Poster #56 - Parenting of Siblings in Latinx Families During Middle Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

A rarely studied domain of parenting with both theoretical and practical implications is the ways in which parents manage their children’s sibling relationships (McHale et al., 2000). Parents with multiple children are faced with the tasks of fostering supportive sibling interactions and handling the conflict and jealousy-- or what has been termed sibling-focused parenting (Feinberg et al., 2019; McHale et al., 2012). Middle childhood is an optimal period to study sibling-focused parenting as sibling conflicts increase (Kim et al., 2006) and are a source of stress for many parents (Siddiqui & Ross, 2004; Tucker et al., 2019). Supporting positive sibling exchanges also is important given evidence that children’s social cognitive skills can be fostered but their behavior problems exacerbated during interactions with siblings (Bank et al., 2004), children’s most frequent out-of-school companions (McHale & Crouter, 1996; Updegraff et al., 2011).

Research on sibling-focused parenting in ethnic-racial minoritized families is especially rare. Latinx families are an important sociocultural context for the study of sibling-focused parenting given their large sibships (Livingston, 2015) and strong cultural emphasis on close and harmonious family relationships (Cahill et al., 2021). Accordingly, drawing from cultural-ecological and family stress models, this study had two goals: (a) to describe the dimensions of sibling-focused parenting among Latinx mothers with middle childhood-aged sibling pairs; and (b) to examine sociocultural assets and stressors as correlates of sibling-focused parenting.

Participants were 223 Latinx mothers (95% biological) of two children in middle childhood (Mages = 10.7, SD = .42, and 8.29, SD = 1.1, respectively) who were recruited from elementary schools in the southwest and participated in the baseline phase of two studies testing the effectiveness of a family-based prevention program. Mothers were predominantly Mexican (91.5%), born outside of the U.S. (76.2%), and interviewed in Spanish (75.3%). Mothers rated their parenting of siblings, including positive guidance, shared activities, authoritarian control, non-involvement, and differential treatment/taking sides (McHale et al., 2000). Mothers also reported on their cultural assets, including familism (Knight et al., 2010), family cohesion (Olson et al., 1992), and their individual and contextual challenges, including parenting stress (Abidin, 1995), depressive symptoms (Radloff, 1977), and economic hardship (Updegraff et al., 2016).

To address the first goal (Table 1 shows descriptive results), we conducted Bayesian exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to establish the factorial validity of the measure. These revealed five dimensions: positive guidance (10 items), shared activities (4 items), and related to conflict management, non-intervention (4 items), authoritarian control (6 items), and parental differential treatment (PDT)/taking sides (3 items). For the second goal, path models examined cultural assets and stressors as predictors of mothers’ sibling-focused parenting ( Table 2). Family cohesion was positively and parenting stress negatively associated with positive guidance and shared activities; both cohesion and stress were positively related to non-intervention; and parenting stress and depressive symptoms both predicted more authoritarian control and PDT/taking Sides. Discussion will address both research and practical implications of sociocultural assets and stressors related to sibling-focused parenting.

Authors

• Karina Cahill, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author

• Kimberly Updegraff, Arizona State University

• Susan McHale, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

• Adriana J. Umaña-Taylor, Harvard University

• Mark E. Feinberg, Pennsylvania State University, University Park