Parenting in place: How Latina mothers' mesosystems shape ethnic-racial socialization.

Objectives: Ethnic-racial socialization is an important cultural-developmental process in U.S. Latinx families and can be influenced by the ethnic-racial compositions of family members' ecologies, much of which extends beyond their neighborhoods. This study examined the ethnic-racial compositions of mothers' mesosystems, operationalized using activity space methods, which capture the set of locations to which individuals are regularly exposed. For Aim 1, we used a person-centered approach to identify profiles of mothers differentiated by the ethnic-racial composition of the activity spaces they navigate. For Aim 2, we explored how identified mothers' activity space profiles predicted ethnic-racial socialization of their adolescents, including cultural socialization and preparation for bias.

Method: The sample included Latinx adolescents (N = 547; M_W1age = 13.31 years; 55.4% girls; 89.6% U.S. born) and their mothers (n = 271 at Wave 1) participating in the Caminos study in Atlanta, Georgia. The present study analyzed data from Wave 5 (2020) and Wave 6 (2020-2021).

Results: We identified four profiles of mothers' activity spaces, and these differentially predicted mothers' ethnic-racial socialization.

Conclusions: Moving beyond the examination of ethnic-racial socialization within singular microsystems (e.g., residential neighborhoods), this study indicates that day-to-day ethnic-racial exposures encountered by Latina mothers may influence how mothers socialize their adolescent children around issues of ethnicity and race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).