TRIP

The Forgotten Treasure: Bilingualism and Asian Children's Emotional and Behavioral Health.

American Journal of Public Health, 2010

We investigated the relation between the language status of children and their behavioral and emotional well-being during their early school years.Methods.
Behavioral and emotional well-being were drawn from teacher reported data and included externalizing and internalizing behaviors.
Three-level growth curve analyses were conducted on a subsample (n=12586) of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, kindergarten cohort, who originated from Asian countries.
All children started with a similar level of internalizing and externalizing behaviors at kindergarten entry.
The growth rate of problem behaviors was slowest in fluent bilingual and non-English dominant bilingual children compared with White English monolingual children.
By contrast, problem behaviors increased at a significantly faster rate in non-English monolingual children, who had the highest level of problem behaviors among all children by fifth grade.Conclusions.
By fifth grade, fluent bilingual and non-English-dominant bilingual children had the lowest levels of internalizing and externalizing behaviors, whereas non-English-monolingual children had the highest levels of both behavior problems.