Provides an overview of the major themes in the lives of children of immigrants, encompassing their journey to the United States, earliest perceptions, and subsequent transformations. Practitioners working with children in school, health care, and social-agency settings as well as cultural psychologists and anthropologists will learn about: (1) the various routes that immigrant families, refugees, and transnationals take to reach their new homeland; (2) the difference between, and social responses to, the immigrant of 100 years ago and the so-called new immigrant; (3) the psychological effects of immigration on families and children, including how families manage the tensions created by the separations and reunifications of migration, new roles for children, and the remaking of gender relations; (4) different ways in which children reformulate their identities in a new society, including identifying with the dominant culture, taking an adversarial stance toward institutions of mainstream culture, and fusing aspects of both cultures to achieve a bicultural identity; and (5) factors contributing to divergent pathways of school adaptation among immigrant children. Rather than advocating that immigrant children abandon all elements of their original culture, a more promising path to social cohesion is to nurture the emergence of new bicultural competencies.
