Afterword: New directions in research with immigrant families and their children

Abstract

Although migration is fundamentally a family affair, the family, as a unit of analysis, has been understudied both by scholars of migration and by developmental psychologists. Researchers have often struggled to conceptualize immigrant children, adolescents, and their families, all too often giving way to pathologizing them, ignoring generational and ethnic distinctions among immigrant groups, stereotyping immigrants as "problem" or (conversely) "model" minorities, and overlooking the complexity of race, gender, documentation, and language in their lives. In addition, contexts other than the family remain understudied. In this afterword, the authors examine these issues, the contributions of the chapters in this volume to understanding them, and their implications for research and theory within the field of developmental science.