Mexican-American Childhood Experience in Texas

The purpose of this research is to examine the childhood phase of life in the Mexican American community of south Texas, comparing and contrasting it with a conventional understanding of the standard American middle class experience. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of an ethnographic study of the community under investigation, and then to discuss the childhood life cycle phase in that community, comparing it with the same phase in American middle class life, with a view toward fuller appreciation of each community's body of beliefs and behaviors.

The sociocultural system of family structure into which a child is born appears to have an especially strong impact on the shape of Mexican-American childhood experience, attitudes, and behavior. This is consistent with Maslow's humanistic theory of hierarchical motivation for behavior, inasmuch as Maslow's view is that the individual is more than mere biology and physiology or indeed the accumulation of steps toward development. The hierarchy of motivation arises because it is attached to the social environment or class in which individual development takes place. In this view, environment affects the manner in which the individual experiences the fulfillment of physical survival needs on one hand and the sense of safety, belongingness to the environment, self-esteem, and self-actualization, or the potential to fulfill personal psychological needs.

Multigenerational cohesiveness of family li

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therly displays of affection to and playfulness with children are confined to the home, the demands on men for public dignidad and machismo being so strong. But it would be misleading to consider Mexican-American childhood as weighted in favor of permissiveness. Indeed, the weight of evidence for Madsen is on the side of the view that the main message of childhood enculturation is the authority of the father in particular and male superiority in general. This explains why as children get older both parents may discipline daughters but only the father as a rule disciplines sons (p. 54). Madsen cites several examples of children whose principal experience of their father as dictator (p. 54); among the greatest weapons a mother has against disobedient children is that she will "tell your father" (p. 54). Given the growing number of single-mother households in the American middle class, childhood experience of the father as role model or parenting figure may be limited. In one sense, this suggests that the middle class child avoids strong family hierarchy and indeed that the child is encouraged to find strategies of independence. Alternatively, it suggests that the middle class child in a single-mother household may not have acc

Category: Psychology - M