Beliefs about Expressing Love to Adolescents among Ethnically and Economically Diverse Mothers
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EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
Beliefs about Expressing Love to Adolescents among Ethnically and Economically Diverse Mothers 1
Christy M. Buchanan
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Terese Glatz2 Lisa Kiang1 Robbie Richwine3 ●
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Received: 21 May 2020 / Accepted: 23 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Parental love promotes positive developmental outcomes among adolescents, yet knowledge about how context might influence the behaviors parents deem as loving is limited. This study examined mothers’ beliefs about expressing love to adolescent children in diverse ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Participants were 60 European American, 63 African American, and 60 Latina mothers. Household income (the indicator of socioeconomic status) varied within each ethnic group. Beliefs about the most important ways to express love differed by ethnicity more so than income. Latina mothers were more likely than other mothers to emphasize behaviors that involve family togetherness and practical help and guidance, and less likely to emphasize verbal affection or promoting independence. Mothers from all groups believed that “correction and discipline” was an important expression of love. The findings contribute to an ecologically sensitive understanding of parenting during adolescence, highlighting similarities as well as differences across ethnic and income groups. Keywords
Parenting Beliefs Ethnicity Socioeconomic status Adolescents ●
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Introduction Scholars have long emphasized the developmental importance of having a close, loving parent–child relationship for youth’s positive development. Yet, surprisingly little work has focused explicitly on the beliefs that parents have about how best to express love to their adolescent children, or on how ecological context might influence these beliefs. Parenting beliefs are essential to understand given theory and evidence suggesting that beliefs are important predictors of parenting practices, and that contextual differences in parenting are often rooted in different beliefs, or ethnotheories, about effective parenting (Miller 2020). Moreover, the growing physical and psychological independence that characterizes adolescence makes this developmental period an important one to target. Behaviors deemed loving during
* Christy M. Buchanan [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, PO Box 7778, Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7778, USA
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Örebro Universitet, Fakultetsgatan 1, 701 82 Örebro, Sweden
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Reagan High School, 3750 Transou Road, Pfafftown, NC 27040, USA
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childhood (e.g., monitoring, physical affection) might come to be thought of as less loving or appropriate during adolescence, whereas other behaviors (e.g., allowing independence) might be seen as increasingly loving. The current research advances knowledge in these understudied areas by examining what types of behaviors mothers believe are the most important in expressing love to their adolescent children and whether this varies by ethnicity or socioecon
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