title: Latin American immigrant parents and their children's teachers in U.S. early childhood education programmes.
abstract: For many immigrants, their children's schools offer their first sustained interaction with the major societal institutions of their new countries, and so exploring the ways in which immigrant parents manage their children's educational experiences offers insight into how they adapt to new cultural norms, customs and expectations and how they are treated in return. This study delved into the involvement of Latin American immigrant parents in U.S. education, shifting the traditional focus down from elementary and secondary school to early childhood education. Statistical analysis of nationally representative data revealed that Latina immigrants had lower frequencies of most home- and community-based involvement behaviours than U.S.-born and foreign-born parents of varying racial/ethnic backgrounds but higher frequencies of involvement behaviours requiring participation in early childhood education programmes. As a window into these national patterns, qualitative data from an early childhood programme in an immigration-heavy state revealed that Latina immigrant mothers and their children's teachers often talked about each other as partners in supporting children's educational experiences but that their actual interactions tended to socialise mothers into being more passive recipients of teachers' directives.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.|Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Crosnoe
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.|Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Arya
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ansari
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002675:Child, Preschool / Q000193:education*; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D018479:Early Intervention, Educational; D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants; D005260:Female; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D007843:Latin America; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010290:Parents; D014481:United States
keywords: Early childhood education; Immigrant parents; Parental involvement