Most immigrant parents face the challenge of passing on their heritage language to their children.

Abstract. Immigrant parents face a double challenge in rearing their children in a foreign country. In addition to the tasks that all parents face, they must also try to find a balance between the norms and expectations of their heritage culture and those of the culture they live in. How do immigrant parents support their children and contribute to their positive adaptation? The goal of this review is to highlight selected aspects of parenting and family relationships that are strongly linked to children’s development and resilience. With regards to family processes, we underscore the contribution of fathers, the role of a potential acculturation gap between parents, and the benefit of speaking the heritage language in the family. For the connection to the world outside of the family, we highlight the advantage of having proficiency in the majority language and of parental involvement in schools. Finally, we outline the specific challenges and stressors as well as the importance of family relationships for families with refugee status. We conclude by making the case that immigrant parents should be encouraged and supported in rearing their children in a way that fosters family cohesion and reflects their heritage culture as well as the culture of the host country. This requires support and intervention programs that are not only culturally sensitive but are also two-generational and focus on mothers, fathers, and children.

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Recent research has increasingly questioned the bilingual advantage for executive functions (EF). We used structural equation modeling in a large sample of Turkish immigrant and German monolingual children (N = 337; aged 5–15 years) to test associations between bilingualism and EF. Our data showed no significant group differences between Turkish immigrant and German children’s EF skills while taking into account maternal education, child gender, age, and working memory (i.e., digit span backwards). Moreover, neither Turkish immigrant children’s proficiency in either language nor their home language environment predicted EF. Our findings offer important new evidence in light of the ongoing debate about the existence of a bilingual advantage for EF.