August 24th, 2022
Questions and Goals:
For my capstone project I am aiming to look at the impacts that childhood language brokering and parentification have on the mental health, life competency skills, and familial relationships of college students in immigrant families. Specifically in immigrant families who's first language is not English, it is more common for children to take on tasks that are typically done by a parent due to the pertinent language barrier that exists. Often times, children serve as the link between their family and outside communities such as school, the workplace, housing rental companies, and even government services.
I am interested in learning more about how exactly emerging adults are shaped by parentification during their childhood.
Methods:
For this project, I want to explore the realm of qualitative data collection. This means that my project will be based on personal interviews with a few young adults who have experienced parentification during childhood, and this data will hopefully be supplemented by a short survey distributed to a greater population to gain quantitative data on variables more suited for survey measures.
These two sets of data paired together will hopefully give a solid first look into the issues surrounding childhood parentification and language brokering in college students of immigrant families.
Future Implications:
With the expected results of this project, I hope to gain a better insight on how children are shaped by preventable early life stressors. If significant conclusions are found, it may be worth sharing data and outcomes with local schools with high populations of students from immigrant families or youth mental health providers in these areas as well. It would be hoped that if people know more about the problem and the potential effects that parentification and language brokering have on children, greater efforts can be made to provide schools with interpreters, school counselors may be able to fine-tune their efforts to aid children who struggle with stressors related to increased parental roles, or community resources can be put in place that would aid families in gaining financial, immigration, housing, and law related skills so that they don't need to rely on their english-speaking children as often.