The resilience of school-age immigrant children: A scoping review

ABSTRACT

Encouraging the successful adaptation of young immigrant populations is clearly in the best interests of nations that accept immigrants. In the forthcoming decades, the fact that immigrants and their children will become irreplaceable forces in the economies of host societies and taking care of rapidly aging non-immigrant populations should not be overlooked. Therefore, the health and social adaptation of immigrant children is crucial. This review provides information on a comprehensive synthesis of research on immigrant student resilience in the contemporary literature. Three electronic databases (ERIC, Web of Science, and Scopus) were searched. Thirty-four peer-reviewed articles published between 2010–2021 were included in the review. The research reaffirms conceptual problems observed in previous resilience research. However, researchers focus on protective and risk factors. Parental behaviors tend to increase children’s resilience. Different results were obtained according to the migration age variable. There are very few studies based on the evaluation of gender variables. In addition, recommendations were given to researchers for future studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• migrant children
• scoping review
• refugees
• school-age

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ms. Lisa Birnbaum for her contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Academics in Solidarity and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).