Juggling Between Parental and School Expectations: The Development of Domain-Specific Acculturation Orientations in Early Adolescence

Family Functioning, Identity Commitments, and School Value among Ethnic Minority and Ethnic Majority Adolescents

Ethnic minority youth show worse school adjustment than their ethnic majority peers. Yet, it remains unclear whether this gap can be explained by differences in family functioning and consequent identity commitments. This study examined (1) whether family functioning relates to identity commitments over time and (2) whether identity commitments impact later school value (3) among minority and majority adolescents. Minority (N = 205, Mage = 16.25 years, 31.1% girls) and majority adolescents (N = 480, Mage = 15.73 years, 47.9% girls) participated in this preregistered three-wave longitudinal study (T1: March-April 2012; T2: October 2012; T3: March-April 2013). Dynamic Panel Models revealed that most within-person cross-lagged associations were not significant in the total sample. Yet, multigroup analyses revealed differences between groups: Stronger identity commitments related to lower school value among minority adolescents, but were unrelated to school value among majority adolescents over time. Additionally, higher school value increased identity commitments among minority youth, yet it decreased identity commitments among majority youth over time. The findings highlight the differential interplay between identity commitments and school adjustment for minority and majority adolescents, with important implications for their future life chances.

Navigating Across Heritage and Destination Cultures: How Personal Identity and Social Identification Processes Relate to Domain-Specific Acculturation Orientations in Adolescence

Personal identity and social identification processes can be challenging for adolescents belonging to an ethnic minority, who have to cope with the acculturation task of navigating several (and often conflictual) alternatives put forth by their cultural heritage community and destination society. Because identity and acculturation tasks are embedded in core domains of adolescents' life, this three-wave longitudinal study with ethnic minority adolescents (N = 244, 43.4% male; Mage = 14.9) examined how personal identity processes and social identifications are related to acculturation orientations in the education and friendship domains. Results of traditional cross-lagged models showed that, in the educational domain, adolescents who scored higher on cultural heritage maintenance compared to their peers, scored higher on commitment later on. In the friendship domain, stronger associations were found, such that adolescents who scored higher on cultural heritage maintenance compared to their peers, reported higher commitment and in-depth exploration later on, while those who scored higher on identification with friends reported over time also higher cultural heritage maintenance and destination culture adoption. Random-intercept crossed-lagged models indicated that, when adolescents reported above their own average on reconsideration of educational commitment, they reported increased cultural heritage maintenance later on. Furthermore, consistent associations (at baseline and over time) emerged. Overall, this study points to virtuous alliances between the fulfillment of tasks related to adolescents' identity development and acculturation.

Parenting in times of refuge: A qualitative investigation

This qualitative study sheds light on how the different phases of refuge and resettlement shape parents' perceptions of their parenting. We used in-depth interviews to examine parents' accounts of how war and refuge gave rise to different stressors, and how these in turn shaped parenting. We interviewed 27 Syrian refugee parents recently settled in the Netherlands (16 families) twice, using a grounded theory approach. We distinguished five phases of refuge, namely prewar, war, flight, displacement, and resettlement. During flight and displacement, stressors associated with financial and material losses appeared to induce parental empathy for children's suffering, which seemed to increase parental leniency. Stressors emerging from family separation during displacement, however, were reported to burden parents and to lead to uncertainty, which seemed to compromise parental warmth and sensitive discipline. While narratives suggest that families reacted in similar ways during the phases of war, flight, and displacement, differences seemed to emerge during the resettlement phase. Some parents stated that in resettlement, they experienced post-traumatic growth (e.g., increased compassion for their children) and were more autonomy supporting than before the war. Other parents seemed to struggle with accepting and supporting their children's emotions and appeared to resort more readily to parental control. Our findings suggest that emotional exhaustion plays a key role in how parents viewed their parenting changed during refuge, and that individual differences in parents' abilities to recover from emotional exhaustion played a key role in shaping parenting in resettlement.