“There’s Not One Way to Do It:”: Latina Mothers’ Discipline Techniques

Abstract

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.

What makes a good mother? Two decades of research reflecting social norms of motherhood

“…Accordingly, White mothers in the UK try to ensure their children's success by selecting the best schools with the “right mix” of children of different races and classes (Byrne, 2006 , p. 1009). When mothers' own educational resources are devalued in the context of migration, mothers respond to the norm of securing their children's future in specific ways (Bermúdez et al, 2014 ; Navarro‐Cruz et al, 2021 ): Migrant mothers tend to invest more in their children's education than is normatively required in their country of origin to prevent downward social mobility in their children, as has been shown for Australia (Jamal Al‐deen & Windle, 2017 ; Ramsay, 2016 ). Alternatively, migrant mothers might seek to maintain the disciplining strategies of their culture of origin, even in a more permissive context, to help their children improve their school performance and achieve upward mobility, as has been shown for Sweden (Bergnehr, 2016 ).…”