UCLA professor of education Carola Suárez-Orozco has published “Transitions: The Development of Children and Immigrants,” together with Mona M. Abo-Zena and Amy K. Marks ( NYU Press, 2015), an exploration of the unique circumstances of immigrant children and the commonalities they share with their peers.
The book’s interdisciplinary approach brings together a variety of experts and topics that reveal how personal, social, and structural factors interact to determine the development of immigrant origin children.
“As the field has vastly expanded over the last two decades, this new book is 'Children of Immigration, 2.0,'" says Suárez-Orozco, who co-directs the Institute for Immigration, Globalization, and Education with Wasserman Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Professor of Education Robert T. Teranishi, all from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “We turn to the experts in the field and have carefully-curated chapters … in accessible language. Our contributors come from an array of fields with different voices, but we strove to make each section lead to the next, with case studies that would draw the reader in and illustrate each concept.”
Suárez-Orozco says that the book’s title refers to the myriad of developmental transitions that immigrant children go through across childhood. These include the transition to new cultures, languages, spaces, and schools, developmental transitions, as well as the transitions that immigrant parents hope their children will for better futures.
“Whether [immigrant children] manage these transitions well will determine how they will fare,” Suárez-Orozco says. “Children who are flexible do much better in the immigration process [than children] those who are more rigid. Most kids would rather stay in their homeland initially. They would d rather stay with their own friends, in their own school — they’d rather stay within their safety networks. Some kids will be persuaded by their parents’ narrative for migrating but in most families it is a top-down decision. There is no negotiation or conversation; the parents simply announce, ‘This is happening.’ And immigrant kids must make do.”
