Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Are Latino teenagers passionate risk takers? Its difficult researcher says

When a new documentary about U.S. Latinos featured dual teenager mothers in a 90-minute program, the Latino students in my classes thought it was an lunatic description of their village -- and they were right! pronounced Marcela Raffaelli, a U of I highbrow of human and village growth and co-author of a not long ago published section on Latino teenager sexuality.

National surveys do show that Latino immature people as a organisation are less expected than their non-Latino peers to make use of condoms and bieing born carry out and are some-more expected to turn profound and have a child. But these census interpretation censor a majority some-more difficult picture, she said.

For one thing, Latinos paint some-more than twenty conflicting groups, and they live in unequivocally conflicting situations in the United States.

For example, Cuban immigrants who altered to the United States when Castro came to energy tended to be unequivocally wealthy, and they combined an entrepreneurial, successful enclave in Miami. Compare them with Central American immigrants who competence be refugees from a polite fight in the 1980s. Language, religion, and a little aspects of enlightenment are good to be the same, but socioeconomic standing is probably unequivocally different, and that"s a big predictor of early passionate wake up and teenager pregnancy, Raffaelli said.

When you regulate for socioeconomic standing and alternative demographic factors, the disproportion in youth passionate function in between Latinos and alternative groups mostly disappears.

Attempts to assimilate sexuality between Latino teenagers are additionally difficult in that researchers don"t have the interpretation to pull conclusions about how informative factors change sexuality. People speak a lot about Latino enlightenment and sexuality, but they typically don"t magnitude informative variables, such as confluence to informative norms and attitudes, in their studies, she said.

So what do we know about Latino sexuality and risk receiving between teenagers? For one thing, no one unequivocally knows how majority the normal gender purpose attributes of machismo and marianismo -- idealizing the Virgin Mary -- essentially change today"s Latino adolescents.

In normal Latin cultures, machismo dictates that men be masculine and clever and yield for their family. In the United States, when we contend macho, mostly we meant someone"s a masculine chauvinist, but in majority Latin cultures, this thought encompasses such certain function as being obliged for your family and receiving caring of your household, she said.

The womanlike preferred of marianismo includes being self-sacrificing, pure, and silent. But the researcher emphasized that couple of studies have attempted to magnitude the border to that Latinos belong to these normal gender purposes and either informative ideology are related to passionate behavior.

Also, majority investigate on Latino gender purposes and sexuality doesn"t take in to comment that Latin cultures have altered tremendously over the last twenty years as a outcome of globalization, migration, and becoming opposite norms, she added.

Immigrant standing additionally plays a purpose in teens" passionate risk taking. For first-generation Latinos, new immigration seems to be a protecting factor. Families lend towards to move the practices they had in their home country, and over time there"s a change as they turn acculturated. For girls, being an newcomer is protecting since Latin American countries are typically some-more regressive about sexuality than the United States is, she said.

For boys, the conflicting settlement competence be loyal since in most Latin American countries men have some-more leisure to try their sexuality. In the United States, they competence change to a some-more regressive pattern, she said.

Scholars in mixed disciplines have described a settlement called the newcomer antithesis in that immigrants have improved outcomes than their U.S.-born counterparts notwithstanding their some-more severe situations.

First-generation teenagers do improved in school, get in to less trouble, have fewer early pregnancies, and so on, but by the second or third generation, that protecting outcome dissipates. A lot of newcomer family groups have extensive optimism. They think, the hold up here is difficult, but we"re here to urge the children"s chances and, besides, things competence be worse behind home, she said.

By the third generation, things mostly see unequivocally conflicting -- may be since of discrimination, bad schools, or socioeconomic factors, she said.

Raffaelli pronounced that she and alternative researchers are operative to refurbish what is well known about American Latino families. Cultural ideals yield ubiquitous guidelines, but we need new investigate to discuss it us either people hold in these ideals and how majority those ideology affect behavior, she said.

Raffaeli and co-author Maria I. Iturbide of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln wrote the section Sexuality and Sexual Risk Behaviors Among Latino Adolescents and Young Adults for the Handbook of U.S. Latino Psychology.

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