Open Letter + Social Media Composition |
|
Dear Immigrant Parents,
You will never have a perfect child.
Having specific expectations of exceedingly great success for your children, considering you were able to provide a more privileged environment where they could thrive, is understandable; it's more than understandable, even. However, these high expectations had or continue to have lasting effects as this type of pressured mindset pushes us to overexertion.
Have you checked in on them recently?
How did you approach them? What did they say?
How did they initially respond when you asked them this? Were they surprised? Defensive? Confused?
Let's not neglect their lives and their passions outside of academics.
Instead of these questions, you should be asking these questions:
How was school?
How are you?
How are your grades?
How are your friends?
How was the test? Did you study enough?
How's that new hobby going? I'm excited to see how it turns out.
Conversations regarding various other topics besides school are so refreshing and are, honestly, such a relief. We appreciate the endless amount of sacrifices that you've made and continue to make. However, it would be best if you didn't make us feel like our entire and sole purpose in life is to repay you for giving us these gifts. We have and always will be grateful, and we will always feel somehow irrevocably endowed to you. I think it would just help if our conversations weren't only ever fueled by unresolved neglect from your own childhood experiences through guilt-tripping us into these long lectures of how you had it so much worse. These types of conversations, after so many years, become redundant. They serve as this blockade in our relationship. We feel we can no longer talk to you about anything that's going wrong in our lives. Even the opportunity to air out any grievances, knowing the response will be some sort of passive comment about how we should be doing better. It feels almost bittersweet.
It becomes increasingly difficult to empathize with your struggles when you constantly wrestle with assimilating our hardships and obstacles. In doing so, it makes it complicated for us to fully express our emotions. As someone who has and continues to deal with mental health issues, most of my episodes and breakdowns were overlooked and covered harshly with a bandaid, a firm slap, and a very noticeable rolling of the eyes. Many immigrant parents don't believe that depression is real. They tend to compare our reactions to stressful situations to their reactions to even more stressful situations. Completely invalidating our distress isn't helpful in the slightest. The pressure to take advantage of every opportunity we are given is reasonable, but there are just some things we cannot do. There are going to be some things that we will never exceed in. There are simply some things we cannot understand.
Even the unfortunate burden of being an immigrant in the United States is exceptionally prevalent, especially amongst your children. They are almost an immediate probable cause to facing racism first-hand. Not only will you both be harshly subjected to stereotypes, microaggressions, and even hate crimes, but they are also forced out of their childhood pretty early on. Once the age to work has been reached, many of you expect them to have the ability to balance school and work at fifteen. Some households even expect their teens to be the financial and emotional support for their family households. With this also comes the role of mediator, as we might be your reliance when it comes to reading and speaking English. Having to dissect governmental documents they don't or can't even understand, having to help fill out job applications by translating words that aren't familiar is mentally exhausting for a young child. And yes, while you had to live like this in your home, you came here so that your children wouldn't have to live these experiences. The same exhaustion and fatigue breathes within them now as it breathed within you back then.
Many of us also struggle with our cultural identity. As learning English becomes a priority for many immigrants to obtain better chances of securing a stable income job, the native language gets lost, which causes us to have a bit of a disconnect with our family members who don't live in the United States. We become a spectacle of a coin where one side represents how we are too Americanized to fit in with peers who share the same ethnicity. The other side indicates how we are too ethnic to fit in with our American peers. While cultural identity crisis heavily affects our social life, the pressure to make you proud hangs over our academic life. Please be aware that all of these factors, including financial, social, and emotional factors, heavily influence our mental health, influencing how we respond to you.
Love,
A Daughter of Immigrant Parents
Links:
“Children of Immigrants and Their Mental Health Needs: Think Global Health.” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/children-immigrants-and-their-mental-health-needs.
Close, Ciara, et al. “The Mental Health and Wellbeing of First Generation Migrants: A Systematic-Narrative Review of Reviews.” Globalization and Health, BioMed Central, 25 Aug. 2016, https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-016-0187-3.
“Part of US: A Data-Driven Look at Children of Immigrants.” Urban Institute, 14 Mar. 2019, https://www.urban.org/features/part-us-data-driven-look-children-immigrants.
“To Be the Child of an Immigrant.” Mental Health America, https://www.mhanational.org/blog/be-child-immigrant.
You will never have a perfect child.
Having specific expectations of exceedingly great success for your children, considering you were able to provide a more privileged environment where they could thrive, is understandable; it's more than understandable, even. However, these high expectations had or continue to have lasting effects as this type of pressured mindset pushes us to overexertion.
Have you checked in on them recently?
How did you approach them? What did they say?
How did they initially respond when you asked them this? Were they surprised? Defensive? Confused?
Let's not neglect their lives and their passions outside of academics.
Instead of these questions, you should be asking these questions:
How was school?
How are you?
How are your grades?
How are your friends?
How was the test? Did you study enough?
How's that new hobby going? I'm excited to see how it turns out.
Conversations regarding various other topics besides school are so refreshing and are, honestly, such a relief. We appreciate the endless amount of sacrifices that you've made and continue to make. However, it would be best if you didn't make us feel like our entire and sole purpose in life is to repay you for giving us these gifts. We have and always will be grateful, and we will always feel somehow irrevocably endowed to you. I think it would just help if our conversations weren't only ever fueled by unresolved neglect from your own childhood experiences through guilt-tripping us into these long lectures of how you had it so much worse. These types of conversations, after so many years, become redundant. They serve as this blockade in our relationship. We feel we can no longer talk to you about anything that's going wrong in our lives. Even the opportunity to air out any grievances, knowing the response will be some sort of passive comment about how we should be doing better. It feels almost bittersweet.
It becomes increasingly difficult to empathize with your struggles when you constantly wrestle with assimilating our hardships and obstacles. In doing so, it makes it complicated for us to fully express our emotions. As someone who has and continues to deal with mental health issues, most of my episodes and breakdowns were overlooked and covered harshly with a bandaid, a firm slap, and a very noticeable rolling of the eyes. Many immigrant parents don't believe that depression is real. They tend to compare our reactions to stressful situations to their reactions to even more stressful situations. Completely invalidating our distress isn't helpful in the slightest. The pressure to take advantage of every opportunity we are given is reasonable, but there are just some things we cannot do. There are going to be some things that we will never exceed in. There are simply some things we cannot understand.
Even the unfortunate burden of being an immigrant in the United States is exceptionally prevalent, especially amongst your children. They are almost an immediate probable cause to facing racism first-hand. Not only will you both be harshly subjected to stereotypes, microaggressions, and even hate crimes, but they are also forced out of their childhood pretty early on. Once the age to work has been reached, many of you expect them to have the ability to balance school and work at fifteen. Some households even expect their teens to be the financial and emotional support for their family households. With this also comes the role of mediator, as we might be your reliance when it comes to reading and speaking English. Having to dissect governmental documents they don't or can't even understand, having to help fill out job applications by translating words that aren't familiar is mentally exhausting for a young child. And yes, while you had to live like this in your home, you came here so that your children wouldn't have to live these experiences. The same exhaustion and fatigue breathes within them now as it breathed within you back then.
Many of us also struggle with our cultural identity. As learning English becomes a priority for many immigrants to obtain better chances of securing a stable income job, the native language gets lost, which causes us to have a bit of a disconnect with our family members who don't live in the United States. We become a spectacle of a coin where one side represents how we are too Americanized to fit in with peers who share the same ethnicity. The other side indicates how we are too ethnic to fit in with our American peers. While cultural identity crisis heavily affects our social life, the pressure to make you proud hangs over our academic life. Please be aware that all of these factors, including financial, social, and emotional factors, heavily influence our mental health, influencing how we respond to you.
Love,
A Daughter of Immigrant Parents
Links:
“Children of Immigrants and Their Mental Health Needs: Think Global Health.” Council on Foreign Relations, https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/children-immigrants-and-their-mental-health-needs.
Close, Ciara, et al. “The Mental Health and Wellbeing of First Generation Migrants: A Systematic-Narrative Review of Reviews.” Globalization and Health, BioMed Central, 25 Aug. 2016, https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-016-0187-3.
“Part of US: A Data-Driven Look at Children of Immigrants.” Urban Institute, 14 Mar. 2019, https://www.urban.org/features/part-us-data-driven-look-children-immigrants.
“To Be the Child of an Immigrant.” Mental Health America, https://www.mhanational.org/blog/be-child-immigrant.