Children as Brokers of Their Immigrant Families’ Health-Care Connections

Abstract

In an era of ever-increasing population diversity, bilingual intermediaries have become critical to health-care provision in the United States and elsewhere. Professional interpreters fulfill these roles in many cases, but family members frequently do as well. This article focuses on children of immigrants as brokers of language, culture, and media content who facilitate their families’ connections to health-care providers and health-related resources. Children broker in order to compensate for the limited (or nonexistent) accommodations available to their immigrant families when they interact with health-care providers and institutions. As such, children’s brokering constitutes an important, often overlooked, linkage between research on immigrant family dynamics and immigrants’ interactions with host country institutions. Children’s brokering also has implications for their own social, moral, and educational trajectories, which are deeply influenced by their responsibilities to their families. Data collected through field observations and interviews with Latino immigrant parents, their child brokers, and local health-care providers revealed how children’s brokering influences these interactions. This article explores providers’ perceptions of and interactions with child brokers and their families, taken in context of the institutions in which they work and of the intrafamily dynamics that can facilitate or constrain children’s efforts.