Latino Resilience Enterprise at Arizona State University

I traveled to the Tempe/Phoenix area this week for a whirlwind visit with the Latino Resilience Enterprise team at the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University.  I became familiar with the amazing work that is happening within the LRE by attending a series of sessions at the National Council on Family Relations 2014 meeting in Baltimore, MD.  I was fortunate to make connections and to work with Dr. Rebecca White, one of the co-directors of LRE, to arrange a visit.   Thanks to the LRE and especially to Stefanie Fuentes for their care and time in making it a productive day for me.

Stefanie showing off the gorgeous bow she put on the bag they gifted me with as a memory of my day.

I spoke with Rebecca to get an overview of the work LRE is engaged with and to gain an understanding of her work directing the Success in Latino Neighborhoods project.  Rebecca generously shared a number of articles that she and others in her group had published and also gave me a recommendation for a book I have just ordered: Immigrants Raising Children: Undocumented Parents and their Young Children By Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2012.

Rebecca's project is one of seven initiatives listed on the LRE website.  I want to spend some time talking about her work before moving to other work of the LRE.  Rebecca is funded by the William T. Grant foundation as an early career scholar.  It is a prestigious award that will fund five years of her work.  Her first graduate student for the project comes from our very own Washington State University Vancouver Human Development Program.  Elizabeth (Liz)  Burleson came south to work with Rebecca and the neighborhood project.  She is a statistics whiz and was also drawn by the strong statistical analysis focus of the program.  I remember Liz from our regional NCFR conference when she was the undergraduate poster winner.  It was great to connect with someone from home.  I was delighted to go out to lunch with Liz and Michelle Pasco, Rebecca's first year student on the neighborhood project.  We had a conversation that ranged from statistics, the hard work being a graduate student requires, life and work balance and the reasons they both chose to come to ASU.  

Liz Burleson, data whiz and second year graduate student and WSUV graduate.

Michelle Pasco, first year student, UCLA graduate.

Both young women are working with a project in which they are using photo elicitation with youth in Latino neighborhoods gather qualitative data about what the youth perceive are the strengths and challenges of living in their neighborhood and they are also working with a large data set that comes from Los Angeles where there are many such neighborhoods.  Some of the preliminary findings that Dr. White reported are that Latino youth receive increased ethnic orientation beyond what the parents are providing and that this increased orientation and Spanish language use act as moderators and protective factors against substance abuse and other risk behaviors.  I came away with more questions than answers as always but I was really enriched by what I learned and from the resources I now have for deepening my learning about the benefits ethnic identity has on adolescent growth and development.

I met with several other students.  Many thanks to Diamond Brave, Danielle Seay, Chelsea Derlan, and Sara Douglass for sharing their work with me.  

Diamond, Danielle and Chelsea are all involved with the Supporting MAMI project.  MAMI stands for Mexican-origin Adolescent Mothers and their Infants.  I had a little familiarity with the project because I had attended a session that Diamond gave at NCFR in Baltimore.  If you have been following my blog you are aware of the interest I have in the issue of teen parents in the Latino populations.  These young women were engaged in significant work with their mentors in understanding the connection between parenting/family stress and family support and its influence on child development and parental mental health in these moms.  The study is longitudinal, having the 204 adolescent mothers and their children and extended families for six years.  I asked them both for the takeaways from their work.  They provided me with path analyses of their work.  My early work in statistics during my graduate studies helped me enormously.  Diamond's work showed significant negative relationship between parenting efficacy and economic hardship on adolescent parenting stress and that the adolescent stress negatively impacted the adolescent's endorsement of their child's readiness (academic and social emotional) attend kindergarten.  This finding seems very intuitive and has many implications for how teen pregnancy and parenting is handled on the school and community levels.  

Chelsea works with the Family Stress model and found that economic pressure and maternal depressive symptoms are connected to co-parenting conflict between the grandmother and the mother and are compounded in future years with co-parenting conflict with the father and increased hassles for the mother that result in the both acting out and internalizing behavior problems in the 6th year of the study.  I asked Chelsea where the salient points of intervention could be made that might mitigate these effects on both mother and child.  She pointed to year three of their data when the depressive symptoms emerged and in year 4 when the mother-grandmother co-parenting conflict emerges and influences the child's later behavior.    My mind was spinning with possibilities for education and support.  

Danielle was looking at the transition of maladaptive parents within the MAMI sample.  She has found that teen parents who are parented with psychological control more likely to engage in punitive discipline and have higher potential for abuse of their own children.  Effect size is small but robust. We wandered into a long discussion of incidence and effects corporal punishment and authoritarian parenting because I have a long standing interest in the subject.  Danielle had experience working in India before she came to ASU and was doing community training to reduce the amount of corporal punishment and shaming being used as a control mechanism in a secondary school.  I enjoyed our conversation.

My last interview of the day was with Dr. Sara Douglass who is completing her two-year post-doctorate work with the Foundational Director of the LRE, Dr. Adriana Umana-Taylor.  She had just completed the "pilot" study of the IDENTITY project in which they compared 4 groups of 9th graders that received the newly developed curriculum that helped youth explore their ethnic identities with 4 groups of youth that not receive the lessons. Initial findings of the project are that family messages about ethnic-racial identity assist young adolescents in exploring their identity but less so as kids age.  They are less likely to come to resolution of their ethnic-racial identity as a result of family messaging and need some support from other sources, including their parents for creating their own identity.  The benefits of cultural pride are well documented.  Sara gave me some great resources with which to follow-up.

Dr. Sara Douglass

I was exhausted and completely sated with new knowledge by the time I left the LRE.  I had the misfortune of coming down with my husband Michael's generously shared cold that morning.  I was really glad that I took the time to visit Tempe on March 31st.  I was surprised and pleased to know that the city was closed to observe Cesar Chavez's birthday. He is an honored man throughout the SW.

My selfie!

Sign on City Hall 3/31/15

This was a long post so if you made it all the way through I appreciate your attention. I am writing on day 3 of this danged cold and wanted to remember this amazing visit.

Thanks for reading!