Efficacy of a Latino Mother–Child Communication Intervention in Elementary Schools

Abstract

Children of Latino immigrants in the United States encounter ecological stressors that heighten their risk for depressive symptoms, externalizing behavior, and problems in school. Studies have shown that affirming parent–child communication is protective of child depressive symptoms and accompanying problems. The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of an adapted mother–child communication intervention for Latino immigrant mothers and their fourth- to sixth-grade children delivered after school. The intervention, Family Communication (“Comunicación Familiar”), was delivered at children’s elementary schools in six sessions lasting 2 hr each. Significant improvements were found in children’s reports of problem-solving communication, with their mother and mothers’ reports of reduced family conflict. Strengths of the intervention are improved mother–child communication, acquisition of communication skills that can transfer to relationships within the classroom, and a design that allows delivery by nurses or other professional members of the school support team.

Parent Communication and Bullying Among Hispanic Adolescent Girls

“…It would be advantageous in future studies attempting to link parent–child communication to child behavior to include measures (or key items from established measures) that assess these general properties. For example, McNaughton, Cowell, and Fogg (2015) found an intervention designed to improve these general properties of mother–child communication resulted in child reports of lower depression scores and improved health self-concept, a measure which included a subscale related to peer relationships.…”

Parent Support Programmes for Families Who are Immigrants: A Scoping Review

“…4. Most of the studies were qualitative (n = 20) [26,31,39,42,49,57,68,[70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82] and RCT studies (n = 18) [ 23,34,36,38,44,58,64,[83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93]. A total of 14 of the studies lacked a clear methods section or the methods were inadequately reported [27,28,30,32,33,45,55,56,59,66,[94][95]…”

“…Parent support programmes were reported to improve parenting practices and skills [44,84,85,89], promote positive parenting [84,85] and reduce negative discipline or harsh punishment [84,88]. In addition, improvements were seen in parent-child-relationship quality [88], problemsolving communication [38] and family functioning [88].…”

“…In addition, studies also recruited participants from public services e.g. kindergarten[55,64,70,76], schools[29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 56, 58, 72, 80, 84-87, 90, 94, 95, 104], language schools[73,74,107,108], churches or religious organisations[80,94,105,109,110], social services, or through social worker[29,38,[84][85][86][87]104], child welfare services[84], health care clinics[36,44,50,54,55], mental health services or through mental health worker[44,49,50,58,71,85,104,105], initial registration centre…”

What Makes Nursing Work?

“…The worry that staffing patterns limit opportunity for building relationships is real but needs to be addressed. School-based studies targeting families as well as children are showing important outcomes such as communication models within families that are anticipated to show improved communication in the classroom (McNaughton, Cowell, & Fogg, 2015). School-based studies are showing the relavence of relationships such as the Appalacian intervention study focused on healthy lifestyles among youth who were successfully delivered through teen mentoring (Smith & Holloman, 2013).…”