Assessing the Private Safety Net: Social Support among Minority Immigrant Parents

Abstract

Traditional assimilation paradigms argue that immigrants are particularly disadvantaged in feelings of marginality and dislocation. Given these paradigms, we explore how minority and immigrant status are associated with perceptions of social support among parents of young children. We use the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K), a nationally representative sample of children in kindergarten in 1998 and 1999. Most groups of minority immigrant parents, compared to their native-born white counterparts, report lower levels of perceived social support, and this gap persists even when demographic and socioeconomic characteristics are held constant. Additionally, English language ability, but not years spent in the United States, attenuates the disadvantages that Hispanic immigrant parents face in their perceptions of social support compared with white immigrant parents. Finally, Hispanic parents report substantial variation in their perceptions of social support by ethnicity. As social support is an important predictor of parents' economic stability and children's well-being, these findings have important implications for children of immigrants, an important and increasing demographic group in the United States.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors gratefully acknowledge support from The Spencer Foundation and The Russell Sage Foundation. We thank Frances Woo and Melissa Gradilla for clerical assistance.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Comprehensive documentation is available from the NCES Web site.

² In adherence to NCES regulations for using restricted-use data, we have rounded all sample sizes to the nearest 10 in all text and tables.

³ Nevertheless, our results are consistent in magnitude and significance when we substitute the count scale with the factor.

⁴ Because some race groups are too small to analyze separately, we combine the following children into an other race category: Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and non-Hispanic multiracial.

⁵ Thus, this approach lumps together two groups of immigrants: those parents who immigrated to the United States when they were young and who received the majority of their schooling in the United States, and those parents who came to the United States as adults. In supplemental analyses, we consider these two groups of immigrants separately by race. However, we find no differences between these two types of immigrants in their perceptions of instrumental support.

⁶ First, mothers were asked where the child's father was born, and if not in the United States, the age at which he came to the United States, although these data were not collected until the fifth wave of data collection. Mothers' reports of their own immigrant status, on the other hand, come from the fourth wave of data collection. Substantial attrition occurs between the fourth and fifth waves. If we use information on fathers' immigrant status, our sample size is reduced from 12,580 to 8,510 (a difference of 32 percent). Second, respondents were asked to report on where the child's father was born. Because not all mothers are in relationships with their child's father, and there is no information about the immigrant status of their current partner, this presents an additional problem.

⁷ The ECLS-K data set provides a standardized five-category composite family SES measure that includes mother's education, father's education, mother's occupational prestige, father's occupational prestige, and household income. Because some of these categories, such as education, may not translate into the same rewards for native- and foreign-born individuals, we include the five measures separately. However, our main substantive findings do not change when we use the standardized composite measure.

⁸ Number of siblings and number in household are skewed. In analyses not shown, we substitute the continuous variables for categorical variables, but this does not substantively change our results.

⁹ Of the 13,410 parent respondents who completed interviews in the three waves we use for our analyses, we delete an additional 610 observations missing race and immigrant status and 170 observations missing information on private assistance.

¹⁰ Using listwise deletion produces consistent results.

¹¹ Despite these limitations, we run supplemental analyses that take into account the immigrant status of both parents. For each race group, we include a series of mutually exclusive dummy variables: both parents born in the United States, one parent born in the United States, and neither parents born in the United States (with white parents born in the United States as the reference group). About 77 percent of respondents report that both the mother and father are native born, about 7 percent report one immigrant parent, and about 15 percent report two immigrant parents. Results are as expected. Across all race groups, respondents are most disadvantaged in their perceptions of social support when both parents are foreign born. When only one parent is foreign born, compared to when the respondent is white and both parents are native born, parents of all race groups report less social support. Other race individuals are the exception here, as they report similar amounts of support as native-born whites when one parent is native born and one parent is foreign born. We caution putting too much emphasis on this finding, however, because of the limitations discussed as well as the small number of other race parents.