Abstract
Few studies have examined the association between maternal and youth mental health among US Latinos, or its variation by nativity, country of origin, ethnic subgroup, and time in the mainland US. Using 2007–2014 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data linking Latino youth (N = 15,686 aged 5–17 years) and their mothers, we estimated multivariate models of the relationship between probable maternal mental illness (a composite of measures) and youth mental health impairment (Columbia Impairment Scale). Children of mothers with probable mental illness were more than three times as likely to have impairment as children of mothers without mental illness (p < 0.01). In adjusted models, there was an 8.5-point (95% CI 5.1, 11.8) increased prevalence of child impairment associated with mother’s probable mental illness among mainland US–born youth and mothers and a 6.0-point (95% CI 3.7, 8.3) increased prevalence among US-born youth of foreign/island-born mothers. There was no significant difference in the prevalence of youth impairment associated with maternal mental illness when both youth and mother were born outside of the mainland US. For the Puerto Rican subgroup, the association between maternal and youth mental health was greatest among island-born mothers and mainland US–born youth; for the Mexican subgroup, the link was strongest among US-born mothers and youth. While there were large point differences between those groups, the difference was not statistically significant. This study suggests a protective effect of island/foreign-born nativity on symptom association between Latino mothers and children. Considerations for future research and practice stemming from this finding are discussed.
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Notes
We use the term “Latino” in accordance with the terminology utilized by the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), from which the data for this study are drawn.
The term “ethnic subgroup” refers to participants’ country of origin or family’s country of origin, in accordance with the MEPS.
For the Puerto Rican ethnic subgroup, we specified whether mothers and youth were island- or mainland US-born.
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Acknowledgments
We like to extend our appreciation for Elisabet Arribas-Ibar, who assisted in gathering literature for and reviewing an early outline of this paper. The contents of this study are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of the Johns Hopkins ICTR, NCATS, or NIH.
Funding
RP was supported by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) which was funded in part by Grant Number KL2TR001077 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and NIH Roadmap for Medical Research. NWL was supported by the C. Sylvia and Eddie C. Brown Community Health scholarship at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. The analyses in the manuscript were performed on publicly available data (https://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_stats/download_data_files.jsp); no IRB approval was required.
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Platt, R., Weiss-Laxer, N.S., Creedon, T.B. et al. Association between maternal and child mental health among US Latinos: variation by nativity, ethnic subgroup, and time in the USA. Arch Womens Ment Health 23, 421–428 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-019-00982-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-019-00982-4