Latin American Immigration, Maternal Education, and Approaches to Managing Children's Schooling in the U.S.

Arya Ansari, University of Texas at Austin
Robert Crosnoe, University of Texas at Austin
Kelly Purtell, Ohio State University
Nina Wu, Children’s Council of San Francisco

Concerted cultivation is the active parental management of children’s educations that schools often value and reward and that, because it differs by race/ethnicity, nativity, and socioeconomic status, plays a role in educational disparities. Analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (n = 10,913) revealed that foreign-born Latina mothers were generally less likely to engage in school-based activities, enroll children in extracurricular activities, or provide educational materials at home when children were at the start of elementary school than U.S.-born White, African-American, and Latina mothers, in part because of their lower educational attainment. Within the foreign-born Latina sample, the link between maternal education and the three concerted cultivation behaviors varied only slightly by whether the education was attained in the U.S. or Latin America or by other maternal characteristics. Higher maternal education appeared to matter somewhat more to parenting when children were girls, attended public schools, and had higher achievement.