Although organized activities promote positive youth development, Latina/os are least likely to participate among ethnic minority youth. This study tested whether an indicator of social stratification, namely mothers' documentation status (i.e., nativity, citizenship, and legal status), explained low activity participation rates among Mexican and…

Most U.S. children grow up with siblings. Theory and prior work suggest that older siblings are important sources of gender-related information and socialization. However, few studies have investigated the patterns of these associations longitudinally across early childhood. The present study examines the influence of sibling presence and gender…

Parent-child reminiscing talk about positive and negative events provides children with unique opportunities to develop emotion competence. Very little work has involved families from low-income households and ethnically diverse backgrounds. We examined: 1) event valence (positive vs. negative) and ethnic differences in mother-child reminiscing…

Children's book-sharing and oral storytelling experiences were examined in 264 4-year-olds from low-income African-American, Dominican, Mexican, and Chinese families in the United States. Mothers reported on children's book-sharing and oral storytelling experiences with mothers, fathers, and other people (siblings, grandparents, relatives, and…

Developmental changes in the questions mothers asked during book-sharing interactions with their preschool children and associations between mothers' questions and children's narrative contributions were examined. Children and mothers from ethnically diverse backgrounds (African American, Dominican and Mexican) were video-recorded sharing the…

The present study examined book-sharing interactions between mothers and their 4-year-old children from African American (n?=?62), Dominican (n?=?67), Mexican (n?=?59) and Chinese (n?=?82) low-income U.S. families, and children's independent storytelling skills one year later. Mothers' book-sharing style was analysed in terms of…

Early academic achievement has been shown to predict high school completion, but there have been few studies of the predictors of early academic success focused on Latino students. Using longitudinal data from 750 Mexican and Dominican American families, this study examined a cultural model of parenting and early academic achievement. While Latino…

We longitudinally investigated parental language context and infants' language experiences in relation to Dominican American and Mexican American infants' vocabularies. Mothers provided information on parental language context, comprising measures of parents' language background (i.e., childhood language) and current language use during interviews…

Parents' socialization goals are important for cultural transmission across generations, but whether such goals vary by ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and change over children's first years of life remains unexamined. In Study 1, African-American, Dominican immigrant, and Mexican immigrant mothers (N = 300) reported on the qualities deemed…

We examined gestural and verbal interactions in 226 mother-infant pairs from Mexican, Dominican, and African American backgrounds when infants were 14 months and 2 years of age, and related these interactions to infants' emerging skills. At both ages, dyads were video-recorded as they shared a wordless number book, a wordless emotion book, and…

Mothers' spontaneous teaching of their 4-year-olds was observed during block play in 230 dyads from low-income African American, Mexican, Dominican, and Chinese backgrounds. Blocks contained graphics that could be used to teach concepts in literacy, math, construction, or body/color. Coders noted how often mothers taught each of the concepts,…