The Impact of Cumulative Risk On Chinese American Immigrant Children's Behavioral Outcomes: Moderation by Parenting Style

According to ecological systems theory, understanding childhood psychopathology necessitates studying how multiple risk and protective factors operate across organismic, proximal, and distal domains (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). One approach to this challenge is examining cumulative risk (CR), which summarizes risk across socio-demographic (e.g. poverty), child (e.g. temperament), psychosocial (e.g. marital conflict), and contextual (e.g. neighborhood safety) domains. Though empirical work has shown a robust link between CR and children’s internalizing and externalizing problems (e.g. Lima et al., 2010), two important areas remain underexplored. First, information regarding the effects of CR on immigrant children in the US is rare despite this group’s increased exposure to risks like poverty and unique challenges like intergenerational cultural dissonance (Hernandez et al., 2008). Second, few studies have examined how CR interacts with modifiable variables (e.g. parenting), which could yield targets for prevention and intervention programs.

Given gaps in the literature, this study examined the main and interactive effects of CR and parenting styles on Chinese American immigrant children’s internalizing and externalizing problems.  

The data came from a 2 wave longitudinal study of 258 1^st and 2^nd generation Chinese American children. Children were in the 1^st and 2^nd grades at Wave 1 (W1), and the 3^rd and 4^thgrades at Wave 2 (W2). Using a multi-method and multi-reporter approach, this study assessed W1 risk factors (children’s self-regulation and negative emotionality, family structure, poverty status, household density, parental education, marital conflict, parent-child cultural gaps, and neighborhood disadvantage), W1 authoritative and authoritarian parenting styles, and W2 children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. CR was calculated as the sum of all W1 risk variables meeting risk status criteria for each child.

Hierarchical regression analysis showed that W1 CR predicted W2 child-reported internalizing and externalizing, controlling for demographic variables (child age, gender, and generation) and W1 child-reported internalizing and externalizing. Additionally, W1 authoritarian parenting moderated the effect of W1 CR on W2 parent- and teacher-reported internalizing, such that high authoritarian parenting was related to increased internalizing for children with high CR.

This study found evidence that CR impacts Chinese American immigrant children’s internalizing and externalizing problems. Though the “Model Minority Myth” has propagated an image of favorable adjustment for Asian American children, our results substantiate the importance of using an ecologically valid model to examine immigrant children’s functioning in the context of multiple risks. Moreover, while theorists have argued that authoritarian parenting may be protective in high-risk conditions (e.g. impoverished neighborhoods), this study found that increased authoritarian parenting was especially harmful for children with high CR scores. Thus, immigrant children exposed to multiple risks may benefit most from prevention and intervention programs aimed at reducing parents’ authoritarian behaviors.