SSRI/DuPrI Seminar Series ~ Mexican Immigrants and the Early Health and Education of their Children

ABSTRACT: Mexican-origin families make up the single biggest segment of the immigrant population of the U.S. As a group, they have high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage that combined with other characteristics of the U.S. receiving context, tend to block social mobility across generations. The early childhood years are likely to be a critical period in this intergenerational transmission of inequality as well as in policy and programmatic efforts to break it, given the significance of this period for long-term trajectories of health and human capital development as well as the fact that this is when the oft-discussed "immigrant paradoxes" of positive health and education outcomes are least likely to occur. To explore these issues, this presentation will discuss the interplay of physical health and educational experiences among young children from Mexican immigrant families; specifically, the ways in which both serious and common health problems of early childhood may undercut the gradual acquisition of cognitive and academic skills in the run-up to the transition into formal schooling. This discussion will be based on a forthcoming book that integrates statistical analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort with mixed methods data collected in Austin, TX. Seminar #4413