Immigrant Children Change, Adaptation, and Cultural Transformation [Hardcover]

As societies located in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere are growing increasingly multicultural and multiracial in nature, social scientists, educators, service providers, and policy makers are confronted with the difficult task of understanding the new generations of immigrant and refugee children growing up in our midst. In this volume, a team of leading experts provides new information and guidelines essential to achieving this goal. They discuss a broad range of pertinent topics and are especially successful in linking basic research findings to policy recommendations and the perspectives of service providers.This edited book focuses on immigrant and refugee children around the world and will provide readers with a richer and more comprehensive approach of how researchers, practitioners, and social policymakers can examine immigrant children and youth among ethnic minority families. Also, the chapters will focus on the various methodological advances used to explicitly investigate immigrant children and youth.Over the past several decades, the demographic populations of many countries such as Canada as well as the United States have greatly transformed. Most striking is the influx of recent immigrant families into North America. As children lead the way for a new North America, this group of children and youth is not a singular homogenous group but rather, a mosaic and diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural group. Thus, our current understanding of normative development (covering social, psychological, cognitive, language, academic, and behavioral development), which has been generally based on middle-class Euro-American children, may not necessarily be optimal development for all children.Researchers are widely recognizing that the theoretical frameworks and models of child development lack the sociocultural and ethnic sensitivities to the ways in which developmental processes operate in an ecological context. As researchers progress and developl3”