Open-Eyed: Perceived Discrimination, Parental Monitoring, and Youth Emotional Symptoms in an RCT with Latinx Dyads

Background: Latinxs are the fastest growing demographic in the United States which underscores the imperative need to identify and understand how unique contextual, social and political factors shape parenting capabilities and efficacy, as well as youth psychological well-being. Parental monitoring and supervision is a cornerstone in parenting research which is highly relevant during early adolescence given the vulnerability, risk and increased autonomy in this developmental period. Accordingly, parental monitoring has shown to act as an effective buffer against negative developmental outcomes such as emotional symptoms in Latinx early adolescents.

Culturally adapted parent training interventions consistently demonstrate enhanced treatment outcomes for parents when contextual, political and social factors are overtly discussed. Regardless, there is sparse knowledge on how these specific contextual, social and political factors might shape treatment outcomes for Latinx parents, as well as how these factors might simultaneously influence parental efficacy in managing youth psychological well-being.

Methods: This investigation used data from families that participated in a parenting RCT in the southwestern US between 2020 and 2024. We analyzed data from 46 Latinx parent-child dyads in the treatment group across three measurements (69% moms, mean age 31, 56% boys, mean age of 12). We aimed to find associations between parental reports of perceived discrimination as measured by the Perceived Immigration Policy Effects Scale, free time monitoring and supervision measured by the Family Checkup Questionnaire, as well as youth-reported emotional symptoms as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire across three time points. We tested our hypotheses using three Bayesian-estimated autoregressive cross-lagged panel path models with mildly informative priors indicating varying effect sizes for regression coefficients.

Results: The model with medium-effect-sized priors was the best fitting model of the other two prior-informed models (i.e., Lower LOOic, WAIC), and also outperformed the default prior model. Parental perceived discrimination presented high stability coefficients between all time points. Youth emotional distress demonstrated higher stability between baseline and post-test, while parental monitoring demonstrated higher stability in autoregressive coefficients between post-test and 6-month follow-up. Regarding synchronous parameters, discrimination was associated with parent practices of monitoring across all timepoints with stronger coefficients at baseline, and with youth emotional problems only at the 6-month follow-up. Cross-lagged paths included negative associations from parental perceived discrimination during baseline to youth emotional problems at post, from discrimination at post to monitoring at 6-month follow-up, as well as two paths from monitoring at post to discrimination and emotional problems at follow-up.

Conclusions and Implications: Our findings underscore the importance of overtly addressing contextual, social, and political factors in culturally adapted parent training interventions with Latinx families. Perceived discrimination was directly associated with parental monitoring, and with youth emotional symptoms at posterior times which suggest external factors could shape treatment outcomes and hinder parental efficacy in managing early adolescents’ emotional symptoms. Strengthening monitoring through responsive frameworks is crucial for promoting positive developmental outcomes in Latinx youth.