Whom to help and why? Family norms on financial support for adult children among immigrants

ABSTRACT

Financial support for immigrant-origin children is crucial for their integration and success in the host society. Family solidarity norms among minority populations, however, tend to differ from those regulating intergenerational support exchange among natives. Do such differences reflect specific cultural preferences and expectations? Using original data collected via a semi-structured questionnaire featuring vignettes, we explore values and norms about parental financial support towards children among Chinese, Maghrebi and Filipino immigrants in Italy. The vignette analysed here contrasts the beneficiaries of support provided by parents to children (sons versus daughters) and the object of support (opening a new business versus pursuing higher education). Results point to a preference for supporting offspring – especially daughters – who want to invest in an educational career. This attitude is more widespread among Filipino and Chinese respondents than among Maghrebis. Daughters are favoured over sons among Filipinos, whereas the opposite holds for the other two groups. Supporting adult children’s higher education is seen as an efficient investment strategy, reflecting a normative view of children’s life courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational relations
• intergenerational transfers
• immigrants
• education
• vignettes
• Italy

Acknowledgements

An early version of this article was presented at the international workshop on ‘Intergenerational Transfers and Immigrant Population’ held in Bologna on 11 September 2015 (the scientific committee of which included the three authors and Asher Daniel Colombo). The authors thank the workshop’s participants for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this study, first generations comprise individuals who have actually undertaken migration (i.e. non-Italians born abroad); second generations refer to individuals born in the host country to two immigrant parents (i.e. born in Italy to non-Italian parents).

2. Given our specific research interest and the available data, in this article we will not address intergenerational transfers within transnational families (Sana and Massey 2005; Baldassar 2007b; Rooyackers, de Valk, and Merz 2016; King et al. 2014; de Bruine et al. 2013).

3. In the 2014–2015 period, 15.2% of 117,122 non-Italians in Bologna came from Maghreb region, and almost eight out of ten Maghrebis (78.7%) were from Morocco. Moroccans were the largest non-native group in the province of Bologna up to 2008, when they were replaced by Romanians.

4. Accounting for 5.3% of the entire non-Italian population, Filipinos were the seventh largest immigrant group in the province of Bologna in 2015.

5. In 2015, 4.8% of non-Italians in Bologna were Chinese.

6. One version of the vignette reads as follows (country of origin and children’s names are omitted): ‘A young immigrant couple from … has two children: an 18-year-old male and a 22-year-old female. Neither child is married, and both still live at home with their parents. The younger son has just finished secondary school, is a very good student and would like to study at university in Milan. The elder daughter, after secondary school, worked for a few years as a store clerk and is currently without a job due to the economic crisis; now she would like to open a small shop. Unfortunately both children need financial help from their parents in order to implement their projects. Their parents, however, do not have enough money to help both. What should the parents do?’.

7. Since our sample is not representative of the migrant population, the results cannot be generalised to individuals other than our respondents and we have omitted significance statistics from Table 4.

8. Additional analyses including the interaction between vignette version and immigrant group suggest that this effect – i.e. a preference for education of daughters – is more pronounced for Filipino and less so for Chinese respondents, with the Maghrebis falling in between.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a ‘FARB’ grant from the University of Bologna (project code FFBO121274).