The chief goal of this monograph has been to provide educators, counselors, and other professionals who work with Vietnamese children with information on their background and a summary of current research findings about them and their families. This overview also has specific and practical implications for meeting the needs of Vietnamese children as well as immigrant children of other homelands. We conclude by highlighting some recommendations implied by this study. The children of Vietnamese refugees do not live as isolated individuals. They live in families and in communities that have experienced the strains of exile and resettlement.
Some children have to live with the loss of family members at war or in flight.
Others have been separated from family members for a lengthy period of time, and they may have difficulty in reestablishing relations when their family members reunite. Even when family relations are sound, many children find their parents and other adult members of their extended families struggling to establish their places in the new country. All these problems notwithstanding, Vietnamese families tend to orient toward integration into mainstream American society. While ethnic communities have proved to be effective ways of dealing with many problems, they also create social environments that may be quite different from those of most American children. Efforts to assist the children of this new ethnic group in school or in other institutions therefore necessarily involve becoming familiar with the lives of the children in the family and their immediate social environments.