Parenting in place: How Latina mothers' mesosystems shape ethnic-racial socialization

Abstract

Objectives: Ethnic-racial socialization is an important cultural-developmental process in U.S. Latinx families and can be influenced by the ethnic-racial compositions of family members' ecologies, much of which extends beyond their neighborhoods. This study examined the ethnic-racial compositions of mothers' mesosystems, operationalized using activity space methods, which capture the set of locations to which individuals are regularly exposed. For Aim 1, we used a person-centered approach to identify profiles of mothers differentiated by the ethnic-racial composition of the activity spaces they navigate. For Aim 2, we explored how identified mothers' activity space profiles predicted ethnic-racial socialization of their adolescents, including cultural socialization and preparation for bias.

Method: The sample included Latinx adolescents (N = 547; M_W1age = 13.31 years; 55.4% girls; 89.6% U.S. born) and their mothers (n = 271 at Wave 1) participating in the Caminos study in Atlanta, Georgia. The present study analyzed data from Wave 5 (2020) and Wave 6 (2020-2021).

Results: We identified four profiles of mothers' activity spaces, and these differentially predicted mothers' ethnic-racial socialization.

Conclusions: Moving beyond the examination of ethnic-racial socialization within singular microsystems (e.g., residential neighborhoods), this study indicates that day-to-day ethnic-racial exposures encountered by Latina mothers may influence how mothers socialize their adolescent children around issues of ethnicity and race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.

Latent Profiles of Latinx Concentration and Ethnic-Racial Diversity of Mothers’ Activity Spaces at W5 (N=516) Notes. Latinx concentration and ethnic-racial diversity were measured on different scales. To facilitate activity space profile plotting, the scale of ethnic-racial diversity was transformed from 0 – 1 to 0 – 100%, aligning it with the scale of Latinx concentration for comparability. Location 1, location 2, and location 3 are referring to mothers’ three frequently visited locations. Residential = residential neighborhood. These profiles comprised 516 out of 547 families, as FIML handled missing data for up to 516 cases. Unstandardized results reported in these figures.