The ethnic and racial structuring of U.S. neighborhoods may have important implications for developmental competencies during adolescence, including the development of heritage and mainstream cultural orientations. In particular, living in highly concentrated Latino neighborhoods during early adolescence – which channels adolescents into related school environments – may promote retention of the ethnic or heritage culture, but it also may constrain adaptation to the mainstream U.S. culture. We tested these hypotheses longitudinally in a sample of 246 Mexican origin adolescents (50.8% girls) and their parents. Data were collected four times over eight years, with adolescents averaging 12.5 (SD = .58) to 19.6 (SD = .66) years of age across the period of the study. Latino ethnic concentration in early adolescents' neighborhoods promoted the retention of Mexican cultural orientations; Latino ethnic concentration in middle schools undermined the development of mainstream U.S cultural orientations. Findings are discussed in terms of integrating cultural-developmental theory with mainstream neighborhood theory to improve understandings of neighborhood and school ethnic concentration effects on adolescent development.
Family stress model research suggests that parents' exposure to environmental stressors can disrupt key parenting processes. As family stress model scholarship has expanded to include increasingly diverse populations and a wider range of contexts, studies have documented important nuances. One of these nuances concerns U.S. Mexican parents' use of harsh parenting. In the current study, we examined the harshness-as-disruption family stress-model hypothesis, which specifies parental emotional distress as a mediator of positive associations between neighborhood danger and parental harshness. We contrasted this perspective with cultural-developmental perspectives suggesting that harsh parenting may be an important parenting adaptation to dangerous neighborhood environments (harshness-as-adaptation). We tested the harshness-as-disruption hypothesis prospectively, in a sample of U.S. Mexican mothers ( = 749) and fathers ( = 579) with children in the late childhood to early adolescent age-range. Both mothers and fathers demonstrated higher levels of depression symptoms in the face of neighborhood danger. Fathers' harsh parenting, however, was unrelated to neighborhood danger or depressive symptoms. All mothers demonstrated some evidence of the harshness-as-disruption family stress process. For highly familistic mothers, however, harsh parenting may reflect a combination of harshness-as-disruption and harshness-as-adaptation processes. This combined interpretation is consistent with cultural-developmental models highlighting structural inequalities that filter families of color into lower-resourced, more stressful environments, but simultaneously recognizing that families' and communities' adapting cultural systems support parenting responses to such circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record
This commentary, which presents an expanded version of the keynote address at the 2012 Conference on ‘Global Climate Change Without the United States’, outlines Palau’s role in attempting to motivate international action on climate change. It explains two initiatives: the passage of a United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolution highlighting the security implications of climate change, and the attempt to obtain an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the responsibility of states for climate change. The two avenues are located ‘inside the system’ in that they target well-established organs of the UN system. However, they are ‘outside the box’ because they seek to bypass and ultimately jump-start the international negotiation process that has unfolded under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
United States natural gas production is likely to stunt the direction and intensity of renewable energy by up to two decades according to a MIT study. Gas will not provide a "'bridge' to a low-carbon future if it erodes efforts to prepare a landing at the other end of the bridge." 1 Unconventional natural gas extraction need not become a "transition" to a new addiction. This article analyzes how cooperative federalism and inclusive decision-making can provide legitimacy and transparency when balancing property rights versus police powers to regulate natural gas production.
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