Do mothers’ experiences count? : an actor-partner model of language brokering experiences in Mexican immigrant families

Language brokering is a shared experience between parents and children in which children interpret and mediate between the host culture/language and their heritage culture/language for their English-limited parents. Using two waves of survey data collected from a sample (N [subscript adolescents] = 604, N [subscript mothers] = 595 at Wave 1) of Mexican American adolescents (Mage = 12.41, 54% female) and their mothers, the current study tested an actor-partner interdependence model and found that both mothers’ and youths’ subjective language brokering experiences were related to their own psychological wellbeing via their own sense of parent-child alienation. This study also found that high levels of adolescents’ perceptions of parent-child alienation mediated the relation between mothers’ negative brokering experiences and adolescents’ psychological maladjustment.