Identifies the characteristics of parent education programs that make them most effective for immigrant families. The recent growth in the number and diversity of immigrant and refugee families in the United States underlines the importance of culturally appropriate parenting programs to assist parents in meeting the challenges of living in a new culture. Many parent education programs and materials do not address the intergenerational, cross-cultural, and ecological dilemmas that daily confront immigrant parents and their children. Parent education developers need to incorporate emerging best practices into their offerings, including an understanding of: (1) the different contexts inhabited by immigrant families, such as their experiences of war, poverty, and immigration itself; (2) the social and economic conditions of families in their homelands and their adopted countries, their preferred family structure, and their culturally based child-rearing values; and (3) the day-to-day realities of parent-child interactions. In addition, programs need to be held at times and locations convenient for parents, offered in a language familiar to parents, conducted by facilitators who are parents themselves and known to the parents, and contain child-focused material that requires extended family involvement. Exemplary programs in the U.S. suggest that parents are willing to adopt bicultural parenting practices.
