Intergenerational cultural dissonance in parent–adolescent relationships among Chinese and European Americans.

Abstract

Generational cultural gaps (assessed as the mismatch between adolescents' ideals and perceptions of the parent-adolescent relationship) were investigated among Chinese youth with immigrant parents and their European American counterparts who have been in the United States for generations and assumingly do not have intergenerational cultural gaps. The authors of the study examined the associations of such generational gaps with adolescents' behavioral problems and whether youth's appreciation of Chinese parent-adolescent relationships (parental devotion, sacrifice, thoughtfulness, and guan) described by the notion of qin would moderate the relationship between discrepancies and youth's adjustment. A total of 634 high school students (M = 15.97 years; 95 and 154 first- and second-generation Chinese American respectively, and 385 European Americans) completed measures of parental warmth, parent-adolescent open communication, qin, and psychological adjustment. The U.S.-born Chinese American adolescents' ideals exceeded perceptions of parents' warmth and open communication to a greater degree than it did for European American adolescents (ps < 0.05). Such discrepancies in parental warmth were related to greater internalizing symptoms for second-generation Chinese American youth than for their European American peers. In addition, for second-generation Chinese, their perceptions of qin, particularly parents' devotion and sacrifice, had stronger moderating effects, diminishing the associations between generational cultural gaps and youth's behavioral problems compared with those of European American and first-generation Chinese youth. Parental thoughtfulness also played a similar beneficial role, but did so for all youth.