Does Maternal Acculturation Matter? School Readiness Among Children of Asian and Hispanic Immigrant Mothers

Background and purpose: Maternal acculturation is one of the important factors in the early years of young children that is closely related to developmental outcomes. Acculturation means a process of adopting values and attitudes from the destination culture through a negotiation between the two cultures in ways that maintain values and attitudes of an immigrant’s country of origin while also interacting with individuals from the destination culture. For example, acculturation involves a negotiation process between the two cultures’ parenting concepts and practices. In that sense, given that parents play a critical role in the development of young children, it is important to understand how maternal acculturation affects early child development. However, surprisingly, very little is known about the association between maternal acculturation and school readiness among preschool-age children of immigrants. Therefore, using a sample of children of Asian and Hispanic immigrant mothers from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), I examine how maternal acculturation is associated with a wide set of school readiness outcomes at kindergarten entry.

Method: I use a sample of about 1,500 children who have valid information in at least one of the outcome measures at the kindergarten survey—about 850 children of Asian mothers and about 650 children of Hispanic mothers. I define three acculturation groups: 1) mothers who primarily used English at home; 2) mothers who primarily used their home language at home but also had high English proficiency; and 3) mothers who primarily used their home language at home and had low English proficiency. School readiness outcomes include cognitive development (reading, expressive language, and math); teacher-rated socio-emotional development (approaches-to-learning and pro-social behavior); teacher-rated behavior problems (externalizing and attention problems); and weight development (BMI scores and overweight and obesity). Main analyses are based on regressions with an extensive set of covariates, and additional interaction analyses are conducted to examine whether there is variation within each acculturation group according to length of U.S. residency.

Results: I find beneficial associations between maternal acculturation and cognitive development as well as weight development at kindergarten entry among children of both Asian and Hispanic immigrant mothers. I also find higher levels of pro-social behavior, but also higher levels of behavior problems, among children of more acculturated Asian mothers compared to those of less acculturated Asian mothers. Furthermore, in additional analyses, I find that longer residency in the U.S. is associated with higher levels of approaches-to-learning for children of bilingual Asian mothers and lower levels of behavior problems for children of bilingual Hispanic mothers.

Conclusion: The findings suggest that there may be benefits of providing English language programs to Asian and Hispanic mothers, as stronger English skills for them improve mothers’ ability to interact in English with their children, other parents, and teachers. In addition, bilingual-bicultural programs for Asian and Hispanic mothers may also be beneficial since those programs can be a source of helping their children use cultural resources and maintain familial ties, although it should be noted that these programs need to be tailored to ethnic and cultural differences.