Parental overprotection in Asian American children: A psychodynamic clinical perspective.

Abstract

Parental overprotection, involving tight control of children and lack of parental warmth, although culturally tolerated in traditional Asian societies, may result in significant psychopathology for Asian children growing up in modern Western societies. The therapist working with disturbed children from Asian families with excessively overprotective parents can address the child's needs for emotional autonomy and warmth while remaining sensitive to the cultural values supporting family interdependence. The paradigm of the “autonomous-relational self” (Kagitçibasi, 1996b), combining aspects of independent and interdependence, provides a theoretical foundation for clinical work. This paradigm is applied in the treatment of three Asian American early adolescents having overprotective parents and manifesting significant psychopathology. Both cultural and psychodynamic aspects supported the parental overprotection; nevertheless, the therapist was able to achieve some gains in emotional autonomy for these children.

Understanding Asian parenting from a Rasch perspective

“…This parenting characteristic is congruent with the description by some of Asian parenting as being facilitative (e.g. training parenting style, Chao, ), organizational (Lau & Cheung, ), overly protective (Lai, Zhang, & Wang, ; Lowinger & Kwok, ), or even authoritarian (Chiu, ; Wang, Pomerantz, & Chen, ).…”

The Adjustment of Asian American Families to the U.S. Context: The Ecology of Strengths and Stress

“…Affectionate and open communication are generally discouraged in Asian culture (Le, Berenbaum, & Raghavan, 2002;Lowinger & Kwok, 2001). This includes physical and verbal expres-sions of love, anger, and other strong emotions and opinions.…”

Exploring Culturally Based Intrafamilial Stressors among Latino Adolescents

“…For example, parents who experience their child acculturating at a pace that far exceeds theirs may react by becoming overprotective. In fact, previous researchers have indicated that many immigrant youth, including Asian American (Lowinger & Kwok, 2001) and Asian Indian (Varghese & Jenkins, 2009) youth, perceive their parents as overprotective due, in part, to acculturation discrepancies. This study expands on these findings by examining this process in a group of Latino youth.…”