Maternal parenting and mental health of Mexican American youth: a bidirectional and prospective approach.

Understanding the bidirectional relation between parenting behaviors and youth mental health in Mexican American families is crucial because of the current need to improve the availability of high quality services for this underserved population and to broaden the reach of extant theories on this topic. Youth (14-19 years old; N = 88) were recruited from a public high school in an urban immigrant enclave and reported their internalizing and externalizing symptoms as well as six maternal parenting behaviors at two points approximately one year apart. Youth-reported parenting behaviors formed two factors: Supportive Parenting and Harsh Parental Control. T1 externalizing symptoms predicted higher T2 Harsh Parental Control, providing evidence for the coercive model. T1 internalizing symptoms predicted lower T2 Supportive Parenting, providing evidence for social interaction theory. However, T1 parenting factors did not predict T2 youth mental health symptoms as expected according to bidirectional theories. We advocate the use of eco-developmental models to interpret our findings and guide future research.