Presentation :

The so-called ‘acculturation gap' is probably the most studied cause of conflicts in immigrant families in the past decades. However, this construct inherently assumes that children are more acculturated to the receiving country than their immigrant parents. Our data in Chinese immigrant families in Belgium challenge this assumption: although some of the migrants' children we interviewed identified themselves as “completely Belgian having nothing to do with China”, some others did feel “being Chinese” even stronger than their parents. We also found that this divergence in self-identity exerts also an impact on parent-child coactions and relationship, particularly in moments of conflicts. This study uses interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to dive into the texture of Chinese adolescents' accounts in Belgium.