Navigating Immigration Status en Familia: An Exploration of Caregiver Understanding, Caregiver-Child Attachment Quality, and Child Knowledge in Latine Mixed-Status Families

Abstract

This dissertation explores the role of familial strategies for developing shared understandings of being undocumented in the United States. I seek to better understand how undocumented immigration status shapes the developmental trajectory of Latine children in middle childhood and early adolescence (6-15 years old), two life stages during which children typically become more socially aware and have more-developed perspective-taking capacities (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2011). To explore this, I conducted an in-depth mixed-methods study in which I interviewed 19 Latine mixed-status family units with at least one child between the ages of 6-15 years old, in three small cities in the northeastern United States. Paper 1 presents the findings based on a series of three semi-structured phenomenological interviews I conducted with an undocumented caregiver. Paper 2 presents findings based on one subset of this caregiver interview data where I examine, for the first time, attachment profiles across a sample of Latine mixed-status caregiver-child dyads using the Parent Development Interview-R (Slade et al., 2004), an attachment-based assessment measuring parental reflective functioning. I draw on one semi-structured interview with children within these family units between 6 and 15 years old for Paper 3. During the child interview, I asked about each child’s experienced being a part of their family through a book reading, a video clip viewing, and a series of questions following the reading of narratives. The caregiver and caregiver-child studies of my dissertation suggest caregivers use their expertise in their child’s development to tailor their communications about immigration with each child. Their children, on the other hand, show evidence of a progression in knowledge states related to the topic of immigration status in the years before adolescence. The findings from these studies will provide knowledge about the education that occurs within families around the topic of immigration, which will help support schools' efforts to work with this community and inform policy design at the local and state level.