What feelings accompany migrant adolescents in their integration processes? And how do they influence their life development?
The phenomenon of immigration is constantly growing in our country and high school now welcomes second-generation immigrants, boys and girls who are the children of immigrants, born in Italy or who arrived in Italy at an early age. It is easy to come across young people with marked oriental, African or South American features, who speak with a perfect Roman accent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They come to the Listening Center mainly under pressure from teachers who experience the difficulty of helping them, as in the case of Jian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jian is 14 years old, he has finished the first year of high school, he hasn’t gone to see the paintings: he is sure he hasn’t been admitted to the second year, but he doesn’t want to see it written down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was born in Rome but his parents are Chinese, when he was a few months old he was sent to China by his relatives because his parents, in Italy for many years, could not take care of him, they are merchants and they both work all day long. He returned to Rome at the age of 6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a few years, his parents go through a crisis, the house becomes the scene of continuous arguments in which the boy is sometimes involved, he is asked more or less explicitly to take sides, but Jian does not feel that either parent is a point of reference: he is afraid of his father who sometimes raises his hands, and keeps his mother at a distance, who when she argues with her husband takes it out on Jian as well. She doesn’t remember much of her past with her grandparents, not even Chinese, and she doesn’t want to learn it here, her parents speak little Italian, they have never done anything to improve it, if discussions happen everyone speaks in the language they know best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not uncommon for second-generation immigrant adolescents to be ignorant of their mother tongue and to be alien, at the same time, to their country of origin and to the country of immigration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It happens that the immigrant adolescent would like to integrate with the new culture but this can provoke feelings of guilt because of the desire to move away from family traditions and betrayal towards parents who left their country, work hard not to let their children lack anything and try to maintain cultural traditions. As for Jian, he actually feels Italian, but he feels he cannot carry on this identity and cannot belong to any group of Italians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jian has sudden mood swings, he attends school intermittently, sometimes he is absent for days, he cannot study and his school performance confirms this. He would like to leave school because he doesn’t know who to continue it for, he doesn’t have a good relationship with his classmates, he feels ignored, little considered, he has the impression that others are not interested in him. He doesn’t share interests with them usually talking about soccer, school and homework, while he is interested in something else. He avoids getting close for fear of rejection. The feeling of foreignness prevails. His classmates don’t actually exclude him, in fact they would like to involve him, they have tried several times, Jian’s expectation is maximum and he ends up excluding himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His path begins uphill, with the impossibility of maintaining continuity in the attachment relationship, an aspect now recognized as an element of vulnerability of the evolutionary path (Bowlby). Not being able to build stable attachment bonds in the first period of life exerts an unfavorable role on the development of personality. The awareness of being able to count on the protection and comfort of the attachment figure in case of need, creates a state of emotional security from which it is possible to start exploring the external world and one’s own internal world. We can therefore imagine what consequences the failure to strengthen an attachment bond can have. Jian spent a few months with his parents, then was sent to China, and is reunited with them when too much time has passed to rebuild the old bond, a substitute attachment had probably been rebuilt with the relatives with whom he lived in the early years and from whom he was separated. He therefore faced two major transitions. His parents, then, are anything but stable, given the pressing work and economic problems, when not of couple, that they have to face daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The teachers would have liked to help him but the continuous absences have made it practically impossible, as well as stimulating strong feelings of helplessness in them. They have summoned his parents several times, but they have not taken it in the right way and consider their son’s difficulties as a form of disrespect towards them, so their involvement is not very useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jian is suspended between two worlds, like most second-generation immigrant minors: he knows Italian well, but the double cultural pressure – at home with parents who are not positive models of identification and outside the home with peers who represent everyday life – make it difficult for him to build a more defined cultural identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In general, during adolescence, the choice of the peer group satisfies more than any other the socialization needs of young people, who find in the group confirmation of their own value and potential in the process of building an adult identity. It is the frequentation of peers and the assumption of their models of life that guarantees integration in the country of immigration. When this does not happen, immigrant adolescents tend to take refuge in isolation and withdraw into themselves, even though the peer group remains the only acceptable point of comparison. In fact, the degree of acceptance and recognition that occur within the peer group are responsible for the range of strategies that go from complete assimilation to extreme isolation. In borderline cases, it can happen that the adolescent, having lost the stimuli and incentives to maintain his own ethnic identity, which seems to have no more space and reason in the external world he perceives and frequents, risks becoming an outcast in his own community, while continuing to remain an outcast from the external society, since he is not yet able to integrate into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this case, those phenomena that sociology defines as “social anomie” can develop, becoming fertile ground for the emergence of psychopathological discomfort and\/or deviant behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At school we are constantly working to build a positive context and exchange between different cultures, even if it is increasingly clear that integration may remain partial for these children: the availability of classmates and teachers does not correspond to the same availability on the part of young immigrants who must obviously maintain a certain distance to protect themselves from relational shocks, common in interpersonal relationships, but which would be intolerable to them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What feelings accompany migrant adolescents in their integration processes? And how do they influence their life development?The phenomenon of immigration is constantly growing in our country and high school now welcomes second-generation immigrants, boys and girls who are the children of immigrants, born in Italy or who arrived in Italy at an early age. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.icteen.eu\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}