Focus Areas

This priority area advances our understanding of marriage, relationships, and fatherhood among Hispanic families, and generates research-based information on these areas to inform policies and programs.

Across the years, key findings of our work include:

• Many of the raw ingredients needed for child and family success are present among Latino families. Key among these ingredients is stability and high levels of family functioning, despite limited economic resources. Many low-income Hispanic families have two parents present and their family structures appear to be relatively stable. This is especially true for immigrant Latino families.  Read more here, here, and here.  Across multiple data sets, we also find that evidence of high levels of family functioning.  Both foreign-born and U.S.-born Latina mothers report high levels of co-parenting support and low levels of parenting and economic stress, and low-income, immigrant Latina mothers have especially low rates of reported depression. Read more.
• Latino fathers have strengths, but also face challenges. Most Hispanic fathers have stable home lives—for instance, they live with all their children and their romantic partner, and have stable and high labor market engagement. Yet the majority have low income and levels of education, which constrain their and their families’ opportunities for upward mobility. Read more.
• Young Hispanic children are socially strong but lag their white peers academically. Latino boys at preschool age and through Kindergarten have strong cognitive/social-emotional skills, but lag white boys academically. Read more. When we extended our lens to look at all low-income Latino children through third grade, we found further evidence of strong social skills, but also evidence that they lag their white peers in the preschool and early school years. Our work suggests that low-income Latino children, in particular those from immigrant families, may have fewer resources or routines at home that foster academic skills than their low-income black and white peers. Read more.

Looking ahead, we will build upon our work to date with the following projects:

• Employment profiles of low- income Hispanic parents: This project will provide a rich and multidimensional portrait of the employment characteristics of low-income Hispanic parents and identify the ways in which these differ from that of other low-income parents.
• Disentangling the effects of native status, education, and employment on children’s pre-academic skills: This project examines mediating effects of parenting behaviors on the associations between parents’ immigrant status, education, household income, and preschoolers’ cognitive and social skills.
• A review of family data sets: This project will document strengths and limitations of over 20, mostly national, surveys with a sizeable sample size of Hispanics to provide information critical to understanding the characteristics and experiences of our country’s Hispanic population.
• Latinos in the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation Study: This project will examine how Hispanics in the Supporting Healthy Marriage evaluation data set compare to representative datasets containing a sizeable number of Hispanics with similar characteristics.

This priority area has produced a cluster of findings focused on the dynamics of income, the receipt of public assistance, and variations in these economic circumstances by racial/ethnic group and by characteristics that capture heterogeneity among Hispanic child households. Key findings include:

• Low income but stable. Although many Hispanic children are living in poverty or are low income, they live in income stable households. Read more.
• Source of stability is earnings. The source of this income stability appears to be earnings and not public assistance receipt. Read more.
• Lack of knowledge may hinder uptake of public assistance programs. Hispanic parents (like other low income parents) are likely to report lack of knowledge about public assistance. Read more.
• Immigration concerns also play a role. Low-income Hispanic parents are more likely than their white or black peers to report immigration related concerns as a reason for not applying for aid, even among those who reported naturalized citizenship. Read more.
• Policies may not affect all families the same. A scan of policies and practices for up to 7 states related to CCDF, TANF and SNAP uncovered areas that could facilitate or deter utilization among Hispanic families and, subsequently impact their economic well-being. Publication forthcoming. 
• Parents’ time with children varies by race/ethnicity. Our analysis looks at the time that Hispanic mothers and residential fathers spend with their children (as well as in other activities) compared to other ethnicities, and also compares time spent pre- versus post-recession. Publication forthcoming.

Our future research will continue to build upon research related to time spent with children, variation in policy and practice, and more detailed descriptions of low-income Hispanic families’ economic circumstances. Questions for this research include:

• Does more stable income, even at low levels, and lack of reliance on public assistance supports, exacerbate or have neutral influences on the home environments of Hispanic children?
• Is more earnings stability among income poor Hispanic households coming at the cost of juggling multiple jobs and more chaotic family routines, which impose on the quantity and quality of parental time spent with children?
• What are the potential ways that policy and practice are affecting utilization of public assistance among Hispanic families? And is (and if so, how) this low utilization affecting children’s developmental outcomes?
• How can available data about inflows and outflows of income deepen our portraits of the economic circumstances –including a consumption and expenditure perspective—of Hispanic families?

The work of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families spans across the contexts we focus on—income and employment, family/household composition and processes, and early care and education settings—to understand how they interact shape children’s development and family well-being, and to examine what factors can account for such linkages.

Our work also capitalizes on the diversity of our investigators’ areas of expertise to bridge our research across priority areas. Doing so reflects our desire to capture the different experiences Hispanic families experience across contexts.