Maternal Caregivers Types and Internalized Behaviors in African American Adolescents Living in Public Housing

Back Ground. The maternal caregiver plays an important role in the way that their adolescent children feel and think. An encouraging and supervising maternal caregiver may help youth formulate their beliefs, their self-perception and even their mental health. Involved maternal caregiver are extremely important in neighborhoods where children are exposed to community risk factors that may have deleterious effects on their internalized behaviors. Indeed, African American youth living in urban public housing face many challenges that may negatively impact attitudes and mental health. Despite the vulnerability of these youth, the promotive role of the maternal caregiver in these youth lives have not been fully explored. Furthermore, new analytic strategies such as Latent Profile Analysis are rarely used in research within these understudied communities.

Methods. Using a quasi community based participatory research design and quantitative methods, this paper contributes to this gap in knowledge by assessing how variations in maternal caregivers types are linked to their dependent adolescents’ attitudes towards deviance, self-efficacy and depressive symptoms (i.e., internalized behaviors). The sample used in this exploration include 375 African American youth (age = 15.5; SD=2.2) recruited from public housing in three large US cities.

We used a three-pronged analytic approach. First, we conducted univariate and bivariate analyses on all the study variables. Second, we performed a Latent Profile Analysis to identify maternal caregiver types based on adolescents’ self-report of their mothers’ encouraging and monitoring behaviors. Third, we ran a Multinominal Logistic Regression to assess whether there were statistically significant differences in youth’s internalized behaviors across maternal caregiver types.

Results. Results indicate that 50% of the sample is female and 47% were in early adolescence, 39% were in middle adolescence and 14.5% were in late adolescence. Three maternal types emerged from the LPA: 1) high encouraging and high monitoring class (53.5%); 2) high encouraging and moderate monitoring class (21.2%); and moderate encouraging and moderate monitoring class (25.3%). Results from the Nominal Regression Model were significant and correctly classified 70% of the cases. Parameter estimates suggest that membership in higher types of maternal caregivers were associated with significantly better conventional attitudes, significantly higher self-efficacy and significantly lower depressive symptoms.

Implications.  Results suggest that interventions developed to support maternal caregivers’ capacity to encourage and supervise their adolescents children may contribute to positive internalized behaviors in youth. Future research should explore how maternal types interact with paternal types to effects their adolescent children’s internalized behaviors.