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Literature Review: Examining Immigrant Children's Mental Health

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Examining Immigrant Children’s Mental Health
The existing literature by McClure (2010), Hatzenbuehler (2015), Castañeda (2015), Messias (2014), and colleagues establish that immigration and immigration policy create stressful environments for immigrants that can affect health. To reiterate this point, Messias and colleagues mention, “there are physical and emotional costs to immigrants living under prolonged stress in conditions of poverty and victimization and lacking access to health care and other social services (2014, p. 88). In addition to the literature on immigration, there are several case studies that examine immigrant children’s mental health, which will be enumerated in this section of the literature review.
Children of immigrants, …show more content…

born) children live in fear that their parents will be deported or incarcerated for indefinite periods of time, a situation that most non-immigrant children do not have to worry about (Delva et al. 2013, p. 26). Through snowball sampling, Delva and colleagues, interviewed immigrant families with children and or adolescence (both documented and undocumented). The interviews focused on the children and adolescence, interview questions revolved around their daily lives (Delva et al. 2015, p. 28). Additionally, the children and adolescence were asked to rank their anxiety during different activities, to get an index of stress (Delva et al. 2013, p.28). Sampled population was mostly undocumented children, twelve out of twenty of participants, and all participants met at least one clinically significant health risk factor. Factors that were the most common among the participants were, attention issues, withdrawn-depression, anxiety-depression, and behavioral issues, meaning that these children suffer from mental health issues (Delva et al. 2013, p. 29). Correlatively, Brabeck and Hunter (2014) examines the impact of parents’ immigrant status on the children, through an analysis of the existing literature, on immigrant families and children. Brabeck and Hunter (2014) analyze the factors of deportation and undocumented status, examining how they affect children’s health in multiple studies (p. 497-498). Hunter and Brabeck summarize, that these factors interact

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