Ethnic and Racial Socialization in Second Generation Asian American Parenting

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Parenting, Race, and Educational Inequality in Asian and Asian American Communities

Abstract

While previous work has highlighted the ways that gender and socioeconomic class impact how families navigate the care crisis, we know less about the ways that race, ethnicity and immigrant status shape ideologies and strategies of care work. This paper focuses on how do Asian Americans understand what it means to be “good” parents to their children at a time when Asians are precariously positioned within broader US race relations. Their narratives underscore the ways their childhoods in immigrant families and coming of age in the US at the turn of the century merge with contemporary parenting culture and US racial logics to shape how they approach and understand care work.
Stereotypes of Asian immigrant “Tiger Mothers” include strict family dynamics in which emotionally closed off parents focus solely on producing future Ivy League-bound children who will go on to become economically successful doctors, lawyers, or engineers. But what does second-generation Asian American parenting look like that both preserves and challenges the expectations and practices their immigrant parents engaged in? Unlike their own childhoods, these parents share the same language and cultural understandings as their children and racialized experiences as people of color in the US. However, their children, with their third-generation Asian American experiences, are contending with ideas of race and ethnicity complicated by multiraciality and growing up in a cultural context steeped in diversity, equity, inclusivity and belonging initiatives often referred to as DEI-B and more direct conversations around racial inequalities. Carework is negotiated in a radically different framework that requires new parenting strategies and approaches of ethnic and racial socialization.

Authors

• Helene K. Lee, Dickinson College

• Linda Sujin Park, University of Wisconsin-Madison