Mental Health Challenges for Children of Immigrants

Children of immigrants often face unique challenges and dynamics, both within their families and in broader society. While every person’s experience is unique, legacies of loss, grief, and hardship that often accompany immigration may be shared. Children of immigrants often grapple with conflicts around their identities, feelings of extreme pressure and guilt, and face various barriers when it comes to connecting with and communicating with family. In this post, we’ll explore some of those challenges, as well as discuss what kind of support therapy can offer.

Sense of identity

For children of immigrants, or those who moved between countries in their early childhoods, “home” may be hard to define. They may feel torn, navigating between the cultures of a country they have little or no connection to, and a country where they may perpetually feel like an outsider. It’s understandable then, that a core conflict for many children of immigrants is understanding and defining their own identity and sense of self across multiple cultures and worlds. The facets of their identities or personalities they feel most comfortable expressing at home with family may be in conflict with who they are with friends, romantic partners, or at work. This conflict can result in confusion, frustration, and depression as they find themselves constantly having to negotiate between or sacrifice parts of who they are to hold onto important relationships.

Pressure and guilt

Children of immigrants often grapple with immense pressure to succeed academically, professionally, and financially, with the implicit or explicit understanding that they need to somehow justify their parents’ sacrifices and hardships. This may lead to definitions of success that are narrow and restricting, offering little room for exploration or error. Even as children of immigrants grow into adults with more secure lives, careers, and families, the feeling of the high stakes of failure may remain with them, perpetuating cycles of pressure and striving for perfectionism. “Failure” to achieve perfection may lead to intense guilt or shame, as the constant striving may contribute to a belief that one’s inherent value is equivalent to their highest achievement. When the margin for error feels that small, we often see struggles with anxiety, imposter syndrome, and burnout.

Barriers

Barriers come in all forms–generational, cultural, structural, physical, language–and children of immigrants often face all of these, within their families of origin, among their friends and in their closest relationships, and in broader society. These barriers may have felt like their responsibility to overcome as children. They may have felt like they had to act as translators for their families; they may have felt like if they achieved enough, they could “overcome” the impacts of racism, xenophobia, or capitalism; they may have felt like they needed to accept that would never be fully understood by their families, closest friends, or partners. Living with the burdens of these barriers will often lead to overarching feelings of alienation, loneliness, and difficulty connecting in their closest relationships.

How can therapy help?

Therapy may be hard for any first- and second-generation immigrant to approach, as the idea of mental health may not have been championed or even accepted in their families of origin. However, examining the narratives under which we grew up and formed our earliest relationships and experiences of attachment can be a critical component toward leading more authentic, connected lives.

Among other things, within the therapeutic setting, we might: explore and rewrite parts of the narratives of our upbringing and the roles we have played within our families; examine our values and attitudes toward things like success, guilt, and shame, and reconstruct them to better suit us now; clarify more deeply what meaningful relationships could look and feel like for us, and move toward them.

To learn more about the specific issues that are often addressed in therapy and areas of expertise at West Therapy Group, click here. Or book a free consultation with any member of our team here.