Abstract
Parenting practices are a key mechanism in the transmission of class advantage from adults to children; however, Latinxs have not been a main focus of this work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 middle-class and working-class and poor Mexican American parents, we explore social class patterns in childrearing practices and beliefs. Rather than stark-class differences found in previous work, we observed substantial similarities across social class lines. Our findings suggest that (1) Social mobility experienced by middle-class parents complicate class-based parenting beliefs. (2) Variation in parenting approaches in the same household mitigates class distinctions. (3) Mexican Americans’ shared contextual experiences and cultural values minimize social class differences in childrearing. These findings reshape the literature on class differences in parenting and show how social class and race and ethnicity impact childrearing beliefs and practices that are better illuminated when studied as a process.
Parenting practices are a key mechanism by which parents transmit their class advantage from adults to children, with educationally relevant consequences (Roksa and Potter 2011). Research in this tradition asserts that childrearing beliefs are primarily shaped by social class, above and beyond other factors such as race or ethnicity (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003). However, this literature has focused primarily on non-Latinx black and white families, while Mexican Americans, the largest Latinx sub-group in the United States, have been excluded. 1 Consequently, there has been a notable lack of attention to the impact of ethnicity, culture, or context when addressing questions about childrearing practices (i.e., attitudes and behaviors) and childrearing logics (i.e., the motivations that drive practices). Thus, it is unclear whether social class differentiates parenting logics and practices among Mexican American parents or whether other factors influence parenting in ways previous research has not examined.
In this exploratory study, we draw on in-depth interviews with 17 U.S.-born Mexican-origin parents from 10 families with elementary-aged children living in San Antonio, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona, to examine social class differences in childrearing and factors that shape their parenting practices and beliefs. 2 Although we observed some social class differences in parenting, we mostly found similarities across social class lines in parent reports of their interactions with their children and schools. We contend that broader contextual factors such as race and ethnicity and the fluidity of class status across an individual’s life, for example, play vital roles in shaping parenting practices and logics, and we call for a more nuanced consideration of these factors in future research.
Social Class Lens to Parenting
Childrearing practices have long held the interest of sociologists. While early work asked how differences emerged (Kohn 1963), more recent work has focused on class-based parenting practices as a generative mechanism for educational inequality (Lareau 2002). Research in this tradition asserts that social class advantages are socialized and activated in childrearing practices (Calarco 2011). These studies document considerable class differences among both black and white parents in the organization of their elementary school children’s lives, language use within the family, and parental involvement in schooling (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Diamond and Gomez 2004). Middle-class parenting behaviors, this research explains, follow the logic of concerted cultivation, in which parents believe their central role is to cultivate their children’s talents, while working-class and poor parenting behaviors follow the logic of the accomplishment of natural growth, in which parents view their primary role as providing for children’s basic needs to support their otherwise naturally unfolding development (Lareau 2002). The literature maintains that these differences in cultural logics lead to class-differentiated parenting practices such that middle-class parents (following the concerted cultivation logic) tend to enroll their children in many extracurricular activities, treat their children as relative equals, and approach institutions with a sense of entitlement. In contrast, working-class and poor parents (following the logic of the accomplishment of natural growth) allow their children to have free time that is relatively unstructured and self-directed and often approach institutions with a sense of constraint that limits intervention on their children’s behalf. 3 Finally, scholars argue that institutions are oriented toward middle-class parenting styles and thus benefit children whose parents engage in this style of childrearing (Kalil 2015; Streib 2017).
Institutional orientations toward a particular parenting logic or style have been a frequent topic of study in the literature on school-based parental involvement. In particular, research on the incongruity between Mexican-origin parents’ involvement practices and assessment of these practices has found that schools serving low-income, predominantly Mexican-origin populations tend to do a poor job engaging parents and lack critical support services to facilitate connections between families and schools (Delgado-Gaitan 1991; Shoji et al. 2014; Stanton-Salazar and Spina 2003; Valenzuela 2010). Schools in these contexts often rely on “traditional” forms of involvement typically associated with middle-class norms, such as parent–teacher associations, classroom volunteers, or parent–teacher conferences. These engagement efforts are largely ineffective because they fail to address the underlying factors that impinge upon Mexican-origin parents’ participation, such as language (in)accessibility (Carreón, Drake, and Barton, 2005), inexperience with U.S. institutions (Hill, Jeffries, and Murray 2017), or material and economic constraints (Jasis and Ordoñez-Jasis 2012). It is perhaps unsurprising then that Mexican-origin families are disenfranchised in under-resourced schooling contexts because knowledge about how schools work and the ability to influence schooling systems are defining features of advantaged middle-class parenting (Cucchiara and Horvat 2009; Posey-Maddox 2013).
Despite structural impediments to their school-based involvement, prior research suggests that Latinx parents have high educational expectations for their children (Qian and Blair 1999), yet their ability to translate these expectations into educational success is hindered (Kao and Tienda 1998). Nevertheless, Mexican American parents are highly involved in home-based schooling practices (Delgado-Gaitan 1992; Kiyama 2010). Collectively, the previous research on Mexican American parenting suggests contextual factors other than social class might constrain school-based involvement but not other forms of involvement, thereby complicating a singular and rigid class-based view of parenting and parental involvement.
Measuring Class in Parenting Research
To measure social class patterns in parenting, researchers rely on some combination of parental educational attainment, income, and the degree of prestige or authority associated with parents’ occupations. This measurement of class, however, “assumes that parents’ current class location is the starting point of class transmission” (Roksa and Potter 2011:299) and ignores that some parents “end up” in a different class location than the one in which they were raised.
Building on this gap in the literature, Streib (2013) examined the influence of social class origins on parenting beliefs. She interviewed college-educated, middle-class couples with divergent class backgrounds where one parent was raised in a working-class household and the other raised in a middle-class household. Streib found differences in the same household concerning parenting values and beliefs and attributed these differences to parents’ divergent social class upbringings. For example, she found class origin differences in parents’ approach to structuring their children’s free time. While working-class origin parents were inclined to let children do as they pleased, middle-class origin parents believed their children’s time needed to be structured, and that participation in extracurricular activities should have specific learning goals. A central contribution of this work and one explored further in our study is the focus on within-family heterogeneity in parenting, which forces researchers to consider the contribution of each parent to their children’s socialization, rather than assume the family unit shares similar parenting beliefs.
However, missing from Streib’s analysis, and the sociological literature on childrearing more generally, is a critical approach toward social class explanations. Researchers of class-based childrearing cultural logics have argued that social class is the primary determinant of parenting beliefs and values (Calarco 2011; Kohn 1963; Lareau 2002; Streib 2013). Asserting the primacy of class neglects how larger contextual factors, such as race and ethnicity or resource constraints, may shape parenting. For example, in their study of children’s summer activities, Chin and Phillips (2004) found that parents’ social, economic, and human capital were equally as important as cultural resources for structuring children’s experiences. Bennett, Lutz, and Jayaram (2012) reached a similar conclusion in their mixed-method study examining social class gaps in extracurricular participation. They found that working-class and poor families participated less frequently in organized activities because of financial constraints and the lack of opportunities provided by community-based organizations in under-resourced communities, not because of a cultural orientation toward participation in extracurriculars.
Similarly, in a recent study of black mothering with middle-class African American women, Dow (2016) found that “parenting practices and opportunities continue to be shaped by economic, cultural, and structural resources that are different from those of white middle-class mothers” (p. 14). Moreover, recent evidence from an experiment with a nationally representative sample of parents found that intensive parenting norms associated with concerted cultivation were rising for all families, irrespective of social class background (Ishizuka 2019). Taken together, these studies suggest that social class might be less determinative of parenting practices and beliefs than previously suggested by the extant literature and instead highlight how broader social contexts might shape parenting.
Contextual Influences on Latinx Families’ Approach to Parenting and Schooling
While the Latinx experience in the United States is heterogeneous, specific unifying characteristics of shared social context might uniquely shape parenting logics and practices within this group. For example, high levels of segregation among racial and ethnic minority communities mean they are often more economically and culturally heterogeneous than white communities (Harding 2011). As Logan (2013) noted in his study of racial segregation in metropolitan cities, affluent Latinxs tended to live in less affluent communities and in communities with fewer resources than similarly affluent whites (p. 166). Meaning, if social class differences in parenting result from distinct social environments that middle-class and working-class and poor whites occupy (Kohn 1963), then living in socioeconomically mixed communities, like those Latinxs tend to live in, might suggest lessened social class differences in parenting.
Even if middle-class Latinxs live in socioeconomically advantaged communities, they may maintain strong connections with less affluent communities. For example, Vallejo (2012) found high levels of interconnectedness with under-resourced communities among her sample of upwardly mobile Mexican Americans. Greater interconnectedness with under-resourced communities may be due in part to their sense of obligation and duty to extended family members, or familism, which has garnered significant empirical investigation in Mexican American families (Baca Zinn 1994; Desmond and López Turley 2009; Rumbaut 1997). Research in this area has noted that extended kin relations are a dominant feature of Mexican American families, irrespective of social class standing (Rumbaut 1997). Yet, the literature on social class and parenting has argued that contact with extended family members is a feature of families that are working-class or poor families. Meaning, stark-class-based differences found previously may be less salient for Latinx families.
Beyond parents’ social context, Latinxs’ racial and ethnic identity, or the extent to which they adhere to and identify with values and norms associated with their cultural group (Cokley 2005), might uniquely shape their approach to parenting. Latinxs, and in particular those of Mexican descent, have been a part of the United States since its inception, but their contemporary experiences are strongly influenced by continual immigration streams (Rumbaut 2006). Today, one of every four immigrants in the United States are of Mexican descent (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). Most Americans of Mexican descent were born in the United States (Noe-Bustamante and Flores 2019). However, within the context of ongoing and increasingly politicized immigration, social–psychological processes blur the distinction between the native and foreign-born. Jiménez (2010) contends that continual waves of immigration “replenish” ethnic identity in successive generations of native-born Mexican Americans. For example, Telles and Ortiz (2008) found that both language and ethnic identity remained salient among third- and fourth-generation Mexican-origin Latinxs in San Antonio and Los Angeles. These patterns suggest that cultural maintenance, wherein the country of origin remains relevant, might be more prevalent and longer-lasting for Latinxs. Also, “societal racism or nativism directed at Mexican immigrants but felt by all persons of Mexican origin” can serve as a basis for racial and ethnic boundaries (Telles and Ortiz 2008:17). In other words, immigration patterns influence all Latinxs because outgroup reactions are aimed at Latinxs more generally, regardless of individual nativity status. The result of these experiences, as Jiménez (2010) notes, is that ethnicity becomes a more prominent and relevant social identity for all Latinxs irrespective of native-born or foreign-born status.
The extension of a relevant racial and ethnic social identity is the transference of this identity to children. Racial and ethnic socialization, or how parents “convey implicit and explicit messages about the significance and meaning of race and ethnicity” (Neblett, Rivas-Drake, and Umaña-Taylor 2012:296), is a dominant feature of Mexican American parenting (Knight et al. 2011). This is perhaps a result of parents’ experiences with discrimination that not only shape their own racial and ethnic identity but that of their children as well (Rumbaut 1994). Thus, Mexican American parents’ ethnic identity may lead them to adopt similar parenting styles regardless of class status and thus to diverge from their non-Latinx white peers in important ways. Given this complex coupling of class and race and ethnicity, researchers should not treat them as separate “variables.” Instead, researchers should explore how parenting can be shaped by the unique location of individuals and families within a social structure defined by not only social class but also other dimensions of power (Choo and Ferree 2010).
Methodology
To extend our understanding of childrearing in Mexican American families, we qualitatively assess how parenting beliefs and practices differ by social class and identify factors that shape parenting among these families. Data for this project come from interviews from a sub-sample of parents participating in a larger research project in low-income, predominantly Latinx, Title I public elementary schools in San Antonio, Texas, and Phoenix, Arizona. 4 Of the more than 50 schools participating in the larger project, we randomly selected eight schools—four in San Antonio and four in Phoenix—to recruit parents to participate in our interview study. We recruited families at each of these eight schools by cold-calling from lists of parents who consented to participate in the larger study. Familiarity with the larger study, our institutional affiliation, and the fact that we had information specific to each family (elementary school’s name, child’s name, teacher’s name, parents’ home address, and contact phone number), established a certain level of trust and authority that would not have been possible had we attempted to cold-call families without any of these connections or information. In total, we made 268 telephone calls to eligible parents across the eight study schools. Of these, 36 percent went unanswered, and another 38 percent were unreachable because the phone number had been disconnected. The remaining 26 percent of our calls resulted in speaking with a parent or guardian. Of those that we reached on the phone, about 16 percent declined our invitation for an interview (either because of disinterest or in some cases, due to serious health issues), another 36 percent were willing but unable to participate (typically due scheduling conflicts with the available interview dates and times), and the remaining 48 percent agreed to participate and were interviewed.
When talking to parents on the phone, several recalled filling out surveys or participating in the larger study. Thus, although we were strangers on the phone, there was a certain level of familiarity, which might have explained why refusals were rare.
Interview recruitment phone calls occurred a few nights before our trip to each city. During these calls, we explained the purpose of the interviews and compensation for participation. The day before each interview, we would call to confirm the interview appointment and collect food orders, as we provided dinner for agreeing to be interviewed. Upon arrival at the residences, we ate dinner with the whole family, including children, which usually lasted 30–60 minutes. Dinners were a critical part of the interview project because they allowed us to establish rapport and collect demographic information about parents’ work experiences, educational levels, personal histories, and racial and ethnic backgrounds.
After dinner, we conducted the parent interviews separately and simultaneously, which were audio-recorded and transcribed, with the male researcher interviewing the male parent or guardian and the female researcher interviewing the female parent or guardian. 5 The interviews lasted 60–150 minutes (See Supplemental Appendix D for our procedures, protocol, and guide for interviewing). Interviews were well-suited for capturing the nuances of parenting practices and beliefs. During our interviews, we focused on collecting three levels of information: (1) narrative accounts, (2) thoughts/feelings/opinions about these narrative accounts, and (3) theorizing about the extent to which they believe their experiences generalized to other families. This approach to interviewing allowed us to understand parenting practices in both concrete and nuanced ways. For example, we asked parents to describe the last time they went to their child’s school or spoke to their child’s teacher (narrative accounts). Detailed narrative accounts allowed us to situate parents’ thoughts and feelings concerning a particular experience. We then asked parents to theorize to the broader context of families. Specifically, we asked parents to draw comparisons between their own experiences and that of others in the school community, or we asked parents to describe how relationships with teachers or administrators might look in an ideal world (See Supplemental Appendix D, Section D for more examples). Parents’ theorizing often elicited information on their approach to childrearing and the influence of the local context. Our focus on these different levels of information allowed us to capture a nuanced picture of Mexican American parenting.
Our decision to interview parents separately and simultaneously was also helpful in capturing the nuances of parenting practices and beliefs. First, it allowed us to compare and contrast childrearing within a household, instead of assuming that one parent’s approach represented the entire family. Second, we were able to triangulate narratives, creating greater confidence when there was mutual agreement across two interviews in one household. For example, when a father mentioned an issue with a teacher, and the mother also mentioned the same incident, then this agreement served as an additional point of verification. Finally, separate interviews allowed us to explore how each parent’s upbringing influenced his or her current parenting decisions.
In total, we spent two to four hours in each participant’s home. Our extended visits gave us insight into a range of parent-child interactions, and children often interrupted our conversations by making requests of their parents or engaging in behavior that required a disciplinary response. We recorded these “raw” events in field notes that were later incorporated into the analysis.
We conducted the interviews over approximately one year, between March 2011 and May 2012. 6 In total, we interviewed 57 parents from 34 families; however, for this analysis, we restricted the sample to the 10 families in which all parents were born in the United States and in which the focal child was identified as Mexican American. We determined parents’ racial and ethnic background through life histories revealed through the interviews and by using parents’ self-reported race and ethnicity collected through the surveys. This left us with a sample of 17 individual interviews across 10 families. The sample was reduced to understand the parenting experiences of native-born Mexican Americans, uncomplicated by other factors that may impact parenting practices but have not factored into previous studies of social class. Specifically, we were concerned with factors associated with recent emigration, such as limited English proficiency or citizenship status, which may also confound the relationship between social class and parenting. Although reducing our sample circumscribes our findings in meaningful ways, we see this paper as a first step toward revealing how the Latinx experience fits into the existing literature on social class, with the goal of opening future lines of inquiry.
Measurement of Social Class
Following the previous literature (Chin and Phillips 2004; Lareau 2002, 2003; Streib 2013), we determined class status based on occupational and residential information collected during the interviews, such as home ownership, educational attainment, and descriptions of employment type. We classified six families as middle class and four families as working-class or poor. The occupations held by parents from middle-class families required greater educational credentials, entailed more authority, and had more flexible schedules than the occupations of parents from working-class families or those experiencing poverty. For example, middle-class parents held jobs such as a registered nurse, teacher, or IT professional. In contrast, working-class and poor parents held jobs in food sales delivery or factories or were unemployed. Middle-class families were more likely than working-class and poor families to be dual-income households. Moreover, except for one family who lived in a high-rent apartment complex, all the middle-class families and none of the working-class or poor families owned homes (see Table 1 for descriptions of each family).
Family Descriptions.
All names are pseudonyms the families selected.
Social class assigned on the basis of occupational and residential information.
Family structure at the time of interview and relative to focal child (second or third grader). In some blended families, one or more children spent some time in a dual-headed household and/or a single-headed household. In one dual-headed household, the focal child was born to a family with biological parents as household heads but has a sibling who is a child from one parent’s previous relationship.
Analytic Approach
The analysis proceeded in three stages: descriptive coding, pattern coding, and matrix display (Miles and Huberman 1994:57, 69, 93). First, we used descriptive coding to examine how parents interact with their children’s schools and what parenting practices they employ. We used semi-focused codes, beginning with broad initial categories, and derived more specific codes through open-coding. Through this process, we identified, summarized, and described evidence of childrearing and parent involvement attitudes and behaviors represented in the data and developed codes for other motivating factors, such as race and ethnicity, family structure, or material resources.
Second, we used pattern coding to investigate the degree to which parents’ reported practices reflected the concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth childrearing logics. We consulted Lareau (2000a, 2003) to develop codes for the concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth childrearing logics and the parenting attitudes and behaviors associated with each. The logics are differentiated by parents’ primary role in childrearing—either the concerted cultivation of children’s talents and development, or meeting children’s basic needs to support their otherwise naturally unfolding development. We distinguished parenting attitudes and behaviors along five dimensions associated with the two logics in previous work: language use in the home, organization of daily life, social connections, parental involvement behaviors, and parental interventions (on behalf of the child) in school (see Supplemental Appendices A and B for detailed descriptions of codes). 7
Third, we populated a matrix display, a useful tool for visualizing data to explore patterns. We inserted direct quotes into the corresponding matrix cell to populate the matrix, where each cell was a pattern code (see Table 2 for the matrix display). For each parenting practice (captured in a pattern code), we assessed the strength of evidence for a given family: strong, moderate, or weak based on the coded passages in the data. We assessed strength based on the amount of text in the interview transcripts for a given family related to the parenting practice, and the level of detail in the text about that parenting practice. Blank cells in Table 2 mean that the parenting practice was not discussed in the family’s interview(s), while “strong” evidence indicates that the interview(s) provided substantial information and level of detail about the parenting practice. We triangulated the strength of evidence assessments with our field notes and transcripts of post-interview debriefing sessions to ensure conclusions were consistent across all data sources. 8 We then entered the strength of evidence assessments into the matrix display, organized by class and concerted cultivation/accomplishment of natural growth logics. The populated matrix allowed us to investigate the extent to which the sample participants’ parenting practices and beliefs mapped onto the pattern identified in the previous literature. Comparisons within columns also provided a means for assessing variation in parenting practices and motivations within families. Supplemental Appendix C presents one example to illustrate our analytic approach; the example highlights three families that we concluded had different levels of evidence (low, medium, and high) for one pattern code (“parent-child talk marked by discussion, eliciting feelings, opinions, and thoughts”). For each of the three families, we present descriptive codes related to that pattern code and some illustrative selections from interview transcripts that we coded to the descriptive and pattern codes.
Matrix Display: Assessment of Evidence for Parenting Practices and Childrearing Logics.
Note. “Str.” indicates strong evidence; “Mod.” indicates moderate evidence; “Wk.” indicates weak evidence; blank cell indicates no evidence. Gray font and cell indicate cells that we expected to be less populated under the hypothesis of class differences in parenting practices and logics.
Indicates that evidence applies to interview with only one parent in a household where two parents were interviewed.
Consistency in Coding
At each step of the analysis, both authors met regularly to discuss the coding procedures with the goal of creating consistency across coders (Harry, Sturges, and Klingner 2005; Saldaña 2013). To ensure consistency at the descriptive stage, we began by jointly coding one interview together. Then, each author separately coded two interviews and met afterward to discuss the process. We each described our rationale and agreed upon a structure for developing subsequent codes. We then coded two more sets of interviews and met again to discuss areas of convergence and divergence.
Pattern coding was a more straightforward process as we developed codes based on the previous literature and applied them to the data. To consistently apply the pattern codes, we used definitions based on Lareau (2003), which provided extensive detail for coding parenting practice and logics according to her typology. Once we completed the pattern coding, we then populated the matrix display, inserting the pattern codes into each cell of the matrix.
Verification Check
To ensure our conclusions were supported by the data, we provided a sample of anonymized transcripts to a qualitatively trained external investigator and asked him to inductively code the data to summarize themes that (1) characterized the parenting practices described in the interviews and (2) explained the parent’s childrearing motivations. Upon reviewing the data, the external investigator and first author met. The external investigator began by summarizing the various parenting practices he observed in the data for each transcript. The first author and investigator then discussed class-based patterns of parenting summarized in prior literature (and in Supplemental Appendices A and B). Next, the investigator assessed the extent to which each parent’s childrearing approach aligned with the accomplishment of natural growth and concerted cultivation. The investigator’s assessment matched our own, concluding that each family’s parenting practices reflect a range of attitudes and beliefs not solely aligned to one or the other childrearing logics.
Findings
Despite some evidence of class patterns, the distribution of data in Table 2 across the left and right panels (which differentiate class groups) and the top and bottom panels (which differentiate childrearing logics) indicates that class status tells only part of the story. The matrix reveals class differences in two aspects of childrearing—how children spend their leisure time and parents’ emphasis on meeting children’s basic needs. However, when considering the full range of practices and motives in the table, families in the study sample generally appeared to be doing similar things and often for the same reasons regardless of social class.
Variation in Parenting Beliefs and Practices across Class Lines
In every family, irrespective of class status, parents described childrearing logics and practices that reflected aspects of concerted cultivation and accomplishment of natural growth. For some families (such as the Griffin and Garcia families), there were similar levels of evidence for each of these parenting styles. Overall, however, parent reports of interactions with their children and schools tended to reflect, primarily, the concerted cultivation parenting logic regardless of the family’s social class. The cross-class similarities we found in parenting practices and logics are illustrated by the Gellars, a middle-class family in San Antonio, and the Griffins, a family experiencing poverty in Phoenix. 9
Although the Gellar and Griffin families had distinct class backgrounds, they shared the motivating belief that parents should actively cultivate their children’s talents and development. The Gellars, a multigenerational middle-class family, lived in a recently built two-story house in a new subdivision just inside the city limits of San Antonio. We interviewed the mother, Vanessa, while we ate dinner; her husband was not available during the visit. Joining us at the dinner table was Vanessa’s mother (who lives with the family) and the focal child, Luke (a third grader). Vanessa had completed her education in her late 20s and was an elementary school teacher at the time of our interview. Luke was a prominent presence in the interview as he regularly interjected his own thoughts and responded to our questions as if they were directed at him. Vanessa often affirmed or directly elicited these verbal expressions, thus validating his sense that he was entitled to participate in the discussion. Throughout the interview, casual exchanges between Vanessa and Luke about his specific and high-status educational and occupational goals, such as attending an Ivy League college, suggested such interactions were a regular occurrence. Vanessa reported that Luke was a high-achieving student and that he was involved in numerous extracurricular activities, with only one unscheduled day per week.
The Griffins, a family experiencing poverty, expressed similar motivations to cultivate their children’s talents and elicit feelings, thoughts, and opinions in interactions with their daughter, Mary. The mother, Yvonne, was currently unemployed, and the child’s step-father, Peter, had a job at a factory, though he had recently returned from working out of state for a few months. The family lived in an apartment with a kitchenette the size of a closet that housed a refrigerator that did not keep items cold, or as Yvonne said, “don’t like milk,” and two other small rooms: the couple’s bedroom and another room that served as a living room, dining room, and bedroom for Mary, who slept on a mattress that was stored on the wall next to the front door.
Yvonne Griffin had a steely outward demeanor, which may have helped her overcome the early loss of a parent, turbulent adolescence, and an abusive romantic relationship. She reported that providing for Mary’s basic needs had proved challenging at times, most recently, while Peter was away, and Yvonne had experienced debilitating health problems that often left her bedridden. The family had to ration food on occasion, and the electricity in the apartment had been turned off a few times. Yvonne explained that she attempted to cultivate Mary’s talents and encourage her to pursue extracurricular activities and express her thoughts and emotions, but at times her efforts were constrained by the family’s limited financial resources. Yvonne recounted that she had once attempted to enroll Mary in a martial arts class, believing it would both help her daughter develop self-defense skills and provide weekly exercise. Yvonne planned to use money from Mary’s biological father, who had promised to pay the $25 session fee. Unfortunately, he “decided to drink the money away,” and she was unable to pay for the class. With the little money she had available, Yvonne bought Mary a pair of boxing gloves so they could simulate a class at home.
Yvonne also described attempts to cultivate her daughter’s creative talents, exclaiming proudly that Mary’s talent for “arts and crafts” made her “one of a kind.” Although a lack of material resources constrained Yvonne’s options, she did her best to foster and develop this artistic talent. While explaining how Mary had started writing and drawing, Yvonne illustrated her efforts to cultivate her daughter’s interest: For [one of] her birthdays, instead of a Barbie doll or Elmo or anything like that, she wanted a pen and paper . . . She started writing; writing poems. Little up and down squigglies. And then, in first grade, she started learning her rhyming words and started poetry. Well, I started poetry and drawing when I was 13, so I have a family history of writers, or a lot of them draw portraits . . . [Mary], I guess, watched me, over time. She was curious about it, and we’ll drive by the mountains or something—“Mommy, you think you can draw that?” “Yeah. Can you draw that?” “I think I can.” “It looks pretty hard.” We were out yesterday, and I showed [her] the rainbow that was in the sky. “I could draw that mom.” “You can?” “Yeah. Just with a marker, just yellow, green, blue.” “Okay.” But I just explained to her that it’s more easier in pencil because when you mess up, you know, you can always erase it.
When we asked Yvonne how her relationship with her daughter compared to her strained relationship with her own mother, she replied, . . . I’m teaching [Mary]. You know what I mean? I’ll let her know that when you grow up, “I want you to be successful . . . I just . . . told her [to] think about what she wants to be when she grows up. Instead of playing outside, she should focus on what’s [she] gonna do after leaving school. She says she wants to be a creator. I said, “What do you wanna create?” She go, “I don’t know. I just wanna make things. I wanna fix things. Like how you do.” She’s like, “You do things like dads should do.” I said, “What do you mean?” “Cuz you fix this, you fix that . . .”
This passage not only highlights Yvonne’s focus on cultivating specific talents but also shows that she engages Mary in a reciprocal conversation focused on reasoning, which we also witnessed during our four-hour visit with the family.
Although Vanessa and Yvonne inhabited different class locations, their beliefs and attitudes reflected a similar logic of parenting. Financial resources influenced the extent to which their children could participate in structured extracurricular activities, yet for both mothers, their interactions with their children reflected practices and logics associated with the concerted cultivation childrearing logic.
Interconnected Approach to Schooling: For the majority of families in our sample and within each class group, there was continuity across the school and home, with parental involvement characterized by interconnectedness—parents regularly volunteering and participating in school events and intervening on their children’s behalf when necessary. The fluidity through which parents interacted and intervened in school settings is best highlighted by our conversations with both the Carter and Smith families. Linda and Steven Carter have two sons and two daughters, who span from early-elementary through high-school-aged. Linda has a bachelor’s degree and works in a professional field, and Steven works in law enforcement. Both parents expressed a strong sense of personal responsibility for their children’s education. Linda, in particular, engages the school regularly, describing herself as a “proactive” parent and believes parents should act as the school’s “reinforcers.” As such, she monitors her children’s behavior and academic progress by maintaining regular communication with teachers by email, conference, written notes, and phone.
In addition to monitoring, Linda is quick to advocate for her children when she sees fit. She recounted an occasion in which she was going through the backpack of her youngest daughter, Amy, and noticed failing grades on several of her assignments. It was evident to Linda that Amy had not realized there was a backside to the double-sided worksheets. Linda intervened by emailing the teacher to ask if Amy could make up the work, explaining her rationale. When the teacher refused, Linda went to the school to speak with her in person. Again, she pleaded her case, but the teacher still refused her request. Linda immediately went to the principal’s office, who called the teacher into her office to join them. In front of the principal, the teacher agreed to allow Amy to make up the work without contestation. We can see from Linda’s story that she was determined to use any means necessary when advocating on behalf of her child and was not willing to accept less than what she felt was appropriate. As she recalls, So I think that she [the teacher] wasn’t thinking that I was going to go over her, but at that point, I’m like you’re not going to give my child a 40 or a 30 [grade on assignment] and I think she even had a 15 because she forgot to do the back like that wasn’t going to happen. If she didn’t understand how to do it, if she just didn’t do it, that’s a different story, but no. So when we got into the principal’s office and she saw me she looked like, “Oh, no,” like, “She actually went through with her threat,” and I even told the principal, “You need to, you know, make sure this is addressed at your level because if it’s not then I will go to the school board because I’m not going to be dealing with these issues.”
This example highlights both Amy’s interconnected approach with the school and her comfort intervening on her daughter’s behalf, pursuing the decision she felt her daughter deserved.
Vanessa Smith’s approach also reflected an interconnected approach to her children’s schooling even though she occupied a less-advantaged class location than Linda Carter. The Smiths are a blended, working-class family of three children, headed by mother, Vanessa, and step-father, Bob. Before experiencing unemployment, Vanessa held an hourly position and later worked as a manager at a telemarketing firm. Bob entered the military after graduating from high school and now works in sales for a food delivery company. The Smiths currently live with relatives after being flooded out of their rental home.
During our interview, self-reflection seemed to come naturally to Vanessa Smith, a petite woman with a sunny disposition. Like Linda, she prioritizes her involvement in her children’s schooling, even when it was difficult to find the time. She explained that whereas some families chose to use vacation days to take trips, she used hers to visit her children’s classrooms. In her previous hourly job, she requested time off in advance to attend school events, such as award ceremonies or classroom parties, the latter of which her children now expect her to attend.
In speaking about her involvement in her children’s schooling, Vanessa described an ease and comfortableness, but also a sense of responsibility. She took ownership of her children’s education and stated as much: “I feel like that’s my responsibility. The teacher can do so much, but the rest is on me.” Another example that demonstrated a strong connection between home and school was when she told us about inviting her daughter’s teacher to her birthday party. In her own words, she stated, When Stephanie went to kindergarten like I said, I tried to build that relationship [with her teacher], and I saw how she just reached out to her. Stephanie’s birthday is towards the end of the school year, so we had pretty much all of the year to kind of get to know each other and when I felt really comfortable, like, “Hey,” you know, “she’s really, really genuinely concerned with her. She reaches out anytime that she can,” so I felt, you know, “I’m gonna give her an invite.” So, I invited her and she showed up. Then three weeks later, it was her daughter’s birthday and Stephanie came with an invitation to her [the teacher’s] little girl’s birthday, so we went.
Vanessa’s belief that schooling is one of her core responsibilities as a parent is made tangible in her efforts with all her children. Moreover, her words and reported behaviors reflect a particular approach to schooling—one that involves a strong connection between home and school. The idea that schooling is Vanessa’s responsibility mirrors Linda’s “reinforcer” approach, even though their occupations, educational attainments, and residences reflect different social class standings. In both families, these attitudes and behaviors provide clear examples of the monitoring and interventionist stance that is typically associated with middle-class parenting and the concerted cultivation logic of childrearing.
Other Factors that Shape Parenting Practices and Beliefs
The overall similarity in parenting practices across class groups raises two critical questions: Why were families in the study sample more similar than different? Moreover, what factors produced the cross-class similarities we observed? We found three potential explanations. First, parents’ experiences with social mobility complicated the relationship between social class and childrearing. Second, within-family heterogeneity or variation in parenting approaches in the same household made strict class distinctions less applicable. Finally, shared contextual and cultural aspects associated with being Latinx created similarities in parenting across social classes.
Class mobility
One reason parenting may be more similar than different across social classes in the study sample is that many Latinx middle-class parents had experienced class mobility—that is, they grew up working-class or poor. As parents reflected on their approach to parenting, many offered extensive descriptions of their upbringings and highlighted the ways their childrearing practices responded to how their parents had raised them or the social context in which they were raised. Most commonly, these parents reported practices consistent with concerted cultivation but being motivated to do so for reasons related to their working-class or poor upbringing.
The middle-class Riojas family exemplifies this dual influence. Sandra and Ramiro Riojas are the parents to two children, Eli, a second-grader, and Sofie, a four-year-old. They live in a 30-year-old home tucked away in a quiet neighborhood on the northwest side of San Antonio. Ramiro has a stable position in the information technology field, and Sandra works in a government office. Both parents described being very involved in their children’s schooling. They maintain regular contact with teachers, attend formal school events, and frequently volunteer at the school. In explaining her rationale for developing these relationships and her constant presence at the school, Sandra stated, [Children are] not safe anywhere. Anything can happen, but you trust that you’re going to get to know those teachers, and hopefully, they’re going to take care of your children while you’re not there because the State says that they have to go to school, so can’t keep them at home either. . .
She went on to say that, even though people think of teachers as trustworthy, they are basically “strangers.” She expressed concern about the various dangers that could befall her children when not in her direct care, ranging from physical dangers to sexual abuse. These concerns manifested in personal relationships as well. She told us that Eli was not allowed to spend the night at his best friend’s house even though the best friend spends most weekends at their house, and Sandra and the best friend’s mother have a strong relationship—sharing carpooling duties and talking to each other on the phone often. Sandra explained her decision in the following way: “You don’t know what happens behind closed doors, and . . . even if you know somebody on a personal level, it’s hard to know what they’re really like.” When we inquired further about the basis for this motivation, Sandra described her own upbringing, My parents at that time [when I was growing up] were not responsible . . . I grew up really fast because I was the oldest one, and my parents were both alcoholics, so I always took [care of] my brothers. I was always there for them.
She went on to say that she spent a large portion of her formative years living with an aunt and started working at an early age in an attempt to remove her siblings from her parents’ house. Ramiro’s childrearing strategies also appear to be driven by a desire to improve upon his own parents’ failings. When asked to describe what it was like for him growing up, in contrast to the way he parents Eli, Ramiro said, “It was like if I wasn’t even there.” Above all, he endeavors to build a bond with his children to avoid the pain he experienced from his own parents’ lack of concern.
Similarly, in speaking with the Smith family (previously introduced), parents Bob and Vanessa each individually indicated that their approach to childrearing was often in response to their own upbringing. Vanessa grew up in a working-class family in which her parents’ work schedule prevented involvement in her schooling, leaving an indelible impression. She attributes much of her extensive involvement to the memorable disappointment of her parents not being there for her, which motivates her to ensure that her children do not feel the same disappointment.
Lack of parental involvement motivated Bob’s presence in the life of his children. He was raised by a single mother and lamented the absence of his father, who did not take an active role in his life. Instead of his parents working to ensure his future, Bob relayed that he worked from early adolescence through high school to put his mother through night school. Now, as a parent, he reflects, It makes me feel good inside ‘cause I’m trying to give ‘em [my kids] everything that my mom never was able to do and just to be able to hear ‘em be happy and proud of their dad wanting to do so-and-so event and all that . . . I vowed that I will never be like my father or anything like that. Never leave my children or anything, and I’m gonna keep my promise. Make sure that I’m involved with all my children as much as I can in everything.
Bob’s description of his involvement in his children’s life appears to back up his words. Moreover, Vanessa’s description of Bob’s engagement in her interview also described a deep level of involvement.
The Smith and Riojas families exemplify a pattern in the data showing that class effects are more nuanced than a simple dichotomy in the cultural logics of childrearing. Instead, parenting choices are often a response to a parent’s own childhood experiences. Previous research on intergenerational mobility and parenting argues that class origins tend to be congruent with childrearing beliefs and practices. For example, Streib (2013) found that if working-class origin parents attained middle-class status in their lifetime, their parenting approach was likely to be reflective of their working-class upbringing. However, in our data, both the Smith and Riojas families engaged in middle-class parenting practices through their interventionist approach to school, interconnectedness between parents and school staff, and intense monitoring of children. But the underlying motivation for their involvement seemed to germinate in response to their own similar upbringings, rather than an intense focus on cultivating their children’s talents. This suggests that, when parents’ current class status differs from their class of origin, their parenting practices and logics likely reflect their range of experiences from both class positions. As such, future research should disentangle parenting practices from their associated logics and investigate a full range of potential childrearing logics.
Within-family heterogeneity in parenting
Another reason why parenting may be more similar than different in the study sample is within-family heterogeneity—that is, when two parents within the same household engage in different parenting practices or hold different beliefs about parenting. Our data revealed considerable differences in the childrearing practices between parents. The middle-class Gonzales-Serna family is an illustrative case where one parent was more deferential toward school staff, while the other parent took a more interventionist stance.
Stephanie Serna and Steven Gonzales head a middle-class family with elementary-aged children and a college-aged daughter from a previous relationship. Stephanie and Steven shared working-class origins but varying levels of educational attainment. Stephanie has a college degree and works in the medical field while Steven has a high school education and works as a sign technician, building and repairing large signs such as McDonald’s golden arches.
Stephanie explained that her style of interaction with school staff was much more “upfront” and “firmer” than her husband’s style, which she described as more “lenient” and “nonchalant.” Stephanie expressed an interventionist stance toward the school—she was not afraid to question conclusions, demand explanations, or initiate “confrontations” if needed. She approached school staff with a sense of entitlement, believing that her concerns about her children’s education were valid. In comparison, she viewed her husband’s interactions with the school as more constrained. She described Steven as more deferential toward authority, saying, “He just kind of sits and listens, and just kind of goes with what they’re saying and doesn’t question them.” Stephanie’s view of Steven is shaped by his more frequent interactions with the school. He is in charge of dropping the children off each morning and sometimes stays to eat breakfast with them at the school.
The difference in parenting styles was exemplified in their reactions to learning that their son would be retained in second grade. Both parents described working with their son at home to help him improve academically, but they took different approaches to intervene in the school’s decision to retain their son. For his part, Steven tried to set up a formal meeting with the teacher via both email and phone calls but was unsuccessful. As he explained, “And if [the teacher had] found out that we were coming, she would find a reason to leave. ‘Oh, I gotta go.’ It’s like, I need to know what going on with my kid!” His disappointment was palpable as he recalled his own negative experience being retained as a child in the same grade as his son. When we asked him to describe his role in the decision to retain his son, he said he felt he and his wife were “stuck with our hands tied behind our backs.” Stephanie, however, had a more interventionist response—she took their son to a private doctor to be tested for learning disabilities or attention disorders, thinking the results might sway the school staff. She explained that she later came to believe the school would not budge regardless of her wishes and that providing test results from the pediatrician would, in her words, “hurt” her son’s situation. In response to the school’s resistance, Stephanie resolved to move her son to a different school.
Within-family heterogeneity found in the study sample and reflected in the Gonzalez-Serna household illustrates why families across social classes in the sample appear to be more similar than different. The Gonzales-Serna case defies easy categorization. In some ways, the family is middle-class. They own their own home, one parent is college-educated, the children participate in a host of extracurricular activities, and their children had no issue engaging us in an impromptu conversation for 10 minutes on the finer points of “stations” and “centers” in elementary school. However, the Gonzales-Serna family shares characteristics with working-class families as well. They live in a depressed economic area, they deferred to the school’s decision to retain their son even though they disagreed, one parent’s highest level of education is a high school diploma, and the house is multigenerational (Stephanie’s college-aged daughter lives at home with her infant son). Categorizing Mexican American families based on typical social class measures—such as education, homeownership, or job prestige—is likely only to be loosely connected to parenting practices and beliefs when variation in childrearing approaches exist within the same household. The source of this variation is not clear. For our purposes, though, the fact that they do differ is what stands out most and is one partial explanation for why families in our sample appear more similar than different across social classes.
Contextual and cultural aspects of Latinx parenting
A third reason why parenting may be more similar than different across social classes in the study sample is due to contextual and cultural aspects of parenting in Latinx families—including familism and Latinx ethnic identity.
Previous research found that a prominent feature of working-class and poor families was frequent contact with extended family members (Horvat et al. 2003), which Lareau (2002) identified as a significant aspect of the accomplishment of natural growth childrearing logic. However, this class-based distinction in extended family contact fails to account for the fact that close extended family relations are a defining characteristic of Latinx families regardless of social class. In other words, Latinx families of different class statuses are not likely to differ in their contact with extended family members because interconnectedness among extended kin networks, or familism, cuts across social class lines (Vallejo 2012).
The matrix in Table 2 highlights that most families in the study sample had regular and frequent interaction with extended family members irrespective of social class status. This frequent contact was, in part, due to family structure. Of the 10 households interviewed, five were intergenerational. In the middle-class Gellar and Jimenez households, a grandparent lived with the family and provided care for their grandchildren. In the case of the Gonzales-Serna family, they were grandparents—Stephanie’s oldest daughter lived at home with her infant son, and they also spent extensive time with extended family. The working-class Smith family has lived with Vanessa’s parents for the past year and a half after being flooded out of their apartment. Rudy Cruz, a third-grader, and sister, Jennifer Cruz, a second-grader, live with their grandmother, Carmen, in Phoenix because their mother had been imprisoned for some years. Beyond these intergenerational living arrangements, most families reported strong extended family bonds, which they considered part of what it means to be Latinx. For example, Avalon Jones, a divorced middle-class parent with an advanced degree, stated, “With Hispanics, it really is a family affair. It’s the culture, and so that is just accepted.” Avalon’s comments, along with reported connections with extended family members, cut across social class, meaning that social class divisions demarcated by contact with extended family members are probably less salient for Mexican-origin families, where strong family connections tend to predominate.
Parents also reported that racial and ethnic socialization played a prominent role in shaping their childrearing behaviors. The middle-class Gellar family most clearly illustrated this style of parenting. The mother, Vanessa, expressed a strong desire for her children to grow up in a diverse community near “a lot of Hispanic people,” to be tolerant of others, and to take pride in their ethnic identity. She reported that she was teaching her children to “respect” the Spanish language and Spanish-language speakers—Vanessa’s mother, who lived with the family, only spoke Spanish. When asked what she hoped her children would gain from this exposure, Vanessa responded, “I want them to be proud of who they are and what they are.” Vanessa nurtured a sense of ethnic pride in her children and made choices about where to live and send her children to facilitate this process. For example, she visited potential schools to assess their racial and ethnic composition and sought out schools that offered bilingual or dual-language Spanish education programs and moved the family to a more inclusive community, even though the change entailed a longer daily commute. Vanessa’s upbringing influenced these choices and her desire for her children to grow up in a Latinx community similar to the one she grew up in. In this case, her childrearing logic was, in her view, motivated by developing a healthy sense of Latinx identity in her children, presumably because she considered ethnicity to be an essential dimension of her self-concept.
The fact that Latinx ethnic considerations affect parents’ motivations should not be surprising given that social psychologists have long recognized race and ethnicity as an important dimension of social identity (see, for example, Howard 2000; Phinney 1990; Sellers et al. 1998; Tajfel and Turner 2004). Such a connection also seems intuitive when ethnicity is a powerful symbolic marker in society, and prior research has shown that Latinx ethnic values factor into parenting (Halgunseth, Ispa, and Rudy 2006). Latinx ethnic identity’s influence on parenting may depend, in part, on contextual factors such as attitudes toward Latinx immigrants or representations of Latinxs where the families live and operate (Lacayo 2017). A robust literature in psychology notes that racial and ethnic socialization is a central parenting practice for parents of color (Hughes et al. 2006). Dow (2015) reached a similar conclusion, noting that race continued to be a salient feature of African American parenting that structured parents’ interactions with their children and how they navigated their social words.
Discussion
The findings of the current study shape the literature on class differences in parenting practices in a few ways. First, we did not observe stark-class differences among the Latinx families interviewed. Instead, we observed substantial similarity across families regardless of social class status. This finding may be because although families diverged along important social class makers (educational attainments, homeownership, and job prestige), they still occupied similar social contexts. By this, we mean that families in the study resided in under-resourced communities with their children attending Title I schools.
Kohn (1963) argued that social class parenting values were attributable to the difference in the broader social environments they inhabited. However, if social environments vary little, as they do in our sample, then we might expect greater similarities in parenting, irrespective of one’s social class position. Moreover, the broader finding in the literature that middle-class racial and ethnic minorities are more likely than their white counterparts to live in economically diverse communities (Logan 2013), suggests that stark-class divisions might be more prevalent when parents occupy distinct social environments. In contrast, class divisions may be less likely to emerge when greater economic heterogeneity exists within a community.
Second, we highlight the significance of social class trajectories and the longitudinal influences of class on parenting. Parents’ upbringings, which were often less socioeconomically advantaged than their children’s, were also central to understanding why parenting practices appeared more similar than different. Parenting practices described by the participants were consistent with those described in earlier work, but these practices did not always, or even consistently, map onto their associated logics (e.g., parents who had a sense of entitlement toward institutions did not necessarily espouse the concerted cultivation logic, and those who took a deferential stance toward education did not necessarily espouse the natural growth logic). In every middle-class family in the sample, at least one parent came from a working-class or poor background. Middle-class parents from less socioeconomically-advantaged backgrounds tended to adopt parenting attitudes and behaviors of the middle class; however, they often adopted these attitudes and behaviors in response to aspects of their upbringings rather than because they espoused cultivating their children’s talents. Moreover, we also found evidence of working-class origin parents engaging in practices and behaviors with the explicit focus on cultivating their children’s talents, and we found middle-class parents engaging in practices motivated by their working-class origins. The breadth of parenting practices from working-class and middle-class families suggests that future research should consider childrearing behaviors along a continuum for not only middle-class families, as articulated by the previous literature (Streib 2013), but also for working-class families.
Third, the results suggest that focusing on mothers and not fathers may limit understanding of childrearing in Latinx families. Previous sociological research on parenting and social class concluded that fathers are less reliable sources of parenting information. For example, regarding her interviews with mothers and fathers, Streib (2013) states, “Men had little to say regarding parenting” (p. 678). Lareau (2000b) reached a similar conclusion, penning a methodological article wherein she asserts that “fathers were not useful sources of information for the routines of family life” (p. 408). Yet we found fathers to be valuable and reliable sources of information. Moreover, interviewing mothers and fathers separately revealed important within-family heterogeneity that likely would have been missing from a single parent interview.
Within-family heterogeneity may, in part, explain fathers’ increased involvement. If mothers are the family breadwinners because of higher educational attainment, then fathers may be responsible for increased childrearing responsibilities. It is unclear if mixed-educated families with mothers holding higher levels of educational attainment than their male spouses are more prevalent among Latinx families relative to other racial and ethnic groups. There is suggestive evidence that this may be the case. Out-marriage—that is, marrying someone from a different racial or ethnic background than your own—is becoming more common for most racial and ethnic groups. However, Latinxs are still most likely to marry other Latinxs (Qian and Lichter 2007). Also, the gender gap in educational attainment among Latinxs has been increasing since the 1960s (DiPrete and Buchmann 2014). In 2010, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to Latinxs, 61 percent were to women and only 39 percent to men (DiPrete and Buchmann 2014). Thus, if Latinx gender gaps in educational attainment persist, and (heterosexual) Latinxs continue to marry other Latinxs at high rates, then mixed-educated households, such as the Gonzalez-Serna example, may be an increasingly unique feature of Latinx families. Fourth, to our knowledge, this was the first study of social class and childrearing logics with the focus on Latinxs in the United States. Our evidence suggests that greater attention on this population as both a unique and illustrative case is warranted.
Limitations
There are several limitations to this research. First, the study was based on interviews with 17 parents and 10 families. As such, the study should be considered exploratory. Second, we can make no claims about the extent to which the findings generalize beyond the sample parents. It may be that more affluent middle-class Mexican American parents living in well-resourced communities engage exclusively in concerted cultivation type parenting behaviors. Furthermore, a larger sample of Mexican American or other Mexican-origin parents from San Antonio and Phoenix (or elsewhere) may yield additional factors beyond those found in this study. For example, preliminary analysis of Mexican immigrant families in the larger study sample suggests that approaches to parenting and parental school involvement are structured by parents’ liminal legal status, language (in)accessibility, and the hostile social context in which families reside (Rangel, Letellier, and Medina 2020). That said, our finding that parents engage in similar parenting behaviors regardless of social class position comports with a host of previous studies documenting how parenting practices are influenced by a range of factors not solely isolated to a particular social class position or a class-based cultural logic of childrearing (see, for example, Bennett et al. 2012; Chin and Phillips 2004; Doepke and Zilibotti 2019; Dow 2015; Ishizuka 2019; Weininger, Lareau, and Conley 2015). The sample limits any broad generalizations, but our findings are data-supported inferences (Saldaña 2013:252; Small 2009:23) that offer testable hypotheses for future research and may inform development of broader theories about how and why the factors identified shape parenting attitudes and behaviors.
Future research is needed on how Latinx culture and context shape parenting. For example, we highlighted that intergenerational mobility and extended family contact make parenting in Latinx families more similar than different, but we say little about the ways in which these factors may explicitly impact parenting or shape particular childrearing logics. Moreover, we found evidence of parents nurturing their children’s racial and ethnic identity as central to their parenting approach. Future research can address whether Latinxs represent a distinct case or are merely illustrative of a broader unexamined case. To advance this scholarship, future research should examine how the Latinx experience differs in other contexts or regions. For example, are aspects of Mexican American parenting applicable to Cuban or Puerto Rican American families? If not, what are the points of divergence? Similarly, how might immigration intersect with parenting practices? Would we expect the logics and practices of Latinx immigrant parents to be shaped by similar influences as their non-immigrant Latinx peers? Answering questions such as these will not only clarify racial and ethnic influences on childrearing practices and beliefs but also help us understand elucidate how race and ethnicity intersect with longitudinal processes of social class to influence parenting.
Conclusion
That a class-based explanation fails to account for understanding parenting among our Mexican American sample may not be altogether surprising. It is evident that children’s socialization is influenced by parents’ approach to childrearing, which are reflective of class origins and current class location. Yet, parenting approaches are not solely explained by one’s social class position. Rather, as this exploratory study demonstrates, there can be both heterogeneity and continuity in various aspects of parenting within and between middle-class and working-class and poor families. Latinx families may be an ideal case for understanding the complex ways that parenting is structured by the larger social milieu in which families are embedded.
Supplemental Material
Supplementary_material_Appendix_a-d – Supplemental material for Social Class and Parenting in Mexican American Families
Supplemental material, Supplementary_material_Appendix_a-d for Social Class and Parenting in Mexican American Families by David Rangel and Megan N. Shoji in Sociological Perspectives
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Drs. Kevin Escudero, Andrea Flores, Adam Gamoran, Adrienne Keene, Amy Langenkamp, and Ruth N. López Turley, who provided comments on previous versions of the manuscript. Authors’ names are in alphabetical order, with both contributing equally to the article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD051762-01A2), the Institute of Education Sciences U.S. Department of Education (R305B090009), and the Ford Foundation. The contents herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the supporting agencies.
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