Gender Differences in How Catholic Latino Parents Pray with Their Children

Latino families, one of the largest demographics in Southern California, remain underrepresented in developmental science and are often described as culturally disadvantaged or lacking resources (Fuller & Garcia Coll, 2010). However, to understand child development, researchers need to be informed of the activities children engage in within the cultural contexts they navigate (Rogoff et al., 2018). One prominent activity in early childhood is engagement in religious practices that involve learning how to communicate with God. The current study aims to shed light on this salient practice (e.g., parent-child conversations with God) in which many Latino-Catholic children engage, and to investigate how gender informs the ways parents socialize their children’s prayer engagement. Parents (N = 30; 96.7% Female) between the ages of 23 to 48 years old (M = 31.90, SD = 5.833) were interviewed, and all identified both themselves and their children as Latinos and Catholic. Their children (N = 30; 50% Female) were between the ages of 3.44 to 5.98 years old (M = 4.58, SD = 0.761). Parents were asked the following questions: 1) How old was your child when you first started to include them in normal practices of talking to God? and 2) In what situations do you typically talk to God with your child on a regular day? Thematic analysis was conducted leveraging the Rigorous and Accelerated Data Reduction (RADaR) Technique (Watkins, 2017). Our analysis revealed that most parents, regardless of their child's gender, began incorporating their children into regular practices of talking to God between the ages of 1 and 3. However, socialization differed among male children, with parents more frequently engaging in routine prayer practices or a mix of routine and sporadic (on an as-needed basis) practices, while those with female children more often engaged in sporadic prayer practices.