metaphors of the role of children within families. A father from Guinea likened a child who is raised traditionally to a monetary investment that will yield future profits and a child acculturated to the U.S. system as a threat to that investment:

M66: [Back] home when you educate your children and you bring them up, it’s like an investment, it’s like taking money and putting it in the bank because when the children grow up and they make something of themselves, they take care of you, whatever you need, they do for you. If you want a car, they buy you a car, if you don’t have a home, they build you a home, if you want to go for your pilgrimage to Mecca, they send you they take care of you. But here when you bring up your children and invest in them and you educate them, once they grow up and they’re able to take care of themselves, that’s it, you go your way. (Interview, June 1, 2011)

The accompanying analytic memo highlighted a father’s “economic understanding of the child’s position in the family” and its relation to COR theory.

The notion that parents’ expectations for their children emerged from their sense of lost opportunities was reflected in the memos of two separate families from Sierra Leone:

Hope for education does not only refer to children: respondent equally refers to himself. Respondent “projecting” own aspirations on children. (Analytic memo, M42)

He suggests that he has lost the ambition that he had when he initially arrived, but instead has transferred it to his children. The high expectations he had for himself have been inherited by his kids—he no longer expects it of himself. (Analytic memo, M43)

The examination of textual proximity via the number of exchanges in conversation between codes of Loss and the intersections of Child and Education yielded that there was considerable proximity between narratives of loss and discussions of their children’s education. These occurrences were present in the narratives of all 12 families. After removing five outliers that ranged from 730 to 872 exchanges in conversation (because of the obviously disparate topics of conversation), our frequency output yielded that of the 111 references to the overlap between Child and Education, just under one half (n = 50, 45%) were within 25 exchanges from any reference to loss. The modal number of exchanges between them was 0 (n = 18), and the second most common one was 1 (n = 9). The distribution of exchanges indicated that when parents spoke of loss, they often segued without prompting into discussing their children’s education, and when they talked about their children’s education, they likewise often referred to losses.

For a 42-year-old father and a 33-year-old mother who fled war in Sierra Leone, descriptions of the support their family had received from hospital staff in the United States was followed by a discussion of their educational expectations for their children. After reporting that the staff helped the family overcome past trauma, they segued into describing the source of their optimism:

M42: Yeaaaah. So that’s why we forgot about a lot of stuff. But, it’s not that we’re gonna forget, to tell you, but, most of the stuff that we think of//

F33: //maybe we take courage that things//

M42: //We have courage that here, if we can’t do it, our children will do it one day. So this is the courage right now we have. And they are doing very well. They are doing very very very very well. . . . That’s the hope right now we have. Because more, probably before the next three years, my first son will be in college. So that will be a very very very good experience for me. (Interview, December 20, 2010)

Later in the same interview this father interrupted the interviewer to show off a number of trophies that his children had earned in school for academic and sports achievement.

When asked about his ambitions, a 43-year-old forced migrant father from Sierra Leone associated “hope” with his children’s academic success:

M43: Well, I have a proverb, “We never lose hope.” When I was in school we have a song of, “We Never Lose Hope.” . . . So I’m still hoping. But at this moment? My main focus is now my kids is getting bigger and bigger? So, I’m like, retiring right now little by little from my ambitions. Now I’m focusing personally now how my kids can go to college. . . . So, you know I am very happy they are learning. My son is doing good in school. I always ask him to do more. And my daughter here she’s doing good in school, so I’m very happy with that. (Interview, February 4, 2011)

A 43-year-old voluntary migrant from Guinea referred to how she related economic hardship in her home country with the desire for future success for her children:

F43: I talk to them a lot about, you know, the situation back home, the difference with here going to school . . . all the advantages they have here compared to back home. And I also talk to them about how we can work this out so they can go back so they can see what they left behind, and then when they come back, they will be even more determination to succeed in life. (Interview, July 25, 2011)

The continued comparisons between past losses and hardships on the one hand and the opportunities afforded in the host country on the other were believed by many parents to motivate their children toward greater educational success.

School-Home Conflicts of Interest

Within participants’ narratives also existed a notable counterfactual: Although parents viewed formal schooling in the United States as a gateway to financial gain and upward mobility, schooling was also seen as conflicting with cultural rearing goals and the ability to transmit important values to their children.

A 66-year-old father from Guinea reported that U.S. schooling actively undermined his parental authority:

M66: When it comes to discipline, the children, because we’re here, they know that you cannot hit them, you cannot punish them the way we do back home. So the children feel like they have more power than you do as a parent. In school, the . . . teachers teach the children a lot of things, like you know, if your parents do something to you, you should call the police. (Interview, June 1, 2011)

When asked about differences in parenting experiences between Guinea and the United States, a 40-year-old father provided an emotional response regarding the role of corporal punishment, parental authority, and disciplining in guiding children’s development toward the “good way”:

M40: Here [you’re not allowed to] punish your child at home. Why? There’s a law here. What I mean is, sometimes a law that lets children go, sometimes I do not respect the law. . . . Given the absence of the parents, the child will never be well-educated. . . . And I did have to take responsibility to my children by doing what? Giving them a good way. (Interview, January 6, 2011)

The theme of moral education extended to conversations regarding the ways in which U.S. schools competed with parental goals. These conversations included concerns that children’s peer affiliations could have a potentially corrupting influence on their school performance. A 43-year-old father from Sierra Leone reported a common dilemma: Schools provide social and moral risks as well as positive academic opportunities:

M43: As I said [to my son], “Listen . . . if you see the bad kids, don’t make friends with them, you have to know what you have to do. I wanted to send you to a better school, like private school . . . but even though you are in a public school you are getting what everyone is getting. It’s just the kind of people that surround you. If you know how to play around them, you can be succeeded like the other children in the . . . private schools.” (Interview, March 22, 2011)

This dilemma was echoed by a 43-year-old mother from Guinea:

F43: I was nervous and afraid for them because I was afraid they would go out and meet with other children, and you know here in New York some children are armed, so I was afraid someone would do something to them. (Interview, July 19, 2011)

A recurring theme in memos across several narratives regarding unwanted peer affiliations was that friends were perceived of on balance as negative.

Friends are bad: not allowing children to have friends in order to avoid negative influences of American multiculturalism. (Analytic memo, F35)

One couple, a 35-year-old father and 29-year-old mother, chose to send their older son back to their native Côte d’Ivoire for an education despite renewed family separation and considerable political and economic strife. These parents described the U.S. system of schooling as both morally inferior and one in which quality is dictated by socioeconomic strata. Their perceptions contrasted with the popular belief among many immigrants that U.S. education is superior to education in home countries and a means to upward mobility. Field notes explicated the parents’ rationale for returning their son to the native country:

Both husband and wife brought up an example of their neighbor in their previous residence whose son they saw smoking as a good indication of why they sent their own son back to their country of origin. The husband said he told his wife about the incident (seeing the Nigerian neighbor’s 13-year-old son smoking) for the purpose of proving to her the wisdom of his choice to send the son back. [The father] brought up the incident as evidence to show me that they had made the right decision. (Field notes, M35 and F29)

Demographic Subgroup Analyses

We examined whether there were any obvious differences between men and women and between forced and voluntary migrants with regards to the co-occurrence between loss and children’s education. No gender differences were found. Regarding migration histories, although it appeared that forced migrants reported more loss and made more references to their children’s education than voluntary migrants, the co-occurrence of the two codes was found to be proportionally equal among both groups.

Discussion

The finding that loss and educational aspirations were closely associated in this study suggests that educational aspirations are a key idiom through which West African parents express their future hopes. Textual overlap between the two codes Child and Education generated two overarching themes, each of which reflected the primacy of education and achievement in the rearing beliefs of these West African parents. First, children’s education was perceived as a means for recovering past losses and overcoming struggles, particularly in the domains of material loss and status loss. Hence, education was often referred to as a gateway to professional opportunities, material gains, and upward mobility. Second, the narratives also revealed that parents upheld a dual interpretation of the term education, which they talked about interchangeably. While education was most often mentioned in the context of formal schooling and systems of institutionalized learning, parents also tended to use the term in keeping with the French meaning of bien éduqué, which translates as “well brought up.” The parents regarded cultural values, religious piety, and norms of propriety as integral to their children’s general education and deemed parenting and the home environment as instrumental in this process. These findings are consistent with studies of other immigrant families’ experiences. In a study of Haitian immigrant parents, for example, Doucet (2011) found that parents shared in a philosophical belief about the purpose of education as fostering éducation, or moral guidance. Reese, Balzano, Gallimore, and Goldenberg (1995) likewise found the concepts of educación and persona de bien (literally “person of good,” figuratively “a person of character and integrity”) to be pervasive in the narratives of Spanish-speaking Latino families of kindergarten students. These parents saw their primary responsibility as teaching their children right from wrong and respect for parents, over and above their responsibility to prepare them for school.

The findings in this study also suggest that these immigrants are heavily invested in their children’s academic and professional success. Perceptions of loss (i.e., material loss, status loss, and loss of culture) are inextricably linked with hopes for the future (i.e., financial gain, upward mobility, and maintenance of traditional values), and for many parents, their children are the conduit from the former to the latter. Children’s education in the United States is therefore regarded as integral to parents’ success and family well-being. This finding echoes extant studies on the achievement beliefs and positive expectations of immigrant children and their families (Garcia Coll & Marks, 2012; Raleigh & Kao, 2010). It is also consistent with a recent ethnographic study of African immigrant children and their parents in Boston in which academic success was perceived as “the number one key for success” (Dryden-Peterson, 2011, p. 17) in the United States and in which over 96% of parents held expectations that their children would complete college.

The findings of the current study also lend themselves to an application of COR theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 2001). For many immigrants from West Africa, the exigencies of migration are self-evident: West Africa is a region of the world with a relatively recent history of violent conflict. For the nine families in this study who had fled conditions of war and ethnic persecution, the incidents of material, status, and cultural losses were particularly abrupt and extreme. Hobfoll (1989, 2001) suggests that such traumatic events often elicit active coping measures via greater risk-taking and mobilization of efforts to replace that which is lost. However, loss of connections to kith and kin and valued artifacts of the native culture are no less palpable among voluntary migrants who are in search of greater economic opportunities. In this study, fostering children’s educational success in the United States may be understood as a resource investment in the service of regaining that which was lost and thereby lowering its stressful impact. This study also underscores a feature of COR that is implied but that has not been as explicit: Proactive engagement in the replacement of resources, rather than actual replacement, may in itself be an effective strategy for stress reduction. In other words, parents’ educational aspirations and their encouragement of children’s educational success in the United States, via such measures as hiring tutors for children or actively managing their children’s peer associations, may be adaptive strategies for countering the stressful impact of migration-related losses. This may also help shed light on the mechanisms by which many Black immigrant parents are less inclined to allow structural disadvantages for Black minorities in the United States to undermine their aspirations for their children. Viewing immigrant parents’ educational expectations through the lens of COR can expand our understanding of the ways in which the gravity of families’ migration-related losses plays into their motivational drive toward facilitating their children’s educational success in the host country.

The study also demonstrates that these parents have a nuanced understanding of their children’s education as being situated within multiple contexts. Parents in the current study referred interchangeably to education as something that is transmitted via formal schooling and the home. While the former was associated with the learning required for upward mobility, the latter was associated with the transmission of the principles that guarantee the continuity of valued cultural and religious practices and a child that is bien éduqué. The fact that parents perceived a conflict between educational and social demands within each of these contexts was evident in their narratives. U.S. schooling, including the peer affiliations that result from it, was often seen as undermining rearing goals and risking parental authority.

Perceptions of discontinuities between school and home in terms of children’s moral development and views on discipline echo other qualitative studies with immigrant populations. These suggest that the cultural values imparted in the home may often compete with desires for formal education for their children in the United States (e.g., Bledsoe & Sow, 2011; Rasmussen, Akinsulure-Smith, Chu, & Keatley, 2012; Reese et al., 1995). In a study on West African immigrant families who chose to send their children back to the homeland, Bledsoe and Sow (2011) noted that although families wanted to see their children succeed in the West, their perceptions of Western societal permissiveness, indulgence, and children’s growing sense of autonomy, combined with the legal restrictions on disciplinary practices, led parents to fear for their youths’ moral development. This is reminiscent in our study of the family from Côte d’Ivoire. Having children return to the country of origin to be reared by relatives or guardians may be seen as a strategic attempt to keep their children on course to fulfilling their future familial obligations. Doucet’s (2011) study of Haitian parents of adolescents in the United States likewise suggests that such issues are not limited to African subgroups but that many immigrant parents feel threatened by and have ambivalent feelings toward the Americanized values imparted in schools. For those immigrant families residing in underserved urban centers, concerns that their children may adopt the adversarial school and behavioral culture of many of their native-born Black counterparts cause them to counter the assimilative process and to reinforce cultural practices and values that bolster a sense of ethnic and cultural pride (Rong & Fitchett, 2008). Among some immigrant subgroups, formal schools in the United States thus pose both promise and risk. As parents’ socialization practices influence children’s ethnic identity development, parents’ discouragement to affiliate or identify with American peers and their values will have implications on the degree to which their children will develop positive associations with parents’ cultural heritage. It will also impact the degree to which that identity will lend itself to the development of academic achievement motivation (Marks, Patton, & Garcia Coll, 2010).

The school-home conflict can be aptly illustrated via Kagitçibasi’s (2005) family change model of culturally specific socialization patterns. A family model characterized by interdependence and obedience to authority is hypothesized to foster a heteronomous-related sense of self. This family interaction pattern is characteristic among many rural agrarian societies in which family livelihood is dependent on intergenerational economic contributions and is also found among many traditional societies and immigrants residing in North America and Europe (Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, & Maynard, 2003; Kagitçibasi, 1996; Reese et al., 1995). Fostering the independence of children in such societies is theorized to threaten the economic stability of the family and undermine family cohesiveness. For Kagitçibasi (2005), family ideals predicated on family interdependence, obedience, and respect for authority (i.e., heteronomy-relatedness) contrast with those espousing independence, autonomy, and self-reliance (i.e., autonomy-separation). Although intended to reflect family models within cultural contexts, Kagitçibasi’s theory may also be extended to understanding educational value systems. This application of the theory sheds light on the ways in which the meaning of education can be culturally construed and the ways in which conflicting socialization goals may be imparted in multiple settings. From the perspective of COR theory, when family values that are central to the native culture (i.e., home values) are threatened by the values imparted in other relevant contexts (i.e., school values), the resulting dissonance and stress that the conflation of these worlds causes can lead families to reassert their principal beliefs through various mechanisms, be it returning the child to the home country, reinforcing disciplinary practices, or discouraging contact with non-native peers. This conflict has also been referred to in the literature as “cultural incongruence” (Au & Kawakami, 1994) or “cultural mismatch” (Ladson-Billings, 1995). The current study’s findings thus show how immigrant families can approve of the U.S. school system in as far as it leads to educational achievement while simultaneously disapproving of a core value of that liberal education system—namely, children’s independence.

Additionally, Kagitçibasi’s (2005) theory highlights the ways in which socialization practices that foster interdependence and obedience serve an instrumental function: Children’s upward mobility is integral to family economic well-being. Children’s success in the United States serves to ensure that immigrant families can fulfill vital economic responsibilities to parents as well as to family members who remain in home countries. Remittance obligations are common among West Africans in the United States. In 2010, the African diaspora remitted over $51 billion to the home continent (Africa Review, 2013), and this practice was also widely reported by participants in the current study.

Figure 2 is a graphic representation of the theorized mechanisms we propose to explain the relationship between loss and educational expectations. Parents’ investment in their children’s education via formal schooling and the home offers the opportunity to offset their losses related to migration. Positive relationships between educational settings and aspirational outcomes are represented by plus signs. The rupture between formal schooling and parents’ desire to foster cultural continuity and traditional values is represented by the arrow indicated by a minus sign.

Figure 2.

Proposed model of loss and parents’ educational aspirations for their children.

Limitations and Future Directions

By design, participants in this study comprised a small, religiously and geographically homogeneous sample of West African families residing in New York City. Findings are therefore not necessarily generalizable to other, non-Muslim African immigrant subgroups. Although the sample included equal numbers of mothers and fathers, there was a noticeable gender disparity in the extent to which parents contributed to family narratives in the first, joint interviews. This disparity is a result of the patriarchal norms of many West African societies where men have more authority to speak to outsiders. This likely resulted in narratives that are markedly oriented around fathers, and though we made many efforts to encourage women to contribute in the presence of their husbands (as did several husbands), women’s participation was primarily limited to confirmation. This may result in a “culturally appropriate” narrative in that it fits with patriarchal realities, but it should not be accepted as the final word. In a similar vein, this study did not lend itself to a meaningful exploration of differences in educational aspirations by child gender because families made few if any references to gender-specific expectations. This may be because each family’s target child was prepubescent and thus at an age where parental expectations may not yet be as differentiated. Also, although families were asked to focus their narratives around one child, they may inadvertently have generalized their thoughts around all or more than one of their children. In this sample, the number of children ranged from 2 to 16 per family, with a modal number of 5 children. Gender differences in the educational socialization of immigrant children have been noted, particularly in families from countries with “historically deeply rooted” (Kwong, 2000, p. 37) gender inequalities and gender gaps in education (Dion & Dion, 2001; Phalet & Schönpflug, 2001; Qin, 2006). Thus, future studies on gender differences in the educational socialization of West African immigrants would be a worthy contribution to the literature.

The hardships endured by 17 of the 20 participants who fled their native lands may also bias the narratives toward depictions of extreme loss. This raises the question whether the experience of loss among voluntary migrants is as salient as among forced migrants and whether this differentially impacts parents’ educational aspirations for their children. The small number of voluntary migrants in this sample did not allow for any meaningful comparisons. Although we conducted post hoc analyses of differences in loss and educational aspirations between forced and voluntary migrants, we found only a small difference in frequency of references per person to each theme; forced migrants on average made slightly more references to loss and their children’s education than voluntary migrants. However, we found no differences in the proportion of co-occurrence between education and loss and no clear qualitative differences in the narratives between groups. Given that the data are qualitative and that there were only three voluntary migrant families in the study in comparison to nine involuntary families, we hesitate to infer any meaning to the small differences we did find. Future studies should aim to examine more systematically whether narratives vis-à-vis parents’ losses and educational aspirations for their children differ by voluntary versus forced migration histories. Future comparative studies between voluntary and forced migrants may also provide more insight into whether the conditions of migration and/or gravity of loss are associated with degree of parental investment in education.

Finally, our second method of judging the salience of loss to educational aspirations was based on a particular strategy of quantifying qualitative data, namely, frequency counts of exchanges in conversation between these themes. This strategy contains inherent limitations. On the one hand, frequency counts of exchanges may overestimate the distance between two themes where those exchanges are brief interjections that encourage the flow of participants’ narratives (e.g., “tell me more”); on the other hand, interviews can change topics quickly, making distance less indicative of relatedness even though themes are close to one another in a text. Although we believe that our findings drawn from frequency counts were meaningful, we recognize that quantifying qualitative data is not without risks. We encourage the use of qualitative strategies to triangulate findings when researchers attempt quantitative techniques with qualitative data. The use of field notes and memos to identify salience along with measuring proximity in the current study is an example.

Although not a limitation per se, it is also important to note that parental educational aspirations and expectations, particularly in the context of migration, do not remain static. Parents continuously negotiate and adapt their hopes for their children with their perceptions of what the environment can realistically yield. Thus, one potential question that this raises for future research is whether and how immigrant parents’ premigration and early postmigration expectations for their children evolve given their continued exposure to and experiences within the U.S. educational system. This work forms only the basis for an understanding of the relationships between loss and educational aspirations for children. Future research might include quantitative studies with larger samples to test and establish the hypothesized causal relations between loss and educational aspirations proposed herein.

Implications for Educators

The findings in this study are consistent with the extant literature on immigrant parents’ hopes and concerns for their children in the United States (Poza, Brooks, & Valdés, 2014) and have implications for understanding parents’ strategies for engagement in their children’s schooling. For most families in this study, children’s education was heralded as the conduit to future success for the children and their families alike. Immigrant parents care deeply for and are heavily invested in their children’s education, and a lot appears to hinge on their children’s future achievements. This knowledge may not be overly apparent to educators who do not have frequent contact with parents or whose communication with them is hindered by language barriers. Past studies often reported a disparity in school engagement between immigrant and non-immigrant parents in terms of lack of parent attendance at school conferences or school committees, parent-teacher interactions, or literacy practices in the home of immigrant parents (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003)—behaviors that have often been equated with parental apathy. However, researchers note that conceptions of parental involvement in children’s education may be too narrowly defined by majority populations and that immigrant parents may construe parental involvement more indirectly (Greenberg, 2012).

Since schooling is seen as only one component of children’s education, immigrant parents often prefer involvement strategies that comprise activities outside the school system, such as encouraging their children’s attendance in religious and community organizations or strictly monitoring their children’s peer affiliations (Poza et al., 2014). Understanding the extent of parents’ migration-related losses may broaden educators’ appreciation of parents’ high educational aspirations for their children and resulting practices aimed at augmenting their children’s educational and moral trajectories in the host country. Furthermore, findings suggesting that immigrant parents both respect and are suspicious of the impacts of U.S. schooling on their children’s value orientations and development merits greater awareness of heteronomy-interdependence value orientations. Educators’ agendas should include active outreach to immigrant parents to enable them to express concerns and expectations in order to foster more adaptive, culturally sensitive school-family partnerships.

Footnotes

Notes

Sonia Roubeni is a doctoral candidate in Applied Developmental Psychology at Fordham University, 441 East Fordham Road, 226 Dealy Hall, Bronx, NY 10458; e-mail: sroubeni@fordham.edu . Her research focuses on cultural and ethnic disparities in academic achievement, the educational trajectories of children of immigrants, and the influence of parenting practices on children’s school readiness and academic achievement.

Lucia De Haene is assistant professor at the research group Education, Culture and Society, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, K.U. Leuven. Her research focuses on the psychosocial impact of organized violence, forced migration, and exile on refugee and migrant family relationships; the role of disclosure and narration in individual and collective processes of reconstruction in the aftermath of traumatization; and process analyses of family therapeutic and community-based interventions in host societies and post-conflict settings.

Eva Keatley earned her bachelor’s of science from the University of California, San Diego and is currently enrolled in a clinical psychology doctoral program at the University of Windsor. She specializes in clinical neuropsychology, and her research interests include traumatic brain injury, concussion, cross-cultural psychology, trauma, and cognitive-affective processes.

Nira Shah earned a master’s of education degree at Columbia University, Teachers College in psychological counseling. She currently works within refugee resettlement, processing cases around sub-Saharan Africa.

Andrew Rasmussen is an associate professor of psychology at Fordham University. His research focus concerns the well-being of immigrants and refugees and evaluation of psychological disorders in cross-cultural settings.

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