HELPING MOTHERS HELP THEIR CHILDREN COPE WITH STRESS: EVALUATION OF A PROGRAM FOR LATINA MOTHERS

Thesis (Ph.D.), Human Development, Washington State UniversityLatino youth are exposed to a number of stressors that can overwhelm their coping abilities. Learning and strengthening coping skills from an early age is thus critical for this population. Parents play a significant role in their children's coping; consequently, culturally appropriate programs that help Latino parents help their children cope with stress are needed. A multi-site randomized controlled trial (RCT) with pre- and post-assessments was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of a program to help Latina mothers help their children cope with stress. Mothers in the intervention condition participated in a seven-week program that focused on improving mothers’ abilities to help their children cope, teaching mothers positive scaffolding techniques to help their children manage stressful situations, and enhancing emotion coaching skills. Consistent with the hypotheses, the results indicated that there were significant increases in mothers’ self-efficacy in helping their children cope with stress, in the number of strategies mothers generated to help their children cope, and in developing more positive scaffolding behaviors as well as having improved emotion coaching abilities from pre- to post-test. These findings imply that Latina mothers are receptive to and benefit from culturally sensitive parenting programs that focus on improving their skills so that they can better assist their children in coping with stress. This population can greatly benefit from evidence-based programs such as the one in this study that empower parents to take an active role in ensuring their children’s healthy socioemotional development.Washington State University, Human DevelopmentBy student request, this dissertation cannot be exposed to search engines and is, therefore, only accessible to Washington State University users