Early Marriage in a Hmong Cohort

Abstract

Rumbaut and Ima's (1988) report on the social and cultural adaptation of Southeast Asian refugee youth in Sad Diego indicated that the Hmong have retained their traditional family patterns more than any other group studied. Important characteristics of these family patterns include early age of marriage for female children, high levels of fertility, and a narrow set of circumscribed roles for females vis-a-vis those of males. Other studies indicate that after more than a decade of residence in the United States, a majority of Hmong adults remain unemployed and a majority of households have incomes below the federal poverty line (Fass, 1991). The linkage between early marriage and fertility and subsequent opportunities for the successful social and economic integration of Hmong adolescents and young adults suggests that additional attention should be focused on the social processes that lead to early marriage, and on the consequences of early marriage for the educational careers of Hmong students. The study of ethnic subgroups such as the Hmong is important in several respects. Detailed studies of ethnic populations allow us to assess the generalizability of models developed from surveys of the general population; comparisons among ethnic groups may also indicate the degree to which theories that explain demographic patterns and minority status for one group are applicable to other ethnic subgroups (cf. Ogbu, 1991). In addition, the Hmong have been stereotyped elsewhere as encouraging their daughters to many at an early age. Although some instances of pubescent girls becoming wives have been mentioned in ethnographic literature on the Hmong in their Laotian homeland, we do not have reliable data to indicate the extent to which they may be repeating a traditional pattern by marrying while in high school. Anthropological accounts of early marriage lack even basic measures of central tendency and variance that would allow us to establish connections between antecedent conditions and contemporary patterns of marriage in the Hmong community. In this article we report on early marriage in a cohort of Hmong high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota. Using panel data from the Youth Development Study, we are able to track a cohort of male and female high school students from their freshman year through the second semester of their senior year. The high school years are an important period of transition for adolescents in industrialized countries. This period is even more crucial for Hmong adolescents, who must negotiate not only the usual transition from adolescence to adulthood, but also the competing and sometimes contradictory demands of Hmong culture and the dominant Anglo society. Most studies assume that early marriage has negative consequences for the subsequent educational achievement and economic success of both husband and wife. The underlying theoretical perspective of these studies implies a rather narrow and individualistic definition of educational achievement and economic success, which may be inappropriate for the Hmong. In this study we examine the attitudes of Hmong adolescents toward marriage and fertility, and explore factors associated with early marriage and childbearing. For the Hmong, high fertility may still be an effective strategy for spreading risks across several offspring: If one has many children, chances are that one of them will be economically successful and therefore will be able to contribute to the support of the parents. Because early marriage may well be typical in the Hmong community, we are confronted with a set of parallel but seemingly contradictory research questions: (a) What factors promote early marriage and early childbearing for Hmong adolescents, and (b) why do some Hmong adolescents--in particular, some adolescent Hmong females decide to delay marriage and childbearing until they have completed their high school educations? REVIEW OF LITERATURE There exists an abundant literature on family formation and factors affecting early marriage and childbearing in both the general population (Rindfuss, Morgan, & Swicegood 1988; Sweet Bumpass, 1987) and for ethnic/racial subgroups such as African Americans (Bennet, Bloom, & Craig, 1989) and Mexican Americans (Stephen, 1989; Stephen & Bean, 1992). …