Asset and Protective Factors for Asian American Childrens Mental Health Adjustment

Asian Americans (AAs) are the second largest foreign-born population in the United States. Contrary to the “model minority” stereotype that this group is unitarily well adjusted and high achieving, recent research has revealed substantial differences in mental health adjustment among AA children. Although research to identify the risk processes for mental health problems among AA children is underway, it has paid little attention to related asset and protective processes. This article selectively reviews the theory and empirical evidence on a set of child-, family-, and neighborhood-level characteristics for their potential asset or protective roles in AA children’s mental health adjustment. These characteristics include (a) child factors (maintenance of heritage culture, bilingualism, coping, and emotion regulation), (b) family factors (authoritative parenting and parental support), and (c) a neighborhood factor (ethnic community). Overall, systematic efforts to identify asset and protective factors for AA children’s mental health and understand the underlying developmental mechanisms are nascent. Directions for future research in this area are also discussed. KEYWORDS—protective factors; Asian American; mental health The 2010 U.S. Census defined the Asian population in America as individuals with origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the India subcontinent (such as Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam; Humes, Jones, & Ramirez, 2011). AAs are the second largest foreign-born population in the United States (Acosta & de la Cruz, 2011). However, despite the quickly growing population, little research has examined AA children’s mental health (U.S. Department of Health & Human Service, 2001). Some recent research on AA children and adults has suggested that contrary to the “model minority” image of AAs as a unitarily well-adjusted and high-achieving group, substantial diversity exists within the population in terms of socioeconomic status (SES), acculturation experience, and mental health (Sue, Sue, Sue, & Takeuchi, 1995; Takeuchi et al., 2007). Compounded by AAs’ underuse of mental health services (AbeKim et al., 2007; Yu, Adams, Burns, Brindis, & Irwin, 2008), there exists a pressing need for research that identifies risk and protective factors in AA children’s mental health, as well as their underlying developmental sequences and mechanisms. In the past decade, researchers have begun to focus on within-group heterogeneity among AA children, identifying a number of risk and vulnerability factors that put some AA children at risk for psychopathology. For example, parent–child acculturation gaps (e.g., Costigan & Dokis, 2006; Kim, Chen, Li, Huang, & Moon, 2009), language brokering (Wu & Kim, 2009), and experience of racial discrimination (e.g., Benner & Kim, 2009; Deng, Kim, Vaughan, & Li, 2010) have all been linked to unfavorable adjustment outcomes. However, there is insufficient research on the asset or protective factors and processes that shape AA children’s mental health (for an exception, see Liu et al., 2011). Asset factors are individual or contextual characteristics that are associated with or predictive of positive adjustment outcomes (the “main effects”; Masten, 2001). Protective or buffering factors are intrapersonal, interpersonal, or contextual characteristics The work on this review was supported by a grant from the Foundation for Child Development Young Scholars Program to Qing Zhou. We would like to thank the special issue editors and anonymous referees for their valuable input on earlier versions of the review. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Qing Zhou, Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, 3210 Tolman Hall #1650, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650; e-mail: [email protected].