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ABSTRACT
Relationships with parents have been identified as a major factor in shaping adolescents’ well-being and cognitive development. Compared to adolescents in native families, immigrant children face multiple stressors associated with international migration that may cause the relationship with their parents to be more conflictive or emotionally distant. In this paper, we compare the levels of mother–child conflict and emotional intimacy among Latino immigrant and Spanish native families living in Spain. Our analysis shows that Latino adolescents do not describe the relationship with their mothers as more conflictive than natives do. However, they report more emotional distance with their mothers than native adolescents. This differential with natives cannot be fully attributed to migration-related factors like physical separation from parents due to staggered family migration, to the lower life satisfaction of Latino mothers’ in their new destination or to an acculturation gap between mother and child. However, the fact that immigrant mothers spend less time doing activities with their children, probably due to their harder working conditions, explains part of the differential in emotional intimacy with native families. Finally, our analyses clearly establish an equally negative relationship between conflict and emotional intimacy for both native and Latino immigrant families.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments. The authors also thank the participants in the international workshop on ‘Intergenerational Transfers and Immigrant Population’ (Bologna, September 2015) for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The two competing paradigms in this literature (i.e. conflict-solidarity and ambivalence paradigms) claim that family relationships are multidimensional and are neither wholly conflictual nor wholly harmonious. For a discussion of the coincidences and discrepancies between both paradigms, see Bengtson et al. (Citation2002) and Connidis and McMullin (Citation2002).
2. Following the terminology used in prior studies and in the American literature, we refer to immigrants born in any Latin American country as Latino migrants.
3. Spain is significantly less individualistic than the U.S.but still more individualistic than the countries where most Latino migrants living in Spain were born (i.e. Ecuador, Bolivia or Colombia). Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions scale (Hofstede Citation2001), Spain has an individualism score of 51 out of 100, which is rather low compared to other Western countries such as Germany (67) or the U.S. (91). On the other hand, Spain (51) is significantly more individualistic than Latin American countries, e.g. Ecuador (8), Colombia (13) or Mexico (30). In terms of the individualism–collectivism dimension, Latin American countries are usually considered collectivistic societies, while the U.S. is highly individualistic (Green, Deschamps, and Páez Citation2005).
4. According to the 2011 Census, most of the 1.2 million children of immigrants living in Spain belong to the 1.5 generation, that is, they were born abroad but migrated to Spain before the age of 16.
5. Note that the sample is representative of the immigrant population aged 14–16 years living in Madrid but not of the native population in the same age group (since native students living in affluent neighbourhoods have not been sampled). A detailed explanation of the sample design is included in Appendix.
6. Neighbourhoods with less than 9% foreign-born population were excluded from the sample design (12 neighbourhoods out of 133). Only 3% of the total foreign-born population in Madrid at the time of the sample design resided in those 12 neighbourhoods, which were all affluent.
7. Most immigrant adolescents born in an EU15 country are enrolled in privately funded schools (73%), which are highly selective and expensive. In the 2009–2010 academic year, there were 99 (out of 514) private secondary schools in the city of Madrid (19%). However, in terms of the student population, privately funded schools only account for 10% of the total and 5% of foreign-born students (Consejería de Educación e Investigación Citation2012).
8. The analytical sample is N = 2011 (for Latino migrants, N = 629; for natives, N = 1382).
9. All items have rotated factor loadings ranging from 0.76 to 0.92 on each of the variables (see and in the Appendix for more details). To maintain the 0–10 scale, we have constructed an index summing respondents’ scores on each of the items and then divided the total score by the number of items. Cronbach’s alpha for the emotional intimacy variable is 0.90 for both natives and immigrants; for the conflict variable Cronbach’s alpha is 0.79 for natives and 0.76 for immigrants.
10. Children born in Spain to mixed couples (i.e. a Latin American-born parent and a Spanish-born parent) only represent 8% of the native sample in Chances 2011. We decided to consider them as natives instead of second-generation Latinos, as in their case the influence of the immigrant parent is negligible.
11. Immigrants arriving before the age of 5 have been almost entirely socialised and educated in the destination country and, therefore, their adaptation is likely to be easier and less disruptive than that of older children and adolescents (Rumbaut Citation2004).
12. We use multiple imputation by chained equations to predict the missing values. Information about the variables with imputed missing values are presented in of the Appendix.