Asian American families and socialization

SIGNIFICANCE: Socialization and family relations in Asian American families are often different from what they are in other American families. This may create a generation gap between children, who identify with the forms of behavior and attitudes found in the larger society, and adults. Family styles may also affect the extent to which children socialize with members of other racial and ethnic groups, and they can affect mobility in American society.

The category “Asian American” includes people from a wide variety of national backgrounds, including Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Hmong, Vietnamese, and various Asian Indian Americans. Generalizations about such a diverse category are likely not to apply to many Asian American groups or individuals. Still, there are some common family traits among the major Asian American groups that can affect socialization. Families in many of the major Asian American groups are usually characterized as authoritarian, other-centered, close-knit, long-lasting, and stable. The authoritarian character of these families means that parents, especially fathers, are seen as authority figures to be obeyed, with few, if any, questions. Researchers and theorists describe Asian American families as other-centered because family members are expected to put the needs and wishes of others in the family ahead of their own needs and wishes. These families are said to be close-knit because the cultural values of many Asian groups encourage a high degree of emotional intimacy among family members. They are long-lasting because offspring retain these intimate ties to parents and siblings throughout life. They are described as stable both because of the long-lasting nature of family ties and because most Asian groups show divorce rates substantially lower than those of other Americans.

Family Socialization and Individual Well-Being

Anthropologist Francis Hsu, an authority on the Chinese family, has argued that strong kinship ties in Asian American families enable individuals to share problems with other family members. Thus, Hsu maintains, these individuals tend to experience less anxiety than people in more loosely organized American families. George DeVos, in studies of the Japanese family, has emphasized the importance of strongly established family roles in enabling Asian Americans to adapt to the world around them. DeVos argues that most American families have relatively weak attachments to roles, encouraging their members to be themselves rather than to act out stereotypical roles of father or mother or son or daughter. Roles, though, provide individuals with a sense of identity, so that adhering to roles can actually be a source of psychological comfort and support for individuals.

Psychologist Stanley Sue, one of the foremost experts on Asian American psychology, has argued that patterns of socialization in Asian American families can have both positive and negative consequences for individuals. He maintains that, while research does support the view that relations tend to be close-knit in Asian American families, the very closeness of these families can create problems. This closeness is especially likely to create problems when it interferes with the needs of children to establish a sense of their own identities in the larger American society. Similarly, the strong roles in Asian American families, particularly the authoritarian roles of fathers, may conflict with the ideas and expectations children learn outside the family.

Family Socialization and American Society

Family socialization affects the adaptation of children to their society as well as their psychological well-being. Because children in modern times usually enter the economic and political institutions of their society by means of education, most theories and research on socialization and societal adaptation concentrate on how family socialization affects schooling. Asian cultural traditions, such as Confucianism, are often believed to be passed from parents to children through family socialization. Psychologist Nathan Caplan and his colleagues maintain that Vietnamese American families teach their children cultural values of hard work and respect for authority, enabling the children to do well in American schools and society.

Sociologists Min Zhou and Carl Bankston III have claimed that the relative success of many new Asian groups in American society is due, in part, to the close, cooperative relations in families. They have also argued that new Asian immigrants often settle in some of the nation’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, so family and community socialization must shield children from the negative influences that surround them. Shielding children from surrounding neighbors of other ethnic or racial backgrounds, however, can often hinder the development of understanding between Asian Americans and members of other groups.

A number of researchers and social workers have pointed out that ethnic gangs emerged among young people in a number of Asian American groups in the 2010s. It is often argued that the gap between the culture of the parents and the culture of the children makes communication and socialization difficult, leading to inadequate socialization.

A systematic review of twenty-one years of literature published in 2024 investigated ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) and its prevalence in Asian American and Pacific Islander families (AAPI). ERS has been associated with better psycho-social outcomes, attitudes toward race, and identity in children. The review found that, in general, while Asian American and Pacific Islander families engage in ERS, positive aspects of race and ethnicity, such as ethnic pride, are the focus of this socialization, while negative issues like discrimination are usually avoided. However, the literature reveals a shift in this tendency in the late 2010s and early 2020s, likely due to initiatives such as Black Lives Matter. Asian parents spoke with their children more often about race in society as the issues became more commonly discussed in the mainstream.

Bibliography

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Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston, III. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. Sage, 1998.