Society & Culture - Posted by Carole Gan-UC Davis on Tuesday, December 20, 2011 16:54 - 9 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Conduct disorder: Risk grows for Mexicans in US
"This increase in risk occurring across generations within a migrating population strongly points to the influence of early childhood environmental factors in the United States and the potential to intervene to reduce the prevalence of conduct disorder," says UC Davis professor Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola. (Credit: iStockphoto)
UC DAVIS (US) — The prevalence of conduct disorder symptoms increases across generations for Mexicans who migrate to the United States, a new study finds.
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“Our study shows that there is a large difference in risk for conduct disorder between Mexicans living in Mexico and people of Mexican descent living in the United States,” says Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, a professor of clinical internal medicine at the University of California, Davis.
“This increase in risk occurring across generations within a migrating population strongly points to the influence of early childhood environmental factors in the United States and the potential to intervene to reduce the prevalence of conduct disorder.”
Conduct disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, is characterized by persistent patterns of child or adolescent behavior involving aggression or other violations of age-appropriate norms that cause significant clinical impairment.
Behaviors include bullying others, getting into fights, fighting with a weapon, cruelty to people or animals, stealing with confrontation, forced sex, property destruction, theft, and rule breaking.
To study the prevalence of conduct disorder associated with migration from Mexico to the United States, UC Davis and RAND Corporation researchers assessed conduct disorder symptoms across four groups of people of Mexican origin with increasing levels of exposure to American culture.
The groups were nonimmigrant households in Mexico with no exposure to the United States, Mexicans from migrant households who lived in Mexico until age 15, children of Mexican migrants raised in the United States, and Mexican-American children of U.S.-born parents.
The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, obtained data by conducting face-to-face interviews with nearly 1,800 adults aged 18 to 44 years in the household populations of Mexico and those of Mexican descent in the United States.
The study found that, compared to the general population of Mexico with no history of migration to the United States and Mexicans from migrant households who lived in Mexico until age fifteen, 11.5 percent of Mexican-American children with at least one U.S.-born parent met the DSM-IV criteria for conduct disorder.
This level is close to that of the non-Mexican-American, U.S.-born sample prevalence of 10.6 percent.
“We found a striking epidemiological pattern with differences across generations that are both larger in magnitude and more narrow in scope that anyone expected,” says Joshua Breslau, a researcher with the RAND Corporation in Pittsburgh who conducted the study while at UC Davis.
“Future studies will be needed to identify the specific environmental factors that contribute to these differences.”
Other researchers in the study include Daniel J. Tancredi, Richard Kravitz and Ladson Hinton from UC Davis School of Medicine; Guilherme Borges, Corina Benjet and Maria Elena Medina-Mora from the National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City; Kenneth S. Kendler from the Medical College of Virginia; and William Vega from the University of Southern California.
The UC Davis Health System and RAND Corporation also collaborated with the National Institute of Psychiatry in Mexico City.
The research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health grant to the UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center, and the University of California Migration and Health Research Center.
More news from UC Davis: http://news.ucdavis.edu/
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9 Comments
sarah stewart
patathomas
This article confusingly presents the data, making comparisons difficult. What was the percentage for those who met the DSM-IV criteria for conduct disorder in the general population of Mexico with no history of migration to the United States and Mexicans from migrant households who lived in Mexico until age fifteen? Does that change the actual percentages for Mexican-American children with at least one U.S.-born parent?
I’m not sure I get the message here. First of all, I had never heard of “conduct disorder” until now.
But anyway, are you saying that Mexicans who come to the US of A act out as much as native-born Americans do? Are you saying that Mexicans at home in Mexico are more peaceable people?
Who would be surprised at such a finding? American popular culture is rife with violence, consumerism, sex and disconnectedness. Why wouldn’t immigrants exposed to images on TV and video games not react similarly to the rest of us natives?
Is it really news that Mexican immigrant life in the US usually entails living beneath the legal radar and its protection, being part of the working poor thanks to low and unreliable wages, huge distance from stabilizing family circle, linguistic demands, being exposed to many natives with “conduct disorder” and surviving in a dog-eat-dog society dominated by One Percenters?
seen the disease
I’ve lived on both sides of the Mexican-American border and have family in both countries. Probably the biggest contributor to the degeneration of behavior is the fact that Mexican parents rely on American schools to teach their kids to read English, with the result that generations are doomed to fail. In Mexico parents expect the schools to teach the kids, and the kids do learn to read Spanish, an easy language to read. My Irish relatives taught their kids to read English before they got into school – the key to success for them and for the kids of one of my Mexican aunts. My Mexican relatives expect their children to get remedial help through the educational system, from the same people who teach them not to read.. People with more money send their kids to private tutors or can teach the kids themselves because they aren’t working several jobs. Each generation away from Mexico becomes more and more impoverished in literacy skills. Why? Because teachers are reluctant to move away from a teaching method that makes them feel good about themselves.
I saw this method in person, called Whole language, and it is disrespectful to students and disgusting. It is pedagogical masturbation for brainwashed teachers. Teachers and tutors spend a huge amount of time and effort evaluating student’s verbal reading, while they teach students to guess at words and not analyze them. They get to blame the students for not valuing learning, they do not let students analyze words, they hurry the students through text and encourage the student to concentrate on pictures and clues around the text.. To test the students, they have the students read for half an hour or more out loud while they tick off mistake categories on long sheets. And then when they go back to “teaching”, they do not allow the student to spend time trying to figure out how to use letters, because the student does not sound good. The students are encouraged to guess at words so they sound like they are reading. In effect, students learn to pretend to read. This method was the norm until “No Child Left Behind”, and it is creeping back into schools, with the help of teachers who profess to hate testing.
Where I live the only access to free tutoring from volunteers for kids in school and illiterate adults comes from an organization allied to Whole language learning. Another organization that gets government grants for supposed assistance for family learning also is allied to Whole language learning. The students end up crippled academically, mentally and emotionally for life, and so do their children. What would this do to anyone’s psyche? The poor kids need private tutoring with money-back guarantees, as do the parents. The teachers need reprogramming.
This is a first for me — and I taught high school during the ascendancy of “whole language” and then served for a long time on an urban school board — “whole language” is blamed for increasing “conduct disorder” of Mexicans who move to the United States or are the children of Mexicans who immigrated here. I’d say this is an example of one cockamamie idea richly deserving the other.
seen the disease
“Cockamamie” is probably one of the most common adjectives used to dismiss lots of inconvenient ideas, like ending slavery, stopping wife-beating, cleaning up after yourself. Also, I’m not the first person to recognize the downward spiral brought about by poor reading instruction.
patathomas
Frances O’Neill Zimmerman, have you ever lived in Mexico? Ever been to Mexico other than as a tourist? Mexican life is rife with violence, consumerism, sex and disconnectedness, nevermind American popular culture. Where have you been with your head in the sand? Dehumanizing, tortuous crimes are perpetrated against innocent Mexicans daily by drug gang Mexicans. Now blame the drug trade on the U.S. The drug dealers help create the demand for drugs. The more customers they have, the richer they get.
“Why wouldn’t immigrants exposed to images on TV and video games not react similarly to the rest of us natives?”
They have TV and video games in Mexico – some of the very same ones we have in the States. Duh! :-o
Walt
The abstract contains numbers for the Mexican v. the Mexican-American immigrants:
“Results Compared with the risk in families of origin of migrants, risk of CD was lower in the
- general population of Mexico (odds ratio [OR], 0.54; 95% CI, 0.19-1.51), higher in
- children of Mexican-born immigrants who were raised in the United States (OR, 4.12; 95% CI, 1.47-11.52), and
- higher still in Mexican-American children of US-born parents (OR, 7.64; 95% CI, 3.20-18.27).
The association with migration was markedly weaker for aggressive than for nonaggressive symptoms.”
Monty H.
Have there been any similar studies done with immigrants from different countries — those who come to the US, but also those who immigrate to other countrys ( e.g., Turks to Germany) ? Perhaps the finding isn’t pointing to ethnicity per se, or even exposure to American culture, but to a newly recognized consequence of immigrating in general?
If one looks at this behaviour as a part of the family system might the stress on the parents be reflected by the kids’ conduct disorder