Supporting Adolescent Daughters as They Come of Age: Latina Mothers’ Reflections and Recommendations

The current project describes themes emerging from a set of focus groups with 20 Latina mothers (aged 25 to over 45) who reflected on the transition to adulthood for their daughters. As community stakeholders residing in a large city in the Southern USA, these mothers shared their perspectives and advice on supporting adolescent girls during the transition to adulthood. Qualitative coding revealed four key aspects of the transition that were important to these mothers: ethnic identity, involvement of others, communication with daughters, and individual personality characteristics. We discuss their reflections with regard to the development of more culturally relevant programs for Latina girls coming of age within the USA context.     

Do Job Control,Support, and Optimism Help Job Insecure Employees? A Three-Wave Study of Buffering Effects on Job Satisfaction,Vigor and Work-Family Enrichment

Job insecurity (threat of job loss) is widespread and becomes a permanent phenomenon for a lot of employees. Based on the response of 926 Finnish employees, this study investigated the direct lagged relationship between job insecurity, coping resources (job control, social support, and optimism), and employees’ work- (vigor at work and job satisfaction) and family-related outcomes (work-family enrichment). Particular interest was in the moderating role of job control, support, and optimism in the job insecurity–employee outcome relationship. Our analyses of three-wave longitudinal data, collected in 2008, 2009, and 2010, showed that job control was the strongest lagged buffer against job insecurity in relation to vigor at work. In addition, social support longitudinally buffered against the negative effects of job insecurity on job satisfaction and vigor at work. However, optimism did not function as a buffering factor in any of the tested models.     

Maternal Attention‐Directing Strategies and Infant Focused Attention During Problem Solving

Forty‐nine mother‐infant dyads participated in the study. Mothers were observed during free play with their infants to assess their attention‐directing strategies. Infants were observed during the Bayley to assess their focused attention abilities. Assessments were made when infants were 10 and 18 months. Whereas consistently high levels of maintaining over time were modestly associated with better infant focused attention at 18 months, consistently high levels of redirecting were moderately associated with poorer infant focused attention at 18 months. Additionally, more focused attention was associated with higher Bayley scores at both ages. Although the direction of effects could not be determined, the findings suggest links between maternal attention‐directing strategies (maintaining and redirecting) during play and infant attentional abilities during problem solving.