Immigrants are often confronted with difficult decisions regarding how to provide care and education for their offspring in their country of destination. Involvement with child care and with school can sometimes help in the process of acculturation for both parent and child. A child care provider or teacher can become a conduit to the ways of the new country; and they can help forge connections to potentially helpful social organizations and networks. However, advantages that might accrue to this new relationship can come at the expense of maintaining family style or values prevalent in the culture of origin. As a consequence of this back-and-forth struggle, immigrant children may not be launched on a pathway that leads to academic success, personal well-being, productive employment, and good citizenship.
Subject
With more women around the world entering the workforce, the use of non-parental care has increased in most countries.1,2 Arranging suitable child care can be critical for families recently arrived in a new country as it enables them to find and maintain employment in communities where new immigrants are typically in the minority and may have limited opportunities to obtain desirable jobs.3 In such circumstances, children’s academic success is also a high priority, as it enables children (and sometimes other members of their families) to connect to the society of destination and to obtain the resources necessary for long-term well-being.
Research Context
Because children of immigrants represent a significant portion of the school population and because immigrants as a group tend to have higher birth rates than long-term citizens in many countries, there is considerable interest in research that addresses factors connected to the utilization of non-parental care and early education and to school engagement and academic success for immigrant children,14,15,16 as well as their involvement once children enter school.8,17 There is interest both in research that has policy implications (especially in a time of changing political and economic climates) and in research that has implications for practice (e.g., how to achieve a better fit between the needs and proclivities of immigrant children/families and the strategies used to engage them).8,9,11 Studies of early education represent a kind of bridge between these two bodies of research in that studies of early education often address basic caregiving and educational issues as well as child and family issues in the sense that for some immigrant children entry into child care constitutes the first transition into social institutions in the new country.14,18 The framework for research on child care and schools has broadened over the last two decades, becoming both more biologically and culturally informed.