Examining the Effects of Family and Acculturative Stress on Mexican American Parents’ Psychological Functioning as Predictors of Children’s Anxiety and Depression: The Mediating Role of Family Cohesion

The combination of discrimination and cultural-contextual stressors associated with acculturation demands and immigration processes cause stressful conditions for Latinos above and beyond daily, stressful life events experienced in families. This in turn, can have repercussions on parent–child relationships and family dynamics. We hypothesized that acculturative and general family stress would be associated with increased parental depression, which would negatively affect family cohesion and parents, and that these disruptions would predict children’s internalizing symptoms. Accordingly, mothers and fathers (N = 467) completed questionnaires to describe their experiences of acculturative stress, with mothers also reporting on general family stress. Parent and children’s reports of parenting and family cohesion were also assessed. Structural equation modeling analyses were employed to examine the relationship between parental stress (acculturative and general family stress) and depression at Wave 1, with spillover effects on family cohesion, parenting, and children’s internalizing symptoms at Wave 2. Familial acculturative stress was positively associated with increased parental depression, compromised family relationships and parenting, and in turn, was linked to increased anxiety and depression in their children. In addition, family cohesion served a mediating role in families, helping to explain the pathway though which acculturative stress affects family relationships and children’s internalizing symptoms. This study addresses a critical gap in immigrant family adaptation research, highlighting the need for a cohesive model that integrates multiple stressors to capture their unique, collective, and cumulative effects.