Relationships with parents have been identified as a major factor in shaping adolescents’ well-being and cognitive development. Compared to adolescents in native families, immigrant children face multiple stressors associated with international migration that may cause the relationship with their parents to be more conflictive or emotionally distant. In this paper, we compare the levels of mother–child conflict and emotional intimacy among Latino immigrant and Spanish native families living in Spain. Our analysis shows that Latino adolescents do not describe the relationship with their mothers as more conflictive than natives do. However, they report more emotional distance with their mothers than native adolescents. This differential with natives cannot be fully attributed to migration-related factors like physical separation from parents due to staggered family migration, to the lower life satisfaction of Latino mothers’ in their new destination or to an acculturation gap between mother and child. However, the fact that immigrant mothers spend less time doing activities with their children, probably due to their harder working conditions, explains part of the differential in emotional intimacy with native families. Finally, our analyses clearly establish an equally negative relationship between conflict and emotional intimacy for both native and Latino immigrant families.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Juan March Institute and Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant agreement CSO2012-35234 for the Chances Project ‘Aspirations, expectations and life-course orientations of immigrant and non-immigrant origin youth in Spain. The role of the social context and intergenerational conflict’, co-directed by Amparo González-Ferrer and Héctor Cebolla Boado.

Peer reviewed