Less than half of adolescent mothers graduate from high school and fewer obtain a post-secondary degree. The purpose of this study is to understand how Latina mothers who experienced childbirth during adolescence transition to parenthood and higher education. We conducted 13 in-depth interviews with Latina mothers enrolled in higher education. We found that Latina mothers’ persistence in higher education is influenced by psychosocial factors, initial commitments, academic and social experiences in college, and final commitments.

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Discipline is one of the most challenging tasks for parents of young children. Parental choices of discipline can vary greatly by race and ethnicity (Coley et al., 2014). Research on Latino families’ choices of discipline has been inconsistent and from a deficit lens (Rodriguez, 2008). The current qualitative study uses a Funds of Knowledge framework to understand how Latina mothers from the Western United States with young children make decisions about disciplining their children. A thematic analysis of 42 interviews revealed that discipline choices were grounded in the mothers’ upbringing, education, and work history. The results of this study can inform parent educators, family therapists, and pediatricians to recognize that Latina mothers are not a homogeneous group and understand the underlying factors that determine their disciplinary strategies to better support their effort to discipline their children.

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This chapter showcases how faculty in the early childhood studies department in one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse states in the United States create discourse spaces to empower students. These spaces invite students to critically explore how the power relations of society affect individuals' language development, learning, and identities. In so doing, the English monolingual norm of educational settings is questioned. The faculty empowers students, many of whom are dual language learners themselves, by providing them with the theoretical and pedagogical foundations to best support our youngest citizens, who are more linguistically and culturally diverse than ever. This chapter provides numerous assignment examples that illustrate how each course creates a pedagogical discourse space to honor the languages and cultures of all students, to decenter the English norm that is prevalent in the education system, and to enable students to create more linguistically and culturally inclusive and equitable classrooms.