Cultural Communities and Parenting in Mexican-Heritage Families

SYNOPSIS Objective. To identify different cultural communities and associated parenting practices of low-income Mexican-heritage families in the United States. Design. One hundred twenty-five mothers participated in this longitudinal research. The mothers were recruited during their pregnancy or shortly after the birth of a child and randomly assigned to either intervention or control in the National Early Head Start Evaluation. Data collection continued until the children were 7 years old. Ethnographic fieldwork, maternal clinical interviews, naturalistic observation, and videorecording were all used for data collection. Results. By triangulating ethnographic fieldwork and multivariate latent class analysis, we identified four different cultural communities within low-income Mexican-heritage families and examined parenting practices including parental warmth and intrusiveness and childcare use across these four communities. These different communities of mothers differed in immigration experiences, house...