ABSTRACT
The 20th century has been an era of migration. A considerable amount of research has been done on family and children’s adjustment in a new country, but as revealed in Aronowitz’s (1984) analysis, research findings contradict one another and “there has been very little work done toward constructing a conceptual paradigm within which to understand the process of migration as it affects children” (p. 240). Because the vast majority of research efforts were devoted to parenting problems of economic migrants from Asian or Latin American countries to Western European countries and the United States, they do not reflect the experience of Soviet immigrants, who have a qualitatively different set of problems. Although some studies have already been conducted on Soviet immigrants, especially in the United States, it is clear that a great deal more research is needed with this population. According to Chiswick (1993), studies of Soviet Jews in the United States indicate that they had a high level occupational status prior to emigration, are older at emigration than economic migrants, emigrate in the family context, and have a smaller number of children per family.
