We examined parenting of adolescents with Consensual Qualitative Research analyses of five 90-minute focus groups with 45 Mexican immigrant parents residing in a high-crime and low-income neighborhood. Parents identified gangs as their major challenge in parenting. Relatedly, they endorsed control-oriented practices to ensure the safety of their adolescents. In addition, parents used practices that aimed to build strong, trusting relationships with their adolescents. The co-occurrence of parenting strategies that promote strong parent-adolescent bonds along with strict monitoring highlights the need to conceptualize parenting with both controlling as well as supportive dimensions. Moreover, the parents' narratives pertaining to the dangers in their neighborhood suggest that interventions for Latino families should be not only consistent with their cultural heritage, but also grounded in the families' local neighborhood contexts.

Youth substance use was investigated in a sample of Mexican-origin mothers and youth (93 dyads totaling 186 individuals). We tested the hypotheses that both acculturation and inner-city risk factors impact substance use largely because they undermine family relationships. Mothers and youth completed self-report measures of acculturation and enculturation. Youth completed questionnaires of family relationships, inner-city risk factors, and substance use. Youth substance use was measured with an index of lifetime alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use based on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. As predicted, mother-youth (dyadic) acculturation/enculturation, as well as exposure to violence, were significantly associated with substance use. Family cohesion mediated the impact of violence exposure on substance use. However, both cohesion and violence had unique and significant associations with substance use. Furthermore, family relationships did not mediate the link between substance use and mother-youth acculturation or mother-youth enculturation. Results underscore the need to develop and test hypotheses that link Latino youth substance use with both acculturation and inner-city contexts that do not solely rely on family relationships as mediators.

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