Children of Immigrants Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance (1999) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
1 Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance
1 Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance
Pages 1-18
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 1... ...
Meanwhile, as the baby boom generation reaches retirement ages, the vast majority (about 75 percent) of elderly persons also will be non-Hispanic whites.
|
From page 2... ...
Department of Health and Human Services the Public Health Service, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Additional funding was provided by the Na 2These agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Health Statistics, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, the Bureau of the Census, the National Science Foundation, the Health Care Financing Administration, and the Food and Nutrition Service.
|
From page 3... ...
who are white, black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. Among the best-documented relationships in epidemiology and child development are that children and youth are at risk of negative health, developmental, and educational outcomes if their family incomes are below the poverty threshold, their parents have low educational attainments, only one parent or many sib
|
From page 4... ...
Many officially recognized refugees come from five of these 12 countries (the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam) , and immigrants from four of these countries have fled homelands experiencing war or political instability (E!
|
From page 5... ...
Along a number of important dimensions, children and adolescents in immigrant families appear to experience better health and adjustment than do children and youth in native-born families results that are counterintuitive in light of the racial or ethnic minority status, the overall lower socioeconomic status, and the higher poverty that characterize many immigrant children and their families. Access to health care services, particularly for children, is essential to ensure that preventive services are provided as recommended, acute and chronic conditions are diagnosed and treated in a timely manner, and health and development are adequately monitored so that minor health problems do not escalate into serious and costly medical emergencies.
|
From page 6... ...
(1998) using the 1994 National Health Interview Survey indicate that, according to the reports of parents of children in immigrant families, such children experience fewer acute and chronic health problems than children in native-born families, including infectious and parasitic diseases; acute ear infections; acute injuries; chronic respiratory conditions such as bronchitis, asthma, and hay fever; and chronic hearing, speech, and deformity impairments.
|
From page 7... ...
In Chapter 5, Landale, Oropesa, and Gorman report analyses using the national Linked Birth/Infant Death Data Sets for a wide range of immigrant groups, including Mexicans, Cubans, Central/SouthAmericans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese. They found that children born in the United States to immigrant mothers are less likely to have low birthweights and to die in the first year of life than are children born to native-born mothers from the same ethnic group, despite the generally poorer socioeconomic circumstances of immigrant mothers from many specific countries of origin.
|
From page 8... ...
In Chapter 7, Nord and Griffin report on analyses using the National Education Household Survey (NEHS) pertaining to family and school experiences that influence children's educational accomplishments.
|
From page 9... ...
Parental involvement was somewhat greater for the second generation than the first and for Asian children in immigrant families compared to corresponding Hispanic children. Also in the NEHS, children in immigrant families were less likely to be enrolled in prekindergarten childhood programs, which help children prepare for school, than were children from native-born families of various racial and ethnic groups.
|
From page 10... ...
Important differences among adolescents in immigrant families emerge, however, in analyses distinguishing youth by country of origin and racial and ethnic group and when controls for socioeconomic status are added. In the NELS data, lower levels of feeling control over their own lives occurred among first- and second-generation Mexican-origin and other Hispanic-origin adolescents and among first-generation Chinese, Filipino, and black adolescents but not among the second generations of the latter groups or among first- or second-generation white youth in immigrant families.
|
From page 11... ...
First-, second-, and higher-generation Mexican adolescents are similar in grades and in math test scores, although there is a tendency, especially for reading test scores, toward improvement across generations. Mexican adolescents of all generations have substantially lower educational achievements than non-Hispanic white adolescents in native-born families; most of the difference for each generation is explained by lower levels of parental education and lower family income among Mexican adolescents.
|
From page 12... ...
The study found that low self-esteem and high depressive symptoms were more frequent among female immigrants and children experiencing high parent-child conflict, low family cohesion, recent serious illness or disability in the family, a high proportion of English only spoken in the neighborhood, a school perceived as unsafe, dissatisfaction with physical looks, and lack of popularity with the opposite sex. Seven additional factors associated with higher depression were a later age at arrival in the United States, a nonintact family, a recent worsening of the family's economic situation, perceptions of poor teaching quality or unfairness, experience with stress in school, a high proportion
|
From page 13... ...
Specific provisions of welfare reform are subject to change as the legislation evolves, but it is clear that the law's potential impact on immigrant children and youth derives in large part from the programmatic reach of the new restrictions on immigrants' eligibility for public benefits, which go far beyond welfare as conventionally known to encompass benefits programs, including Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, and noncash services.
|
From page 14... ...
When comparisons are made between immigrant and native-born families with adjustments for these characteristics, the differences either disappear or, in the case of children and youth in Mexican immigrant families, the differences indicate less reliance on the public assistance programs for which they are eligible. In addition, the special refugee status of many immigrants from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet bloc countries appears to involve comparatively high participation rates for the first generation, while children and youth in Mexican immigrant families are less likely than those in nativeborn families at the same socioeconomic level to live in families that rely on both cash and noncash public assistance.
|
From page 15... ...
These new studies made every effort to draw on available measures to correctly identify and present estimates for children by generation and immigrant status, country of origin, and race and ethnicity. But because few national information systems currently collect the full array of data needed on country of origin and immigrant status and because few have samples large enough to support conclusions for more than three or four specific countries of origin, the results derived in these studies should be viewed as the bestavailable first step in assessing the circumstances of children in immigrant families.
|
From page 16... ...
child poverty rates and for which information is available in the 1990 census not only for the first two generations but also for later-generation children, poverty is substantially lower among third- and later-generation children than among second-generation children. Although this might be due to intergenerational socioeconomic assimilation, a more plausible interpretation is that poverty is lower among the later generations because the grandparents of the third- and later-generation children entered the United States in earlier times with much higher socioeconomic status than did the parents of second-generation children who immigrated more recently.
|
From page 17... ...
These analyses, therefore, expand enormously on existing knowledge about these children and families and point toward future research. Overall, the findings suggest that despite the greater exposure of children in immigrant families, especially first-generation children, to socioeconomic risks that tend to lead to negative outcomes for children generally, despite the predominance of racial and ethnic minorities among children in immigrant families, and despite a lack of feeling in control of their own lives, it appears that these children have physical health that is better than or equal to children in native-born families and that their academic achievement is often at least as good, if not better, than children in native-born families.
|
From page 18... ...
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1986 Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Black and Minority Health, Volume VI, Infant Mortality and Low Birthweight.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.