Mission San Jose High School
Khaled Agrama's mother was never prepared to raise him in a country other than Egypt, her homeland. Agrama is part of a growing number of first generation teen Americans struggling with a generation gap caused by a culture clash.
"They see a lot here," Agrama said, referring to his parents. "It scares them ... teen pregnancies, killing, premarital sex. Here it's common, but over there it's a big deal. My parents tried to raise me by their culture, but not everything applies."
Immigrant parents' values do not always match values in America. Sze-jun Tsai, a 16-year-old Taiwanese male student, said, "If you generalize it all, people's basic values are the same, like you shouldn't kill anybody. It's when you get out of those basic values, a generation gap may form."
Albert Tsai, an 18-year old Taiwanese student, said, "We value different things. They value success. They came to this country to find opportunity, success, and to become rich. The first generation doesn't live through that. We value fun."
Culture, values, and even day-to-day life experiences are distinctive to parents' native countries. Parents can't understand why their child insists on the American way of life and doesn't want to conform to the native `rules.'
"As much as they (adults) try to understand us, they just can't comprehend the situations we must handle," said Herman Chan, a 17-year-old student. "If they discovered what we actually got ourselves into, they would be shocked as hell."
One of the biggest issues between cultures is dating. Some parents only first hear about a prom when their kid nags them for money to go.
"A prom is when you take the girl out to a hotel. They (in Egypt) never did that," Agrama said. "A relationship for them would lead to marriage. Dating here is a big tradition; to them it's bad or wrong. (They think that) having a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is not good unless they are engaged. Marriage is sacred. If you do something outside of marriage, it's not sacred anymore," he said.
Dating rules may be much more strict. "I couldn't go to the prom, period. It was just a fact," said Mona Gonzalez, 21-year-old Mexican female."
The solution to the problem may be to increase the amount of communication between the parents and the children. Maybeth Wu, a Chinese mother of three children, said, "I think that the parents must make themselves available, reachable by the children. They must be open-minded."
Dr. Thomas Spencer, a psychology professor at San Francisco State University, agreed with that concept, saying, "Parents must sit down and talk through their views on issues and positions and where they are coming from, so the kids can understand their position and (if not) accept them ... at least tolerate them. A lot of it is understanding. You can't rigidly hold on and say `you're wrong.'"
Many believe cultures may clash, but compromising will bridge this gap.
Pastor Ted Anderson, youth pastor of the Tri-City Chinese Baptist Church, said, "Parents and children must understand that the cultures are different and know how to deal with it. Parents must realize that if they're over here in North America, things are different. It comes down to communication. They have to compromise, just sit down and understand," Anderson said.
Of course this solution will never be easily achieved, but parents and their children can at least try to get along. As Wendy Castello of the Women's Counseling in San Francisco said, "If we had found a solution to that, we would all be rich now."
Agrama concluded, "There's not a solution, basically that's the way they are and that's the way they brought me up. But it's not necessarily wrong."