Intergenerational Conflict

Sociology on Intergenerational Conflict

Intergenerational conflict as a paradigm for study of the immigrant family emerged from immigration scholarship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of families from eastern and southern Europe. Then as now, scholarship on immigration was shaped by concerns about the adaptation of these new populations to the United States. Studies sought to measure that adaptation on two counts: economic productivity (whether new arrivals would prove assets for the workforce) and mental health (whether the stresses of immigration would produce emotional pathologies or psychological disorders).

The notion that dissonance in the acculturation of immigrant and second generations would produce strife was introduced in the 1940s with reference to Italian Americans. Children of immigrants, having been born or raised in the United States, were said to adapt to American norms much more quickly than their parents, the latter perhaps never coming to replace homeland mores with those of the host country.

Studies of intergenerational conflict in Asian American families are apt to articulate this dissonance in terms of Eastern versus Western definitions of familial roles. The standard cultural explanation gives that, by Confucianist norms, parents may dictate all aspects of children's social and academic lives, expect unquestioning obedience in the form of filial piety, and demand elite educational and professional success as direct results of the child's diligence and hard work.

Children exposed to American, individualist norms, meanwhile, would chafe at these impediments to their autonomy and find parental standards inordinately high or unfairly exhaustive. In view of evidence for the strong economic adaptation of Asian Americans—such as their disproportionate representation in higher education and professional fields—Confucian heritage has historically been enlisted to narrate the ultimate utility and resolution of their intergenerational conflict: parental expectation as self-fulfilling prophecy. However, the cultural thesis is not uniformly validated by sociologists. Most Southeast Asian nations do not have Confucian cultural backgrounds, and no South Asian nationalities do. Yet, non-Confucian Asian immigrants have been found to have effectively the same intergenerational conflicts and comparable rates of educational success.

Indeed, evidence for the strong economic adaptation of Asian Americans presents what sociologists have termed an achievement paradox. Lower income immigrant families are also low in social capital relative to native-born populations, contending with handicaps in language as well as in institutional knowledge; these material factors in themselves usually predict low educational and economic achievement and by themselves may burnish the glow of the model minority. But, second-generation students from these backgrounds have also reported low self-esteem scores and in some cases alarmingly high rates of suicidal ideation. In some cases, subjects have linked these feelings directly to parental pressure and intergenerational conflict. Thus, if second-generation Asian Americans are achieving disproportionately strong economic productivity, this is despite economic barriers and indications of poor mental health outcomes. These latter outcomes give less cause to be sanguine about the ultimate utility of intergenerational conflict.

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