4 Elementary School–Aged Children 107procedures. Sometimes students take advantage of their superior language
skills compared to those of their parents or older family members. School
deadlines are missed, discipline notices go untranslated, less-than-exemplary
report cards vanish. More often, students like Huong have unexcused absences
due to accompanying a parent to a medical appointment. Alternatively, they
may come to school unable to stay awake, because they have had to stay up
late doing their own homework while simultaneously supervising younger
siblings.
Loss of school time is, in some ways, a relatively benign side effect of
being “parentified.” The loss of a dependable parent–child relationship can be
far more devastating to family dynamics. Students realize that parents have
no power to control or punish them; communication and roles are frayed and
sometimes severed. Some children understand that their parents have made
sacrifices for them in coming to a land where nothing will be familiar or com-
fortable, but in other cases, children are resentful and desire to separate them-
selves from their parents and the culture that defines them.
While identities at home may be expanding and children may be taking
on additional responsibilities, at school a different scenario is being played
out. Students are often treated in ways befitting children far younger than
they are, based on their developing language skills. Sometimes telegraphic
language is used (“Tomas go bathroom?”) or even baby talk (“time to go bye-
bye!”) by teachers who forget that just because students cannot yet communi-
cate in English, they have not lost their ability to think and reason effectively.
Uncomfortably often, immigrant students may be placed in classrooms with
students who have learning or behavior problems. Early stages of language
acquisition are treated as disabling conditions, instead of as a temporary state
which can be addressed by skillful teaching in the present, to help students
advance to grade-level instruction as quickly as possible. Instead of having
“access to the curriculum” that the law requires, immigrant students are often
in virtual holding tanks until their English skills advance. There is often a sig-
nificant disconnect between being at home where they may have significant
psychological power, and school where they are treated as deficient. Whatever
the class configurations, if there are several or more immigrant students in a
school, they are often automatically grouped together. Their shared lack of
English ability is believed legitimate to dictate educational and social place-
ment. Despite their relative inexperience with students from countries unlike
their own, immigrant students are thrown into a group of other English lan-
guage learners (ELL) and expected to act like a “little United Nations.”
A wide range of cultural norms may be violated unintentionally. A girl’s
sense of propriety may be seriously upset by being expected to collaborate
on group projects with boys, much less attend coed gym classes where activ-
ity can be embarrassingly personal (swimming or tumbling, for example) and
clothing is uncomfortably revealing. An immigrant girl found crying in a gym
class is often thought to be shy or fearful of the physical activity, when in fact
she is mortified and worried about what her parents will think when they
learn about their daughter’s activities in school. In the United States, students
may be asked to learn or cooperate with others whose cultures or communities
are at war with each other in their home countries. They are often expected to