Commentary: Family ties can take a lifetime to untangle

It’s hard to be a new immigrant in this country. It’s hard to be a new immigrant in any country, but the United States is a unique place, with its own set of cultural, political and economic cues and issues, a place that’s hard to wholly absorb or understand with all its positive and negative complexities.

So, for many immigrants whose culture and mind-sets differ so vastly from what America stands for, adjustment often takes a lifetime, if it happens at all.

When you include children in that mix, all of this becomes even more challenging.

In the midst of this adjustment, a phenomenon known as overprotective immigrant parents arises. Some of the most obvious characteristics of this condition are well documented and span beyond immigrant boundaries, but what I’m talking about is deep beneath the surface, the kind of overprotectiveness that makes you feel like you’re still attached to your mother’s umbilical cord well into middle age and beyond.

It’s the kind that instills a certain fear of the outside world in you, the kind where you feel you’ll never gain a sense of independence or carefree will or the ability to handle certain situations because you’ve been shielded and protected and found such a safety net within your family, that dealing with actual, real life is more challenging for you than it is for other kids.

The family structure of an immigrant household is amazing and should be envied in so many ways — there is love there, along with support, trust and a firm sense of feeling grounded.

But there are other traits — anxiety, incessant worrying, distrust of others, guilt, an unease in handling unfamiliar situations and more — that get in the way of immigrant children feeling like they are actual, fully formed adults at some point in their lives.

To never feel like you are a separate entity from a large group of people you are related to is often a hard burden to bear, and it can often stop you from doing what you love.

Many kids are raised to function on their own from a certain point onward in their life. Yet, so many children who come from immigrant families are raised to rely on their family to a point where it becomes detrimental to their own lives.

These thoughts swirled in my head this weekend as I watched a little girl climb up and down a hill, her hair flailing around her, her feet bare. She rolled around in soft earth, played with a litter of puppies, fell down and got up again.

There was such an overwhelming sense of freedom around her, and I envied her in those moments. I envied her independence, her ability to develop her character and learn from her surroundings as well as herself at such a young age.

She was enjoying the moment, instead of being fretted and worried over because she didn’t have shoes on, because the ground was dirty, because she was around animals. Families are meant to love you and protect you, and there’s no family structure that does that better than the immigrant family. But, a little breathing room, a chance to fall and learn from it, a chance to develop your own sense of self, wouldn’t hurt.

LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at [email protected].