By Alexandra Vilchez

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina – Hispanic teenagers who hold on to their culture and whose parents get more involved in life in the United States have less chance of drug and alcohol abuse or dropping out of school, according to a study by the University of North Carolina.

In the past, several studies on the assimilation of young Hispanic immigrants into the new culture showed that they met with numerous obstacles.

“While those stress-related problems have always existed, we now find that the more bicultural a young immigrant is, the greater his chances of avoiding those risk factors,” Paul Smokowski, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, told Efe Tuesday.

Smokowski coordinated the 4-year study for the Latino Acculturation and Health Project financed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The team of researchers polled 281 Hispanics between the ages of 13 and 18. Two-thirds of the subjects were from North Carolina and the rest from Arizona, and 75 percent were foreign-born.

Participants answered a series of questions that attempted to determine their lifestyle and the state of their mental health.

“The study also showed that the children of parents who developed a bicultural perspective suffered less anxiety and met with fewer social problems,” Smokowski said.

In the measure that parents got involved in their children’s school and social activities and communicated more – in English – with the kids’ teachers, fewer were the social problems the teens had to deal with, the research said.

“That suggests to us that both young Hispanics and their parents benefit from being bicultural,” Smokowski said.

“Parents who are strongly tied to their native cultures must reach out to learn skills in the new culture. Adolescents who quickly soak up new cultural behaviors should slow down and cultivate the richness in their native cultures,” she said.

The results of this study will be published in the July edition of the Journal of Primary Prevention, a collaboration of the UNC and CDC that seeks to offer suggestions for developing programs of prevention and family support for Hispanics.

“Communities can invest in cultivating the riches of Hispanic culture or pay the high price of helping their youths deal with social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse or dropping out of school that occur under the stress of unresolved culturization,” Smokowski said. EFE