Addressing Immigration‐Related Stress in a Culturally Adapted Parenting Intervention for Mexican‐Origin Immigrants: Initial Positive Effects and Key Areas of Improvement

Abstract

Culturally adapted evidence‐based parenting interventions constitute a key strategy to reduce widespread mental health disparities experienced by Latinx populations throughout the United States. Most recently, the relevance of culturally adapted parenting interventions has become more prominent as vulnerable Latinx populations are exposed to considerable contextual stressors resulting from an increasingly anti‐immigration climate in the country. The current study was embedded within a larger NIMH‐funded investigation, aimed at contrasting the differential impact of two culturally adapted versions of the evidence‐based parenting intervention known as GenerationPMTO©. Specifically, a sample of low‐income Mexican‐origin immigrants was exposed either to a culturally adapted version of GenerationPMTO primarily focused on parent training components, or to an enhanced culturally adapted version in which parenting components were complemented by sessions focused on immigration‐related challenges. The sample for the study consisted of 103 Mexican‐origin immigrant families (190 individual parents). Descriptive analysis and generalized estimating equations (GEEs) indicated that exposure to the enhanced intervention, which included context‐ and culture‐specific sessions, resulted in specific benefits for parents. However, the magnitude of the impact was not uniform for mothers and fathers and differed according to the type of immigration‐related stress being examined (i.e., intrafamilial vs. extrafamilial stress). Overall, findings indicate the relevance of overtly addressing contextual (e.g., discrimination) and cultural challenges in culturally adapted interventions, as well as the need to increase precision according to the extent to which immigration‐related stressors impact immigrant mothers and fathers in common and contrasting ways. Implications for family therapy practice and research are discussed.

Relationships of Social Support, Stress, and Health among Immigrant Chinese Women in Japan: A Cross-Sectional Study Using Structural Equation Modeling

“…Second, mental health support providers need to focus on stress not only from the acculturation process but also from the child-rearing process among immigrant women. Some mental health promotion programs and interventions only focused on cross-cultural stress while ignoring parenting stress among immigrant women [ 12 , 59 ]. Third, since parenting stress could influence the effectiveness of mental health support, more attention needs to focus on parenting stress to ensure the effectiveness of mental health support to avoid wasting social resources.…”

Parent Support Programmes for Families Who are Immigrants: A Scoping Review

“…On recruitment strategies, we found that the most often used recruitment strategy reported in the included studies were recruitment from the local immigrant communities and agencies/organisations. Studies reported that direct invitation with a bilingual approach and word-of-mouth invitations were considered effective [28,36,44,62,80,84,89,101,[105][106][107]. Only one study reported using social media for recruitment [98] which could be one potential way to reach participants in the future programmes.…”

“…4. Most of the studies were qualitative (n = 20) [26,31,39,42,49,57,68,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82] and RCT studies (n = 18) [ 23,34,36,38,44,58,64,[83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93]. A total of 14 of the studies lacked a clear methods section or the methods were inadequately reported [27,28,30,32,33,45,55,56,59,66,[94][95]…”

“…Some studies reported using social media [98], television [28], radio [100,107] and newspaper advertisements/invitations [28,100,106]. A word-of-mouth strategy was also much used to recruit participants [28,36,44,62,80,84,89,101,[105][106][107]. Personal invitations were seen as effective strategies in recruitment, including word-of-mouth and direct invitations by community leaders or service providers [80,84].…”

“…In addition, studies also recruited participants from public services e.g. kindergarten[55,64,70,76], schools[29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 56, 58, 72, 80, 84-87, 90, 94, 95, 104], language schools[73,74,107,108], churches or religious organisations[80,94,105,109,110], social services, or through social worker[29,38,[84][85][86][87]104], child welfare services[84], health care clinics[36,44,50,54,55], mental health services or through mental health worker[44,49,50,58,71,85,104,105], initial registration centre…”