Citation

Cruz-Santiago M, Ramírez García JI. Fam. Process 2011; 50(1): 92-114.

Affiliation

Psychology Department, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Family Process Institute, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1545-5300.2010.01348.x

PMID

21361926

Abstract

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.

Language: en