Gender Roles in Immigrant Families

Susan S. Chuang and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, (eds.). Gender Roles in Immigrant Families New York: Springer (2013). 224 pages, 978-1461467342.In my own research on the immigrant experience of Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese and Cambodians resettling in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, I became aware that young Hmong girls were being strongly directed by their parents [especially their fathers] to pursue very high-paying positions rather than following their interests and passions. If Hmong girls expressed an interest in art or music, they were shunted into the hard sciences, mathematics, the law or medicine. Early on, then, I learned the importance of gender issues in some immigrant families.While there has been a good deal of research to date on family relationships, family processes, child development and family functioning in immigrant families, there has been little on gender and immigration. The central goal of this excellent volume is to look at ... how gender roles and gendered relationships in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and [p.l] There are three main sections to the book: the parenting roles and experiences of mothers and fathers; the importance of gendered parent-child relationships and child outcomes; and gendered immigrant experiences among children and youth.The book has edited chapters on current perspectives on gender roles and relationships in immigrant families; coparenting in Latino families; roles and responsibilities: a critical exploration of Chinese fathers in Canada and China; understanding structure and culture in the division of household labor for Mexican immigrant families; social support in the lives of Sudanese refugee and Russian immigrant fathers in Canada; Latino adolescents' understanding of good parent-adolescent relationships with common themes and subtle differences; communication brokering in immigrant families with avenues for new research; fathers' and mothers' perceptions of their children's psychosocial behaviors in Mexican immigrant families; gendered conceptions of ethnicity or Latino children in middle childhood; and family, culture, gender and Mexican American adolescents' academic success; and, gender and developmental pathways of acculturation and adaptation in immigrant adolescents. A final and exceedingly valuable chapter by Parke and Leidy provides reflections on research and policy regarding gender and immigration.The audience for this book includes academics and family researchers, service providers of all stripes, and public policymakers who are creating public policies that will impact immigrant families. It will be especially valuable to anthropologists, family and developmental psychologists, social workers, sociologists and policymakers at all levels. There is an overall focus on Canada in the book [although the U.S. and several other nations are also referenced] and each chapter ends with an impressive list of references and citations for further reading. There are a number of useful charts, tables and graphs sprinkled throughout the chapters where appropriate [e.g. OLS regression coefficients of predictors for husbands' hours spent on core housework by race and ethnicity; predicted values of wives' housework by wives' proportion of couple income and ethnicity; or mothers' and fathers' perceptions oftheir sons and daughters' psychosocial behaviors].Brown and Chu point out [p. 139] that one in four U.S. kids is from an immigrant family. This startling statistic is not yet well-known nor well-appreciated by most Americans. Each chapter focuses on how gender roles in immigrant families play out in the lives of children and families, especially in regard to parental roles, parent-child relationships, and child outcomes. How do immigrant families adapt to the immigrant experience? …

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