Parenting within residential neighborhoods: A pluralistic approach with African American and Latino families at the center

Publication date: Available online 11 June 2019Source: Advances in Child Development and BehaviorAuthor(s): Dawn P. Witherspoon, Emily M. May, Ashley McDonald, Saskia Boggs, Mayra Bámaca-ColbertAbstractThe intersection of SES and race-ethnicity impact youth development at the family and neighborhood levels. The confluence of neighborhood structural and social characteristics intersects to impact parenting multiple ways. Within lower-income neighborhoods, there is variability in economic and racial-ethnic demographics and social characteristics and a multitude of different lived experiences. We use a person-centered approach to understand how a plurality of neighborhood social characteristics shape parents’ ethnic-racial socialization and monitoring strategies, normative parenting practices for diverse families. With 144 African American and Latino families in a new destination context—areas lacking an enduring historical and economic presence of same-ethnic populations—we examined whether we could replicate neighborhood profiles found in other neighborhood contexts using four neighborhood social process indicators (i.e., connectedness, cohesion and trust, informal social control, and problems), identified family- and neighborhood-level predictors of profiles, and explored differences in ethnic-racial socialization and parental monitoring knowledge by profile. We replicated three neighborhood profiles—integral (high on all positive social dynamics and low problems), a...
Source: Advances in Child Development and Behavior - Category: Child Development Source Type: research