Immigrant children, more so than native born children come to face a variety of circumstances, such as low family income, poor education, and language confinement. These factors act as barriers and place them at risk of developmental delay and dissatisfactory academic performance upon entering school. I will be conducting research regarding the matter of children moving into Canada, and the barriers that they face. My hypothesis states the barriers that immigrant children and their families encounter, bring a negative affect to their academic performance. The article "Early care and Education for Children in Immigrant Families," written by Karoly and Gonzalez, examine the current role of and future possibility that early care and education (ECE) programs have in promoting healthy development for immigrant children. Overall, immigrant children have lower rates of participation in these non-parental care programs than their native counterparts. Karoly and Gonzalez summarize this by economic and sociodemographic elements such as language, cultural preferences, bureaucratic complexity, and distrust in government. These, being especially contributing to documental immigrant families. Thus the authors suggest a strategic approach for improving ECE participation rates among these families. First, they note, that making pre-school attendance strictly mandatory is one way to benefit both native born and immigrant children, with provided statistics as supporting evidence. Second, that acclaimed unique obstacles facing immigrants can be addressed through the way publicly subsidized and private or non profit programs are structured. The options that they analyze are potentially effective, and can be applied in the form of research that I will be doing on the topic of immigrant children and the barriers of which they face. Given their ways of life are predisposed, immigrant children of older age may have a greater difficulty than those of younger age of settling into a new environment.
