Immigrant Families

Abstract

The study examined the association between immigrants’ adaptation—as reflected by host-country language proficiency (based on self-ratings)—and their children’s psychological well-being in two countries: Germany and Israel. The findings stressed the importance of children’s gender in the study of parent–child dyads. Our separate analyses of boys’ and girls’ subsamples revealed results that were undetected when we analyzed the subsamples of both genders together. Specifically, we found that self-reported paternal proficiency in the German language was positively associated with their daughters’ psychological well-being, whereas maternal proficiency in German was positively associated with their sons’ well-being. No association was found in our Israeli sample between immigrant language proficiency and their children’s psychological well-being during the first 3.5 years following migration. Further analyses demonstrated that in Germany, the quality of father–daughter communication mainly accounted for the association between paternal language proficiency and their daughters’ psychological well-being, while maternal psychological well-being mediated at least partially the association between maternal language proficiency and sons’ psychological well-being. The results are discussed in light of the differences and similarities in the settings of the two countries.