Supporting Immigrant Children to Promote School Readiness

Impoverished immigrant families – in turn – are far more likely to face food insecurity, crowded housing, poor health, and lower rates of health insurance coverage. These stressors, along with the psychological stress that accompanies working long hours for low wages and living in crowded, poorly maintained housing— can be transmitted to young children.

Harvard education professor Hirokazu Yoshikawa recently published a fascinating study of immigrant families raising young children.¹ In this work, Yoshikawa investigates the implications of immigration on early childhood development. His findings give us reason to pause: by the time new immigrant children reached age 2, they are likely to have significantly lower levels of language and cognitive development than are children of native-born parents.

There are many likely reasons for this discrepancy. “Greater hardship among parents, both economic and psychological,” Professor Yoshikawa writes, “can harm children’s learning by lowering parents’ active engagement with their children, the quantity or quality of their language or their warmth and responsiveness.”

This is a familiar story. Research has long indicated that the culture and environment in which children are raised contribute to their early development. Differences in early development, in turn, lead to achievement gaps when children reach school. As a result of differences in economic well-being, parenting-practices, and cultural differences, immigrant children are at-risk of reaching school far behind their class-mates.

Certainly, a large share of the difference in the early experiences of immigrant children is due to family income. Many first-generation immigrant families earn less than their native born counterparts as a result of lower levels of education. But even after we adjust for differences in parent’s education levels, their likelihood of year-round employment, and the number of adults in the home, children in immigrant families remain far more likely to live in poverty than other groups of American children.²

Lower income families – in turn – are far more likely to face food insecurity, crowded housing, poor health, and lower rates of health insurance coverage. These stressors, along with the psychological stress that accompanies working long hours for low wages and living in crowded, poorly maintained housing— can be transmitted to young children.³

An analysis by the National Center for Children in Poverty found that nearly 4 million immigrant families in the United States are low income, in spite of the fact that almost all of them have working parents. Among children with foreign-born parents, 97 percent have a parent who works and 72 percent have a parent who works full-time, year round.⁴ However, these children have less access to government supports that can help low-income families bridge the gap between earnings and basic family needs.

“Adults emigrate to the United States to participate in the American dream,” said Dr. Jane Knitzer, Executive Director of NCCP, “but the fact is that immigrant families are working hard and their children – overwhelmingly U.S. citizens – are getting less.”

Children in immigrant families remain far less likely than other low-income children to receive needed social supports, including cash assistance, food stamps, or housing subsidies.² While children of immigrants are among the groups most likely to benefit from center-based early education programs, they are much less likely than children of natives to be in center-based child care.²

As the number of immigrant children in the U.S. grows rapidly, the cost of ignoring their earliest social, emotional and cognitive development grows more substantial and enduring. Poor early cognitive development can lead to lower school performance, higher dropout rates, an undertrained work force and lower economic productivity.

Resources for families

The Exchange Club Family Center and the Church Health Center have begun to provide many of their services in Spanish to extend help to Latino clients and continue to seek new avenues to provide services to these families. The Exchange Club Family Center now offers individual counseling for clients, even children as young as two. They also offer parent training and anger management programs for families in both English and Spanish. These programs help families cope with their daily stressor, reducing the risk of child abuse and improving the quality of the environments children grow up in. Additionally,

Latino Memphis serves over 10,000 people a year, helping Latinos in Memphis navigate the larger community and connecting them to jobs…"gateway" to put immigrants in touch with health care and other services, to direct them to possible job sources and to help them assimilate with a population that doesn't always welcome them with open arms.

For more on these organizations’ services available to Latino Clients go to:

• Exchange Club
• Church Health Center