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7 Sharon Mclrvin Abu-Laban and Baha Abu-Laban Teens Between: The Public and Private Spheres ofArab-Canadian Adolescents Adolescence, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, may be the best of times and the worst of times. The angst of the young is documented in literature, film, social science research, and hand-wringing conversations between middle-aged adults. In adolescence, biological changes are omnipresent as the body alters, sometimes dramatically, along the journey from childhood to adulthood. It is during adolescence and the young adult years that families often exert considerable pressure to retain the earlier compliance of childhood and mold (or hammer) the young person into making appropriate choices. The crush of necessary decisions in pre-adulthood, involving such issues as dating, marriage, education, and occupation, have critical implications for adult opportunities, life trajectories , and the vested interests of the larger family unit. At the same time, to be a member of the youth generation-to be a teenager, adolescent, or young adult-is often associated with personal concerns about acceptance and sense of place beyond the circle of the family. The concern with age-peers is heightened. Being "different" is not often perceived as a badge of honor by the young. What then are the experiences of the young in North America who are descendants of recent immigrants? What pressures face second-generation youth whose parents are defined as foreign, newcomers, or outsiders trying to make it to inside? What pressures are faced, particularly by children of the Arab diaspora, whose ethnocultural heritage is often devalued by the larger society?1 How do youth of Arab descent perceive, address, submit to, or resist the assemblage of cross-cutting pressures from immigrant parents, age peers, and a largely majoritarian school system? How do these young negotiate their youth, their growing-up, their movement from child to adult, from the family of their childhood to the family of their adult creation in a climate where their parents are less culturally knowledgeable, where they and their parents may share a devalued ethnicity, and where the expectations of their family may seem very different from the expectations that govern their friends and classmates? II4 SHARON McIRVIN ABU-LABAN AND BAHA ABU-LABAN This chapter describes the result of a study that is part of a larger research project on youth and family dynamics. It focuses on a group of early and late adolescents and young adults of Arab-Canadian descent. Collectively, these young people experience the afflictions and annoyances of adolescence in the North American context but with degrees of difference. They have parents who experienced their own youth in countries in the Arab Middle East. Canadians of Arab descent are officially members of a "visible minority," a designation used in federal policy pronouncements and legislation to buttress programs aimed at promoting equity and multiculturalism. Visible minorities are defined as "nonwhite" or "non-Caucasian." There is a variation in the way or extent to which these Arab-Canadian youth are recognizable as being visible, officially or unofficially.2 However, in Canada, at the third millennium, being of Arab descent is a form of "stigma" as the term is used by Erving Goffman.3 It is an attribute that may be hidden, but if revealed in the right (or wrong) time or place, it has the potential to be deeply discrediting.4 This analysis examines the perceived consistencies and inconsistencies across two major areas in the lives of these Arab-Canadian youth: the sphere of family and home and the sphere of school and community. It raises questions concerning the degree of fit between these spheres, the areas of overlap, the points of opposition, and the significance of gender differences. The analysis that follows begins by situating these Arab-Canadian youth in the larger sociohistorical context of the Arab-Canadian immigration experience and contrasting this with the current demographic characteristics of the community and the characteristics of the young informants in this study. The chapter next examines two major influences on the lives of youth in the Arab diaspora, the more private world of parents and kin in contrast to the more public world of school and age peers. It queries the extent to which and ways in which these influences affect the North American adaptation of teens from immigrant families and specifically the ways in which gender plays an important role in shaping the adaptive encounter. The Community in Sociohistorical Context Immigration to Canada from countries of the Arab Near East began late in...

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