Fathering in a Diverse, Cultural Divide: Understanding Latino Immigrant Fathers’ Culture, Experiences, and Parenting Roles

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018Historically, Latino fathers have been characterized as machistas, harsh disciplinarians, and afraid of showing warmth and love to their children, yet they have been described as an integral member of the family and as valuing their role as teachers for their children. Still, few studies have focused on Latino immigrant fathers’ self-reports, despite their contribution to the transmission of cultural values that influence the development of their child’s ethnic identity development. Therefore, this study will focus on Latino immigrant fathers’ cultural values, beliefs, and their understanding of their role as fathers to understand how these factors shape their fathering. Specifically, this study focuses on the following questions: How do Latino immigrant fathers’ cultural values, beliefs, and their understanding of their role as fathers influence their fathering practices? This study employs Knight et al.’s model on Ethnic Identity Development among Latinos as a guide to identify key variables that influence parent socialization on a child’s ethnic identity development, that is, it identifies key factors that may influence culture and ethnic values to be passed on from parent to child. Given the relatively new uncharted research territory on immigrant fathers, this study employs a basic interpretivist qualitative study design and uses qualitative principles of a grounded theory approach to analyze the data. Six fathers, who self- identified as Latino, and as a first generation immigrant, completed in-depth qualitative interviews. All six fathers were single, married, or cohabiting biological fathers, residing with at least one child under the age of five at the time of the interviews. Four fathers’ primary language was Spanish and therefore were interviewed in Spanish. The ages of the fathers ranged from 25 to 43 years (M = 37). Findings will shed light on the paternal strengths, cultural complexities, and social contexts experienced by Latino fathers in the U.S., as well as how Latino fathers socialize their children across two cultural divides