Qualitative study finds immigrant mothers use family stories to navigate immigration talks

A qualitative study of 22 immigrant mothers found that family storytelling emerged as a central resource for discussing immigration with children, including migration history, family separation and the constraints imposed by mixed legal status. Researchers analyzed workshop transcripts and visual materials from Pláticando Juntos, a Spanish-language, arts-based parenting intervention delivered in two northeastern U.S. cities from March through July 2024. Rather than finding that mothers lacked skills for these conversations, the study identified four recurring themes: the need for storytelling, cultural wealth as a narrative resource, the home as a site of cultural teaching, and intergenerational meaning-making. The findings describe participants’ experiences and reported family practices; they do not establish that the program improved children’s development or produced long-term behavioral outcomes.

Immigration socialization describes the process through which immigrant parents communicate with children about immigration history, identity and status. The study examined how mothers in mixed-status Latine families handled those conversations and which existing cultural practices supported them. Eligibility required that at least one parent or caregiver in the household have undocumented status, that the family originate in Mexico, Central America or South America, and that the caregiver have a child between ages 6 and 15. All sessions and study materials were conducted in Spanish. The final sample comprised 17 mothers from Central America, four from South America and one from Mexico; most were older than 35, and the mean number of children was 2.55.

Pláticando Juntos was adapted from the One Talk at a Time parenting program, which focuses on caregiver motivation, skills and confidence in delivering cultural socialization and preparation-for-bias messages. Its community-based format combined structured workbook exercises, group discussion, knowledge sharing and selected videos from the original program. The activities included drawing, mapping and reflective writing. Four groups received the same core content in different schedules and dosages: three groups met over four, five or six weekly sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, while a summer intensive met for two sessions of two hours. Groups were hosted by an immigrant-serving organization and a child and family mental-health and social-services center, with sessions linked to existing after-school or community support structures.

The researchers recorded sessions and analyzed the original Spanish transcripts together with photographs of participants’ workbook pages. Using multimodal thematic analysis in Dedoose, they first organized material by activity, then examined contrasts between groups with the highest and lowest intervention dosage before applying emerging themes to the remaining groups. A shared moment counted as storytelling when an account carried interpretive or relational meaning rather than merely recounting events. Both researchers reviewed coding, compared visual material with discussion, developed subthemes, and discussed discrepancies until they agreed on the codebook. This design allowed a drawing made during an activity to be interpreted alongside what a mother said during the same exercise, although the analysis cannot demonstrate whether every narrative discussed in the workshops was later shared with children.

Two recurring situations prompted immigration conversations. Travel was the most consistent trigger across all four groups: children asked why the family could not visit relatives or the country of origin, revealing that questions about identity and family ties were already connected to immigration status. Crisis was more abrupt. Mothers described enforcement encounters, neighborhood alerts, threats of deportation and children observing events they did not yet have words to understand. One mother recalled embracing her son and taking him to a room during an enforcement event in their building; she said he later asked what would happen “if so many things come in.” Mothers described being pulled into these conversations before they felt emotionally ready, while also feeling responsible for protecting their children and explaining events that threatened the family’s security.

Across all groups, mothers identified emotional labor as the main barrier to these discussions. They struggled with their own memories and feelings, uncertainty about which words or concepts to use, and decisions about how much information each child could understand and manage. The study found that disclosure was not simply binary. Mothers calibrated stories to a child’s age, maturity, personality and the possible risk to family security. One participant described speaking with her son “50 percent, never 100,” while another said family information should remain within the family until her 10-year-old could understand why the information was being protected. Some mothers had already imagined a future conversation, including the setting and an activity that might make it feel manageable. This selective approach showed how immigration socialization can involve continuous judgments about developmental readiness rather than a single decision to disclose or conceal.

Storytelling itself was not introduced by the intervention as a wholly new capacity. Participants drew on “consejos,” culturally specific forms of advice, and “testimonios,” first-person accounts that connect personal migration histories with collective experience. Stories about the origins of their names carried familial and aspirational meanings, including grief, faith, family labor and hopes for a new generation. Faith was described as a source of strength during migration and amid later immigration threats. Mothers also used agricultural metaphors to frame education, patience and gradual growth, and spoke of resisting discrimination in schools and public institutions despite language barriers. Memories of rivers, farms, coastlines and other landscapes functioned as narrative preservation, allowing places that distance and immigration status had made difficult to revisit to remain part of children’s inherited family history.

The analysis also emphasized the home as a pedagogical setting, with mothers acting as cultural teachers through both deliberate instruction and everyday modeling. Some celebrated Thanksgiving in a U.S. style while marking Christmas with foods and practices from Guatemala, giving their children connections to more than one culture. Other examples of unintentional transmission included children repeating where they were from after hearing their mothers identify their origins, as well as children absorbing emotional patterns. Mothers described turning ordinary experiences into lessons, including a traffic conflict that became a discussion of empathy, while others wanted children to learn migration through lived experience rather than information alone. Their deliberate wish to “cut that thread” and avoid reproducing emotional coldness or insecurity from their own childhoods framed parenting as intergenerational repair.

As the sessions progressed, mothers increasingly viewed themselves as living links between premigration worlds and the lives of children born in the United States. Some began asking aging parents or grandparents about family details they had never questioned before, including why they or their children had received particular names. This retrieval had urgency because parents were aging, children were growing up and migration had separated families from relatives. Mothers then connected those histories to present circumstances, such as explaining that a decision to remain in the country had shaped an entire family’s immigration trajectory. Some adult children were reported to recognize the sacrifices their parents had made, while younger children offered imagined solutions or repeated ideas from home. One participant summarized the purpose of remembering as “To remember is to live again,” expressing how stories could sustain a connection across generations.

The study suggests a strengths-based direction for family programming: instead of treating storytelling as an absent skill, interventions may create spaces in which existing cultural repertoires can surface, be affirmed and be directed toward difficult conversations. Pláticando Juntos used social support, structured reflection and arts-based activities to do that, but the evidence is qualitative and limited. It excluded fathers, grandparents and other caregiving arrangements, and differences in workshop dosage gave some participants more opportunity to develop narratives. The group setting may also have made some stories easier to tell than they would have been in a more conventional research environment, while the sociopolitical climate of intensified immigration enforcement shaped both the discussions and their urgency. Follow-up research including children’s perspectives, longitudinal observations and additional family configurations would be needed to determine how the reported practices affect children’s socioemotional development over time.

Subject of Research: How immigrant mothers use family storytelling for immigration socialization in mixed-status Latine families

Article Title: Pláticando Juntos: family storytelling and socioemotional development in immigrant communities

Article References: Rendón García, S. A., & De Leon, G. (2026). Pláticando Juntos: family storytelling and socioemotional development in immigrant communities. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 4, 1869009. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2026.1869009

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fdpys.2026.1869009

Keywords: family storytelling, immigration socialization, immigrant mothers, mixed-status families, Latine families, cultural wealth, intergenerational meaning-making, home pedagogy, qualitative research, community-based intervention, ticando, Juntos