Abstract
Ethnic-racial pride (positive feelings about one’s ethnic-racial group) is critical to healthy identity development across the lifespan. Research on ethnic-racial pride development among Latinx populations has focused exclusively on youth, without regard to pride development amongst parents and relations between pride within family units. Using multivariate Latent Growth Curve Modelling among 674 Mexican-origin youth and their parents (673 mothers; 437 fathers), the trajectory of youth’s pride from 5th grade through emerging adulthood (14 years/12 waves of data) as well as relations with parental pride trajectories were examined. Respondents’ pride generally decreased from waves 1 to 7 (~age 11–17 in youth) and increased after wave 7. Youth’s and mothers’ trajectories were unrelated, but complex associations emerged between youth’s and fathers’ trajectories. This study supports the dynamic nature of ethnic-racial pride across distinct life stages and underscores the complex interplay of youth and parental pride trajectories, emphasizing the pivotal role parents may play in co-shaping identity development alongside their children.
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Notes
The authors acknowledge that the growth model for fathers demonstrated a poor fit. Despite attempts to fit alternative models such as autoregressive models (without growth) and growth models with structural residuals (accounting for autocorrelation across time), the piecewise model remained the best fitting. While this is a limitation, the inclusion of fathers in the multivariate model was deemed essential due to their often overlooked presence in similar literature, and the authors desire not to contribute to this lack of representation of fathers in a rare case such as this when such rich longitudinal data are available.
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The 1st author was funded by a Master’s training scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture. The California Families Project was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA017902) to the 3rd author, R.W.R. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding institutions.
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A.D. contributed to the model design, conducted statistical analyses, interpreted results, and drafted the manuscript; N.K.C. collaborated to the model design, analyses, results interpretation, and manuscript writing in a supervisory role; R.W.R. conceived of the study, created its design and data collection. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Desmarais, A., Christophe, N.K. & Robins, R.W. Mexican-Origin Children’s Trajectories of Ethnic-Racial Pride from Childhood through Emerging Adulthood: Associations with Mothers and Fathers’ Trajectories. J. Youth Adolescence 53, 685–700 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01902-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01902-7