Family Separation due to Migration: Effects of Paternal Separation During Childhood on Attachment Among Latinx Young Adults

• In Event: New Directions for Developmental and Prevention Science for Improving the Lives of Latinx Families

Abstract

The migration of minors and families from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. has received global attention recently. For many decades, Mexican and Central American parents often migrated to the U.S. in search of better opportunities, leaving their children under the care of a relative either with the intention of eventually returning themselves or bringing their children to the U.S. as well, meaning that separation from caregivers has been a common experience for Latin American youth since the 1980s (Berger Cardoso, 2018).
Building upon attachment theory—which posits that separations between youth and their primary caregivers in early life can disrupt the attachment between caregiver and child as well as color the youth’s approach to social relationships across the lifespan—recent research has examined how family separation due to migration relates to attachment security. Migration from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. may reflect a particularly dangerous setting for attachment disruption compared with migration from other regions because the catalysts for migration, which often include poverty, gang/cartel violence, and lack of government infrastructure for national security are not recognized by current immigration policies as representing persecution or warfare, and immigrants are therefore rarely granted refugee or asylum relief from deportation. Thus, migration is often undertaken without proper documentation, tends to be solo migration rather than entire family unit migration, and subsequent visit with left-behind children is difficult (Berger Cardoso, 2018; Fazel, Reed, Panter-Brick, & Stein, 2012; Reed, Fazel, Jones, Panter-Brick, & Stein, 2012).
Through an international data collection effort in Latin America, this study aimed to examine relations between family separation due to migration in childhood and young adult representations of their relationship with migrant caregivers. Participants were college students residing in Latin America at the time of data collection, with the majority residing in Mexico (76.7%). Paternal migration during childhood was was endorsed by 79 young adults, among whom the mean age was 21.38 years (SD = 3.09) and 68.7% identified as female (30.3% identified as male; 1.0% did not answer). Attachment was measured using an existing Spanish translation (Gallarin & Alonso-Arbiol, 2013) of the Inventory of Peer and Parent Attachment (IPPA; Armsden & Greenberg, 1987), which has subscales for trust, communicaton, and alienation as well as a total attachment score. Migration (versus no paternal migration) was associated with lower attachment security, communication, and trust scores, and higher alienation scores with significant, moderately sized group differences. Moderation analyses (Figure 1) indicated a main effect of contact following migration and an interaction between this variable and age at time of migration, such that frequent contact with fathers after migration was associated with higher attachment security, particularly when age at migration was higher. Findings suggest that family separation due to migration has significant relations to young adult functioning, even when the migration occurred, on average, nearly 15 years earlier. Fathers are critical for the social and emotional development of Latinx children, and fathers’ behavior even after migration can have profound relations to young adult functioning.

Author

• Amanda Venta, University of Houston
  Presenting Author