Family Therapy with East Indian Immigrant Parents Rearing Children in the United States: PARENTAL CONCERNS,THERAPEUTIC ISSUES,AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The paper focuses on East Indian immigrant parents and some of the post-immigration difficulties they experience in their attempts to rear culturally East Indian children within the United States cultural context. Concerns specific to parenting children in the US, and therapeutic issues East Indian immigrant parents bring to therapy are presented and discussed. Effective therapy with East Indian immigrant families requires that therapists be flexible in their therapeutic approaches with these families, and become more knowledgeable about the varieties of East Indian families, their cultural beliefs, values, and norms. Recommendations for culturally effective therapy are offered.David A. Baptiste, PhD, is Senior Psychologist, New Mexico Corrections Department, and in the private practice of Marital and Family Therapy, 2709 Sim Ave. Las Cruces, NM 88005 (DAB2709@aol.com).*The author is an immigrant from Guyana, South America, an Indian diaspora country. The experiences and observations discussed here are culled from 30 years of clinical practice in several US locations with a variety of East Indian Families from the Indian subcontinent and other diaspora countries.     

Allocentric versus idiocentric tendencies: Convergent and discriminant validation

Allocentric tendencies were studied with a multimethod questionnaire and Illinois undergraduates. Nine scales measuring different aspects of allocentrism were shown to have good reliability and to be intercorrelated, thus showing convergent validity. Factor analysis identified three aspects: subordination of personal to group goals, the ingroup as extension of the self, and ingroup identity. The scales also had satisfactory discriminant validity. Those high on idiocentric tendencies used equity and those high in allocentric tendencies used equality and need in distributing rewards. A second study found that those who are allocentric are more likely to emphasize the values of cooperation, equality, and honesty, and those who are idiocentric to emphasize the values of comfortable life, competition, pleasure, and social recognition. Those who were allocentric reported receiving more social support and a better quality of social support; those who were idiocentric were higher in achievement motivation, alienation, anomie, and reported greater loneliness.     

Characteristics of social cognition in children with different symptom patterns

Clinically referred 6- to 12-year-old children as having Internalizing or Externalizing symptoms patterns on the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist were compared on two social perspective taking tasks and three measures of personality. On the Chandler Social Perspective Taking Task and an interview assessing the conceptual understanding of friendship devised by Selman, social cognitive immaturity was more likely to be associated with Externalizing rather than Internalizing symptomatology, especially in boys. Both Internalizers and Externalizers maintained an expected developmental course on these measures, however, when compared to normative data. Greater maturity in the understanding of friendship was found among children who had higher self-esteem and a more internal locus of control and who used more adaptive coping strategies in stressful situations. Methodological issues in studies of psychopathology and social cognition are discussed along with the usefulness of assessing social cognitive maturity in clinical practice.     

Children's decision strategies and their adaptation to task characteristics

Recent research has established decision making as an important type of strategic problem solving. From this perspective, the present paper examines strategic decision behavior in children and, in particular, the ability to adapt decision strategies to task characteristics. Twelve-year-olds' strategies were identified through analyses of information search patterns with different-sized matrices of information. Using a similar procedure, Payne (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16, 366–387) found that adults shifted to more efficient (but less “optimal”) strategies as task complexity increased. The present study indicates that, by 12 years of age, children understand many of the basic concepts of strategic decision making, such as compensation and elimination, and, like adults, they modify their strategies appropriately in response to complexity. However, their behavior differs from that reported for adults in that the distinctions among specific decision strategies are not clear cut, and there is frequent use of less demanding, cost-cutting strategies even with smaller decision tasks. Memory capacity and topic interest also affect decision strategy. The results support the feasibility of further developmental study of decision strategies. Analytical techniques developed here for use with children may profitably be applied in studies with adults as well.     

The Influence of American Urban Culture on the Development of Normative Beliefs About Aggression in Middle-Eastern Immigrants

The effects of a community's culture on children's and adolescents' normative beliefs about the appropriateness of aggression were examined. One hundred forty-seven high school students and 103 fourth graders participated in a survey of normative beliefs; 69 high school and 44 elementary school students were of Middle-Eastern background. Although there were no differences in the beliefs of immigrant and nonimmigrant fourth graders, adolescents born in the United States were more accepting of aggression than those who immigrated from the Middle East. Moreover, adolescents who immigrated to the U.S. at age 12 or later were less accepting of aggression than those who immigrated prior to age 12.     

Developmental changes in assigning agent relations in Hebrew: The interaction between word order and structural cues

Developmental changes in the interaction between word order and structural cues was investigated by having Hebrew-speaking children between 4 and 10 years of age interpret NVN utterances that balanced the complementary and contradictory effects of work order and two types of morphological cues, inflections that mark subject-verb gender agreement and an object particle. In Hebrew, gender inflections are highly complex and irregular while the object particle is highly regular and distinctive. Both word order and structural cues affected interpretations by subjects of all age groups, though the role of structural cues increased with age. For all groups, the objec particle was a dominant cue. The likelihood of assigning the agent relation to the first or second noun systematically varied with the relative weights of cues that supported and opposed each assignment. Comparisons were made between processing of Hebrew and processing of Serbo-Croatian and Turkish.     

The relationship between perception and production of /w/, /r/, and /l/ by three-year-old children

Twenty-one normally developing 3-year-old children were tested on two approximant consonant contrasts, rake-lake and wake-rake, and a control contrast, wake-bake. Perception was assessed in a two-choice picture identification paradigm; stimuli were (1) natural and computer synthesized “clear cases” of the minimal pairs, and (2) synthetic stimulus series which interpolated on acoustic dimensions that differentiate the minimal pairs. As a group, the children showed very accurate perception of the minimal pairs. Performance on the synthetic series yielded consistent identification of the endpoint stimuli and monotonic functions with abrupt crossovers at the phoneme boundary. Children who did not yet articulate /r/ and /l/ appropriately showed somewhat less consistent perception than children who produced all phonemes correctly.