Making Family Work: How Korean American Teens and Parents Navigate Immigrant America, is a collaborative work between an anthropologist and a psychologist on Korean American immigrant families with adolescent children. From a survey we conducted with 204 Korean American teens and 102 parents in metropolitan Chicago, we selected and followed five families for two years and beyond, exploring the subtitled question – how do Korean American teens and parents navigate immigrant America? Combining qualitative and quantitative methods and focusing on both generations, this book makes the case for delving deeper into the ideas of immigrant parents and their teens about raising children and growing up in America – ideas that defy easy classification as “Korean” or “American.”

The demographic extent of the exit of pre-college children from South Korea for early study abroad (ESA) is perhaps unparalleled in world history. This veritable “education exodus” offers a window on the challenges of globalization with, in some cases, sobering impacts on children, family life, and education. In South Korea, it has now become commonplace for families to leave the country and to take their children abroad to study in abroad. “Early study abroad” (chogi yuhak), which began as the movement of upper middle class children to North America, is today the exodus of pre-college children from much of the class spectrum who move abroad for stints long and short across much of the globe.

The chapters in this volume attend to this new and distinct chapter of educational migration. The authors utilize a wide range of methodological approaches including analysis of quantitative survey data, media discourse analysis, and qualitative ethnography. Their field sites include neighborhoods, schools, and churches in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. Together, they underscore the considerable diversity of ESA, distinguished by heterogeneity of class and destination; the considerable change in ideas about and expectations of ESA as it comes of age; and the on-the-ground effects of ESA on the ecology of the “Korean” family as is takes new forms.