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Immigrant and Refugee Children and their Families: Clinical, Research, and Training Issues covers many issues which arise in the treatment of ethnic minorities in Western countries. Whereas authors in subsequent chapters of the book essentially focus on how immigration often leads to psychopathology in children and families (for example, see the chapter by Kinzie and Sack), thereby seeing the glass as half-empty, Barwick et. al seem to take the glass-as-half-full approach. They challenge stereotypes of traumatized, troubled, disadvantaged immigrants by pointing out that under certain circumstances, immigrants often do better than native populations within host countries. They discuss various “protective factors” which shield immigrants from “mental health risks” and which help to bring out immigrants' resilience. Many of these factors boil down to how receptive the host country is to immigrants (see Akhtar, 1999) and what provisions are made for their special language, education, and health needs. Other factors which the authors discuss that promote resilience include living in an ethnic enclave, and having access to supportive extended family members.
One issue stressed by Barwick et al., though referred to by other authors of the book, may not have received enough attention overall (for an exception to this, see the chapter on adolescents' adaptation by Saucier et al.). This is the all-important issue of the low socioeconomic status (SES) of almost all the immigrants and refugees studied here. For example, in a fascinating study on how trauma impacts time perspective, Rousseau et. al barely contextualize these childrens' sense of a foreshortened future within the perspectives espoused by their family's “social reference group” (p. 128), i.e., their social class or SES. In other words, validity appears to be at stake here—how much of the variance in subjects' sense of time is explained by the factor of trauma,