CAREER:Language Brokering and Child Adjustment in Mexican American Children

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In this NSF CAREER award, Dr. Kim will examine the academic and socio-emotional development of language brokers (i.e., children who act as translators for their parents), in Mexican immigrant families. Close to 90% of children in immigrant families perform a language brokering function in their family's resettlement process, taking on the task of translating between the heritage language and English for parents with limited English-speaking skills. However, scholars have thus far paid little attention to the developmental consequences of being a language broker. This project on Mexican American families will explore the language brokering experience from multiple perspectives (target child, mother, father). The goal is to illuminate how language brokering impacts parent-child relationships and, more importantly, how it affects children's adjustment in terms of both academic and socio-emotional outcomes. Three hundred fifty Mexican American families will be recruited for the project, from schools with a wide range of Latinos in the student population. The study has three research aims: 1) to understand how child language brokering affects parent-child relationships, including any differential effects for mothers and fathers; 2) to investigate how parent-child relationships may be linked to child adjustment in terms of both socio-emotional development and academic outcomes; and 3) to explore how adolescent gender and schools'/neighborhoods' density of Mexican immigrants may influence aims 1 and 2. This project has the potential to bring to light the effects language brokering may have on the adjustment of the children of Mexican immigrants, the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States.This study will examine developmental outcomes for children of Mexican immigrants, a high-risk population with high rates of poverty and low levels of educational attainment. The project aims to understand the mechanisms involved in improving the academic performance of children of immigrants, a growing and significant percentage of America's children, who represent the future of the U.S. workforce. It also focuses on the developmental period of adolescence, a period of transition in which children are susceptible to developing socio-emotional problems that can compromise school performance. This research has the potential to identify risk factors that can be used to inform future preventive intervention work with children of immigrants. Finally, this project will train undergraduate and graduate students who have been traditionally under-represented in the sciences, particularly those of Mexican origin; deliver a curriculum to educate students about the role of immigration, ethnicity, and race in informing child development; and provide workshops, training sessions, and newsletters to educators on the role of language brokering in children's academic functioning.