TITLE:
Resettled Refugee Families: Parenting Practices and Educational Involvement
AUTHORS:
Grace H. C. Huang, Eddie T. C. Lam
KEYWORDS:
Resettlement, Parental Involvement, Support Strategies, School Relations
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.10 No.6,
June
27,
2022
ABSTRACT: In 2020, there are 25.9 million refugees worldwide.
With the rapidly rising refugee population (over 600,000 from 2010 to 2020) in
the United States, supporting resettled refugee families is a pressing issue,
in which a comprehensive understanding of the refugee families is sorely
needed. The purpose of this paper was to identify the challenges of resettled
refugee families in their parenting practices and educational involvement.
Entering a country with a different language and culture than their own,
refugees, parents in particular, face numerous challenges upon relocation
(e.g., refugee parents who raise their
children in a new and unfamiliar environment have to balance between the new adaptation and the preservation of
their original culture). This obstacle is manifested in their parenting
practices and involvement in their children’s education and schooling as well
as language barrier. We provided an overview of the parenting challenges and explored
the cultural dissonance in parenting and its impact on family dynamics.
Implications were provided to address the challenges refugee families face in
the areas of systemic and personnel support, effective strategies, and
family-school relations.