U.S. Mexican parents’ use of harsh parenting in the context of neighborhood danger.

Abstract

Family stress model research suggests that parents' exposure to environmental stressors can disrupt key parenting processes. As family stress model scholarship has expanded to include increasingly diverse populations and a wider range of contexts, studies have documented important nuances. One of these nuances concerns U.S. Mexican parents' use of harsh parenting. In the current study, we examined the harshness-as-disruption family stress-model hypothesis, which specifies parental emotional distress as a mediator of positive associations between neighborhood danger and parental harshness. We contrasted this perspective with cultural-developmental perspectives suggesting that harsh parenting may be an important parenting adaptation to dangerous neighborhood environments (harshness-as-adaptation). We tested the harshness-as-disruption hypothesis prospectively, in a sample of U.S. Mexican mothers ( = 749) and fathers ( = 579) with children in the late childhood to early adolescent age-range. Both mothers and fathers demonstrated higher levels of depression symptoms in the face of neighborhood danger. Fathers' harsh parenting, however, was unrelated to neighborhood danger or depressive symptoms. All mothers demonstrated some evidence of the harshness-as-disruption family stress process. For highly familistic mothers, however, harsh parenting may reflect a combination of harshness-as-disruption and harshness-as-adaptation processes. This combined interpretation is consistent with cultural-developmental models highlighting structural inequalities that filter families of color into lower-resourced, more stressful environments, but simultaneously recognizing that families' and communities' adapting cultural systems support parenting responses to such circumstances. (PsycINFO Database Record

Trajectories of Familísmo, Respéto, Traditional Gender Attitudes, and Parenting Practices Among Mexican‐Origin Families

“…In a bioecological perspective, decreases in parental cultural values were less affected by the exosystem elements included in this study than the elements in other systems. Although the lack of prediction from community indicators was not in line with literature emphasizing the role of the neighborhood environment in shaping cultural change (Alba et al, 2002;Hill et al, 2003), it might be that other noncultural variables in the neighborhood unexamined (e.g., danger and discrimination; White et al, 2018White et al, , 2019 outweigh the cultural variables at the exosystem level investigated in this study.…”

“…On the basis of our findings, programmatic efforts to improve parenting quality through incorporation of these cultural values are unlikely to succeed for Latinx families. However, interventions and policies that adopt a nuanced stance and acknowledge parental cultural values (White et al, 2019) may be beneficial. For instance, interventions could focus on Latinx parental traditional gender values and how male and female adolescents perceive differential parental monitoring due to their gender throughout adolescence.…”

Ethnic–Racial Socialization in the Family: A Decade's Advance on Precursors and Outcomes

“…Finally, whereas we knew that parenting practices varied based on neighborhood context (Furstenberg, ), the research on variability in ethnic–racial socialization as a function of neighborhood contexts was limited (Shuey & Leventhal, ; R. M. B. White, Pasco, Gonzales, Knight, & Burleson, ).…”

A cross‐ethnoracial comparison of objective and subjective neighborhood predictors of early adolescents' prosocial behavior

“…Furthermore, research substantiating the FSM is based largely on European-American samples of children and adolescents (e.g., Conger et al, 1992Conger et al, , 1993, relatively few studies rely on African American samples (Landers-Potts, 2015) and a paucity of studies test the validity of the FSM using U.S. Latino/a samples (White et al, 2015). Additionally, very few studies that we are aware of makes direct cross-ethnoracial comparisons in family processes (Kilmer et al, 1998;White et al, 2019), particularly from an FSM perspective, despite the fact that understanding potential ethnoracial nuances in family processes can inform future basic and applied work.…”

“…Furthermore, research substantiating the FSM is based largely on European–American samples of children and adolescents (e.g., Conger et al., 1992, 1993), relatively few studies rely on African American samples (Landers‐Potts, 2015) and a paucity of studies test the validity of the FSM using U.S. Latino/a samples (White et al., 2015). Additionally, very few studies that we are aware of makes direct cross‐ethnoracial comparisons in family processes (Kilmer et al., 1998; White et al., 2019), particularly from an FSM perspective, despite the fact that understanding potential ethnoracial nuances in family processes can inform future basic and applied work. The current study aimed to clarify how objective neighborhood risk, perceived neighborhood safety, parent mental health symptoms, and family conflict relate to African American, U.S. Latino/a, and European–American early adolescents' prosocial behavior (i.e., actions intended to benefit others; Carlo et al., 2011).…”