Parent-child relationships in Hmong immigrant families in the United States

The story of migration is a familiar one in our nation of immigrants. Every year millions of immigrants¹ arrive at our shores looking forward to the start of a new life in America.² Yet what many immigrant parents do not realize is that they will find themselves in unfamiliar environments where what they know about parent-child relationships and what the host culture expects are often at odds. For example, research shows that as acculturation takes place in immigrant families, the relationship between parents and children tends to shift,³ partly due to the accelerated acculturation of the children⁴ and partly due to the dependency of parents to their children because of the children’s English-speaking skills.⁵ Dinh and Nguyen⁶ studied Vietnamese families and found that "the more children perceived their parents as ‘too traditional’ or believed their parents perceived them as ‘too Americanized’ the more likely they were to report a poorer quality of parent-child relationship.".