Latina Mothers’ Awareness of Their Children’s Exposure to Community Violence

Abstract

This study examines (a) the degree of agreement between mother-reported child community violence exposure and children’s self-reports and whether agreement changes over time; (b) whether child gender is associated with mother-child agreement; and (c) whether greater mother-child agreement is concurrently and longitudinally associated with children’s psychological well-being. We conducted secondary data analyses using longitudinal data with a socioeconomically diverse sample of 287 Latino adolescents ( MageW2 = 11.2, 47% girls) and their mothers ( MageW1 = 35.3) from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Mother-child agreement about nonexposure to violence was high. However, for violence-exposed children, mothers overestimated exposure in early adolescence and underestimated it in middle adolescence. Mothers had higher violence agreement scores with daughters than with sons. Greater mother-child agreement about witnessing community violence in early adolescence was associated with lower externalizing problems in early and middle adolescence. Agreement about children’s victimization was only concurrently associated with lower externalizing and internalizing behaviors in early adolescence. Developmental changes in adolescent disclosure and parental knowledge of children’s community violence may provide an important point of intervention for addressing the psychological sequelae of violence exposure in early adolescence.

An Exploratory Study on the Perceptions of Neighborhood Safety among Low-income Singaporean Families in Public Rental Housing and Purchased Public Housing

“…First, our study showed that parent-adolescent dyads from low-income families in Singapore had incongruent perceptions of neighborhood safety, in line with past research (Ceballo et al, 2001;Lewis et al, 2012). Previous studies had shown that parents tended to underestimate their children's exposure to community violence (Zimmerman & Farrell, 2013;Zimmerman & Pogarsky, 2011), especially as their children moved on to adolescence (Alers-Rojas et al, 2020). We observed a similar patternmost parents who had incongruent perceptions of neighborhood safety with their adolescent children perceived that their neighborhoods were safer than their children.…”

“…Past studies had shown that parents' underestimation of their children's exposure to community violence was associated with more child internalizing and externalizing behaviors (Zimmerman & Farrell, 2013;Zimmerman & Pogarsky, 2011), while greater parent-child agreement about community violence exposure was associated with fewer child externalizing problems (Alers-Rojas et al, 2020). As parent-child agreement on their perceptions of neighborhood safety and community violence exposure is a malleable protective factor, future studies could seek to explore the factors that contribute to a greater alignment in parent-adolescent perceptions of neighborhood safety, such as better parent-adolescent communication and parent-adolescent relationship closeness.…”

The Maternal Guilt of Working Latina Mothers: A Qualitative Study

“…The studies examining the Latina women have addressed the following effects on motherhood: immigration, racism, community violence, poverty, as well as postpartum depression and anxiety (Alers-Rojas et al, 2020; Sampson et al, 2018; Straut-Eppsteiner, 2021; Vesely et al, 2019). Latina women often face blocks to help-seeking behaviors when postnatal mental health problems occur (Sampson et al, 2018).…”