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122 I The preceding chapters document how children’s brokering influenced their families’ interactions across community locations, as well as the individual and collective activities that enabled and constrained their efforts. By considering what children do across multiple sites, it was possible to assess what strategies were successful in which settings and how interactions with service providers in particular institutions affected what child brokers could (and could not) help their families accomplish. Children’s brokering is an important dimension to how we understand two issues of great concern to a range of stakeholders: namely, immigrants’ interactions with US social institutions, and the social trajectories of immigrants’ children, because family responsibilities also have consequences for their independent choices and opportunities. Considering immigrants’ community interactions as a family project—not as something one generation does for the benefit of another, but as a collective project to which all members can make real contributions—gets us closer to understanding the complex and creative ways that families manage challenges related to migration and settlement. To varying degrees, parents and children honed their skills and strategies, learning from each other and from their local interactions over time. They made each other braver, and courage was surely needed to face the considerable difficulties they experienced making local connections to improve their current circumstances and enhance their future options. The preceding chapters demonstrate just how critical local institutions and the professionals who represented them were to determining whether children ’s and families’ efforts and strategies ultimately bore fruit. A family systems approach to analyzing families’ experiences accounts for what the family can do as a unit, but also demonstrates how individual members’ experiences may differ. Children and parents all contributed to their families’ local interactions, but not always equally and not necessarily in the same ways. c h a p t e r 7 BROKERING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Brokering and Its Consequences 123 Child brokers often communicated differently with their mothers and fathers, and siblings’contributions to collective strategies also varied. Elder siblings often played different roles and shouldered additional responsibilities for family functioning . These differences were most visible in the heavy investments that many made in their younger siblings’ connections to and success in school. Children’s family responsibilities also influenced their own development and access to opportunities. Brokering was a way for children to honor the immigrant bargain and redeem their parents’ migration sacrifices through their achievements in the adopted country—at least, in the short term. The everyday ways that children put their families’ needs first helped them survive and develop innovative, collective strategies for scaffolding meaning and making decisions. Children’s relatively greater fluency in English, familiarity with US cultural norms, and facility with communication technologies were crucial to these efforts; and engaging these skills powerfully demonstrated children’s commitment to their families’ wellbeing. Brokering activities helped address family problems in the short term but could hamper children’s chances of realizing the immigrant bargain in the long term. Children’s family responsibilities affected their relationships with their schools and often reduced their chances to build meaningful relationships with educators who could help them secure a wider range of educational opportunities . The time and energy that children put into brokering often displaced time and energy to spend on schoolwork. The result was a catch-22 for children : brokering pulled them away from their schooling, and schools’ resources were exactly what they required to broker more effectively and efficiently for their families as they got older. This tension between short- and long-term gains has implications for these children, their families, communities, and US society as a whole. Unintended Consequences and Unanticipated Gains Conscious choices yielded both intended and unintended outcomes for many of these families, echoing others’ recent findings on immigrants’ experiences in the United States. Richard Alba and Victor Nee (2005, 41) theorized how immigrants’ desires for a better life can have “unintended consequences” for their families; a decision to move to the suburbs, for example, can have the unintended consequence of US-born children being less likely to retain their parents’language than if they had remained in ethnic enclaves. Likewise, Mario Small (2010) described how connecting with well-resourced childcare institutions could yield “unanticipated gains” for parents who were initially motivated by achieving narrow, specific goals. In both of these cases, immigrants’ strategic decisions—moving to the suburbs or choosing reliable childcare—spawned consequences beyond those they had initially foreseen or predicted. [3.146.152.99] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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