As the immigrant population grows in countries such as the United States, so does the number of newcomer immigrant students in middle and high schools. Many scholars have noted that the education immigrant adolescents receive has a great bearing on the future of the nation. Understanding Adolescent Immigrants: Moving toward an Extraordinary Discourse for Extraordinary Youth highlights the voices of these young people by sharing the stories of seven newcomer youths aged 13 to 20 years in U.S. high schools. By learning their histories, present situations, and dreams for the future, we can understand both these students’ unique contribution to their new country and their schools’ roles in helping them achieve success.

This book shares the stories of adolescent immigrants in the American education system and highlights what teachers need to know about their unique challenges, strengths, and potential contributions to their new country.

Many academic and public policies promote rapid immigrant assimilation. Yet, researchers have recently identified an emerging pattern, known as the immigrant paradox, in which assimilated children of immigrants experience diminishing developmental outcomes and educational achievements. This volume examines these controversial findings by asking how and why highly acculturated youth may fare worse academically and developmentally than their less assimilated peers, and under what circumstances this pattern is disrupted. This timely compilation of original research is aimed at understanding how acculturation affects immigrant child and adolescent development. Chapters explore the question "Is Becoming American a Developmental Risk?" through a variety of lenses--psychological, sociological, educational, and economic. Contributors compare differential health, behavioral, and educational outcomes for foreign- and native-born children of immigrants across generations. While economic and social disparities continue to present challenges impeding child and adolescent development, particularly for U.S.-born children of immigrants, findings in this book point to numerous benefits of biculturalism and bilingualism to preserve immigrants' strengths.

Immigrant children and youth are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. Children of Immigrants represents some of the very best and most extensive research efforts to date on the circumstances, health, and development of children in immigrant families and the delivery of health and social services to these children and their families. This book presents new, detailed analyses of more than a dozen existing datasets that constitute a large share of the national system for monitoring the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Prior to these new analyses, few of these datasets had been used to assess the circumstances of children in immigrant families. The analyses enormously expand the available knowledge about the physical and mental health status and risk behaviors, educational experiences and outcomes, and socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of first- and second-generation immigrant children, compared with children with U.S.-born parents.

Adolescenceâ€"beginning with the onset of puberty and ending in the mid-20sâ€"is a critical period of development during which key areas of the brain mature and develop. These changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity mark adolescence as a period of opportunity to discover new vistas, to form relationships with peers and adults, and to explore one's developing identity. It is also a period of resilience that can ameliorate childhood setbacks and set the stage for a thriving trajectory over the life course. Because adolescents comprise nearly one-fourth of the entire U.S. population, the nation needs policies and practices that will better leverage these developmental opportunities to harness the promise of adolescenceâ€"rather than focusing myopically on containing its risks. This report examines the neurobiological and socio-behavioral science of adolescent development and outlines how this knowledge can be applied, both to promote adolescent well-being, resilience, and development, and to rectify structural barriers and inequalities in opportunity, enabling all adolescents to flourish.

In Inventing Modern Adolescence Sarah E. Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.

Winner Best Edited Book Award presented by the Society for Research on Adolescence Immigration to the United States has reached historic numbers— 25 percent of children under the age of 18 have an immigrant parent, and this number is projected to grow to one in three by 2050. These children have become a significant part of our national tapestry, and how they fare is deeply intertwined with the future of our nation. Immigrant children and the children of immigrants face unique developmental challenges. Navigating two distinct cultures at once, immigrant-origin children have no expert guides to lead them through the process. Instead, they find themselves acting as guides for their parents. How are immigrant children like all other children, and how are they unique? What challenges as well as what opportunities do their circumstances present for their development? What characteristics are they likely to share because they have immigrant parents, and what characteristics are unique to specific groups of origin? How are children of first-generation immigrants different from those of second-generation immigrants? Transitions offers comprehensive coverage of the field’s best scholarship on the development of immigrant children, providing an overview of what the field needs to know—or at least systematically begin to ask—about the immigrant child and adolescent from a developmental perspective. This book takes an interdisciplinary perspective to consider how personal, social, and structural factors interact to determine a variety of trajectories of development. The editors have curated contributions from experts across a carefully selected variety of topics covering ecologies, processes, and outcomes of development pertinent to immigrant origin children.