Asian Media Access :: Helping Youth Succeed

Helping Youth Succeed

AMA worked with U of M, Family Social Science to develop an important project called Helping Youth Succeed in Southeast Asian Families.

Helping Youth Succeed in Southeast Asian Families Project's overall goal is the prevention, reduction and resolution of parent-child conflicts in Southeast Asian families. The Project is to design a culturally grounded parent education package (a Curriculum and a educational Video) aimed at bridging the gap between the cultural knowledge of Southeast Asian parents and the parenting skills needed with vulnerable pre-adolescent and adolescent youth.

Most Southeast Asian parents understood quite well their roles, functions and responsibilities as parental authorities in their homelands. Their parenting behaviors were reinforced by social context and spiritual beliefs and their authority was unquestioned. But in the modern Minnesota context, adults are often uncertain of their roles, fearful of government intervention, and unclear about the Western-oriented developmental stage of adolescence. Many have limited English ability, do not fully understand the expectations for parenting in this new setting, and are confused by what they perceive as too much freedom allowed to youth in the US. Problems between parents and youth are manifested in the street as an increase in runways, growth in gang memberships, higher truancy and dropout rates, and an explosive increase in the arrest rate of Asian juveniles. In order to build up a healthy community, these issues have to be addressed at the basic level --- to help Southeast Asian families to learn bicultural parenting skills which enable them to understand their kids and help them successfully transit into the new environment.

With this initiative in mind, the Curriculum focuses on six parenting skills thought to be universally important to parents from diverse cultural backgrounds: self-care, understand, nurture, guide, motivate, and advocate. Focusing on each of these skills, parents and youth described how they defined the term, the problems associated with the skill, and positive examples of its skillful use in families. Four case studies or parenting dilemmas for each of the six parenting skill modules are the centerpiece of the Curriculum.

The Educational Video will follow closely to the Curriculum and will pick one case from each central theme of six Parenting Categories: self-care, understand, nurture, guide, motivate, and advocate, and transform case studies into short dramatic scenes to stimulate audience's involvement. The Educational Video will be prepared in five languages' versions: English, Hmong, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian. The Educational Video that contained the six cases from each parenting skills to:

Serve as the information providers for the SE Asian parents
Serve as the supplementary materials to the Bicultural Parenting Curriculum to stimulate the discussion
Serve as the independent programs for general public to use when encountering SE Asian parenting issues

After completion of the Project, the Curriculum/Educational Video will be distributed in the "Train the Trainers" conference, and then be disseminated to family educators, community-based agencies, and programs serving Southeast Asian families, and the MAA's. The Project will have a concentric impact that begins with individual parents and extends to the youth, extended kin groups, neighborhoods and eventually throughout the States.