Parenting Styles, Practices, and Achievement of Second-Generation Korean American Elementary Students

• In Event: Understanding Diversity in Achievement for 1.5- and 2nd-Generation Asian American Students

Abstract

Many Asian American immigrant parents who have come to the U.S. in the latter twentieth century have struggled with the competing parenting values, goals, styles, and practices of their native and host cultures (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). Despite this fact, first generation Korean American parents tend to hold tightly to the Korean norm of high academic expectations for children stemming from traditional Confucian values that emphasize academic achievement as the sole means for achieving financial and societal success (Kim, 1999; Koh & Shin, 2005; Lim, 2007; Sorensen, Feb., 1994). Many Korean American students are meeting these expectations because of their parents’ utilization of a combination of parenting goals, practices, and styles (Darling & Steinberg, 1993). However, this is not true for all such students; in fact, there are many individual stories of children’s lack of ambition despite high parental achievement and expectations.

Although differences in parenting practices between Whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans have been broadly researched (Baumrind, 1971; Chao & Arque, December 2001; Grusec & Goodnow, 1994), there is minimal literature on parenting practices in each of the Asian American subgroups, particularly Korean Americans (Cleveland, Detzner, & Xiong, 2004-05; Chao, 1994). Studies based on Korean American parenting practices and their children’s perceptions of these practices, as they relate to academic achievement, are negligible.

The “contextual parenting style”, a new construct of parenting style which integrates parental goals, values, styles, and practices, developed by Darling & Steinberg (1993), was utilized to examine the perceptions of the processes through which parenting style affects the academic achievement of Korean American elementary students. A purposeful sample of 2nd generation, Korean American, high and low achieving fifth-grade students was used to highlight parenting style issues in the Korean American community. A structured interview was used for this exploratory study, and the transcripts of these interviews were analyzed using an analytic induction procedure utilizing Microsoft Word tables for the coding process. IRB approval was acquired for this study.

Educational awareness between parent and child as well as perceptions about effort, authoritarian parenting style, specific parental expectations, active parental guidance, and social capital are patterns that emerged to distinguish between high and low achieving second-generation Korean American students in this study. Overall, the distinct differences in the parental goals (the specific versus the nonspecific and vague parental academic expectations, styles (the authoritarian versus the authoritative and permissive), and parental practices (specific versus passive guiding behaviors) were the key factors that differentiated between the high and low achieving students. The findings from this study have important policy and practice implications for Asian immigrants, particularly in the Korean American community, as they may inform first-generation Korean parents about parenting styles and practices that may improve academic achievement in their children.

Author

• Wendi J. Otto, Pepperdine University