This ostracism places these children at risk in two ways. First, they are likely to assimilate into the adversarial youth cultures of the low-income neighborhoods that surround them. But they also retain certain norms and values of their home society, which continue to provide the standards for assessing their accomplishments. Cultural conflicts between immigrant parents and children born or reared in the United States are common. Young people want to be accepted by their American friends, not their foreign- born peers, and they internalize public and peer messages that the important things in life are personal prestige, instant gratification, and conspicuous consumption.
Parents see their children as overly attracted to the least constructive sides of American culture.
Vietnamese families face the following types of bicultural problems in achieving generational consonance. The danger is that excessive parental efforts at control can lead to open rebellion in the American environment, and parents can worsen the very problems they seek to avoid. Modes of Punishment Many of the means of enforcing parental authority common in Vietnam are unacceptable in the U.S., such as physical punishment, which is sometimes severe. In the U.S., this is not only resented by children, who may see themselves as abused, but discouraged or even forbidden by American institutions. Disagreements within the family about the legitimacy of physical punishment, coupled with mainstream American disapproval of it, makes Vietnamese parents unsure of the proper way to correct their offspring.