Interview: Improving Policies for Latino Children and Their Families

Q: How did you get started doing research examining the development of Latino children and their families more generally?

When I was a grad student at Stanford I started to go to Mexico in the summers — this was in the early 80s — and I started living with families there. The more I hung out with these families, the more interested I got in how they were raising their kids because it was different than how suburban WASP kids like myself were raised. And so the first study I did as a grad student was looking at government run preschools in Morelia and Puebla [Mexico] and contrasting those to what we call family daycare in the states. And what struck me was that the government preschool, while they were brand new facilities, the teachers were trying to be modern and focused on preliteracy skills and teaching three and four year olds the alphabet but they kind of lost all the cariñosa quality, the caring and affectionate quality of the home-based providers. I studied political sociology and I have been interested in how government tries to help families, but sometimes through bureaucratic rules they kind of lose track of the positive, more natural elements of families. And ever since then I’ve been interested in this intersection between government and diverse families.

Q: What have you learned about the social emotional skills of Latino children in all your years of studying them?

There are enormously robust cultural assets in a lot of families, including materially poor families. I think in this country — in the US we used to have this image of the poor but hard working farmer or the virtuous parent working out on the prairie — that is we didn’t equate poverty with lousy parenting. In the early 60s, with the growth of academic work on poverty, Michael Harrington’s book The Other America or Oscar Lewis on the culture of poverty, I think well meaning [people] started to assume that poverty washed over all aspects of parenting and that if you were living in material poverty you were probably a pretty bad parent. But the more I lived with these families in Mexico and the more I studied them, the cultural strengths are just so vivid in terms of the caring quality, the affection, the often strict discipline, the ways in which the five year old is asked to change the diaper of the one-year-old — what academics call maturity expectations — these kids are really expected to contribute to the families really early on.

5 years ago, we found a data set that allowed us to look at this [across several studies] . We found that a lot of Latino kids [primarily Mexican-American] as they enter kindergarten are actually ranked quite high by their kindergarten teachers in terms of their social skills, their eagerness to cooperate [and their] approaches to learning. These five-year-old Latino kids were pretty much on par with middle class white kids when it comes to approaches to learning and that predicts downstream achievement. So we were just delighted to finally get a dataset we could really dig into. And sure enough, we found this socialization side of their upbringing is quite strong even though many of these kids come from very poor households.

Q: What do you think policymakers should be focusing on when designing policies and programs that will meet the needs of these children and their families?

First of all, [we] need to drop this assumption that being an economically poor parent means you’re a lousy parent. We’ve got to get away from these stereotypes. There’s no doubt that truly impoverished Latino parents are having a hard time — that creates stress, maternal depression — some of these families are in dire stress, but overall we’ve got to drop the 1960’s equating of material poverty with poor parenting. That has implications for home visiting programs [and] for how we think about parent participation in pre-K programs. We’ve got to design policies and programs that are more respectful and curious about Latino forms of parenting. Rather than just knocking on the door and saying we’re going to push a white, middle-class way of raising an individualistic waspy kid. We need to learn about these more indigenous cultural strengths and assets. And I think we are seeing that in some initiatives. I’m a big fan of Abriendo Puertas - this program that’s out of LA that Sandra Gutierrez runs. [It’s] sort of seeped its way into the federal Head Start program. There are initiatives now that are more respectful and scaffold up from cultural knowledge and more indigenous parenting practices. So I’m hopeful about it but I still worry about this conventional government view that material poverty means poor parenting.

Q: Your latest study uncovered differences between Mexican American and White toddlers. Can you tell me more about that study and what you think the implications are for policy makers in terms of scaling up programs like Abriendo Puertas or more culturally responsive programs?

We’ve been curious about why if you have a rich form of socialization and kids are raised to be responsible to the family’s interest, these prosocial competencies [don’t] spill over to cognitive growth and the development of early literacy skills? Part of our agenda is to pull apart these two domains and we’re not the first to do this — Barbara Rogoff who’s a fantastic social psychologist at Santa Cruz has talked about social cognition for years and years. That is, what are the cognitive processes embedded within social practices?

We’re not the first to do this, but we have been trying to pull apart these two domains. That took us back to the same national data set — the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS) — to see could we backtrack and see when these gaps in cognitive and pre-literacy skills were first apparent. How early could we discern those differences? So the ECLS-B is advantageous — Westat did all the field work for NCES and they got these huge samples (12,000 births around the country) and got to the families when the kids were about 9 months in age. First of all, we can take off the table any claims about differences in intelligence. At 9 months, the white kids look almost identical to the Mexican-American kids. So we took that off the table, [but] by 24-36 months of age, we detected pretty large differences in communication skills. There are a lot of communication indicators coded like the mother and child are asked to solve a little puzzle or put a brush into a paint jar and these are small micro-interactions but can be reliably coded in terms of the child’s ability to communicate with the mother as well as the mother’s receptivity and responsiveness to the child in these problem solving episodes. Through videotaped interactions with mothers and kids, we saw lagging scores in communication in those kinds of videotaped tasks. These kids were assessed in terms of their recognition of words (in Spanish or English) or their ability to express a wider set of words between the ages of 2 or 3. Again the Mexican-American kids were lagging behind.

We decided to put this paper out in part to highlight the finding that development in the social sphere is on a much steeper trajectory for these youngsters than development in terms of cognitive, communication and pre-literacy skills. Going back to your earlier question: that has implications for policies and programs because you don’t want this growing army of home visitors to go out and indiscriminately try to change parenting practices because a lot of what these parents are doing is very invigorating and very healthy for these kids. But we do need to do work with moms and dads to expand their oral language with kids, elicit more language from their youngsters, listen to their ideas, extend those ideas [and introduce] more print material and picture books.

Q: I read your paper that came out in February on digital media and Latino families. What struck me the most about it was the phrasing in the paper that we are essentially in empirical darkness on the impact that media has on the family lives and development of Latino children. What are the key takeaways from that paper and where do we need to go next to develop a better understanding of how this is all working together?

That’s a great question. I’m kind of new to this whole digital area. If you saw my phone you’d realize how much of a dolt I am when it comes to technology. My kids are constantly ragging on me and my ignorance. Sesame asked me to work on that and I was sort of intrigued...because the national survey data that we reviewed that’s been out there for a while ...basically showed that the digital gap is closing or has closed pretty rapidly for most Latino families vis-a-vis middle-class whites so it’s just a whole bunch of new tools you know, an array of digital tools that are now in Latino households. We found a little bit of evidence in there showing that Latino parents may use mobile devices and tablets to kind of keep their kids busy. They’ll say go play with Vilma on your tablet and then come back at dinner time, which I did with my kids too when they were young. But upper middle-class white parents are more likely to use these same tools to drill their kids in vocabulary or to start working on multiplication tables. So how the tools are being used really varies across ethnic groups. We only have a little bit of evidence on this, but it does suggest different kinds of use.

So the way in which it’s mediated by parents gets me back to my earlier point: we know that kids’ cognitive growth is accelerated when we ask kids questions, when we kind of respect and are honestly curious about what are kids have to say and the ideas they’re spinning off and how they’re puzzling through problems. And so digital media can be a great device for that and you see this in airports all the time: upper middle-class white parents they have their seven mobile devices out and they’re sort of engaged in conversations. If the media truly is a medium for inquiring about your kids’ ideas and invoking language, then I think digital media can be a real blessing. If it’s just another form of video game to keep the kids busy and out of your hair it’s probably not going to...I’m tentative because have such sketchy evidence...it’s probably not going to accelerate their language skills, their problem solving skills and their ability to ask better questions. But the potential is so great, that’s what sort of interests me.

Q: The other idea that I thought was interesting in those series of reports was this idea that digital media could have the potential to change the cultural norms within Latino families. So what impact could it have on familismo and those constructs that are ingrained and changing the dynamic of families?

One of the case studies — from a group in Chicago [New Futuro] — is really interesting because they do a lot of work online with adolescent Latinos trying to get them interested in college and trying to get more information out to them. One of the things they told me when we did that case study was that sometimes the email address was the father’s or the mother’s email address so even access to the web is moderated by a parent. So that got us thinking more and more about Vikki [Katz’s] work and others that are saying, once a 14-year-old Latina gets ahold of a mobile device, she’s now turned on to a whole bunch of stuff in the world that a parent never imagined. It could really break down some of the hierarchy that marks a lot of these families.

--

This post is part of New America’s Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Click here for more information on this team’s work. To subscribe to the biweekly newsletter, click here, enter your contact information, and select “Education Policy.”

 "