Close to 60 percent believe themselves to be "good Catholics." Approximately 20 percent of Mexican Americans in the United States belong to Protestant communions (Encarta 2002). .
The Mexican culture has a very rich heritage of both Indian and Spanish ancestry, which have great influence on raising children. Mexico was a patriarchal society under the Spanish legal system. Women only had rights over their children in extreme circumstances such as default of a natural or appointed male relative. The idea of Spanish family law was primarily unchanged until the late 19th century and was not significantly revised until the 1960s (Lavrin, 1991). .
Today, in Mexican households in both the United States and Mexico there is still a traditional division of labor by gender. For example, girls help their mothers in the kitchen and boys help their fathers in the yard. In addition to the division of labor by gender, in the Mexican culture adult males are "expected" to be dominant over adult females (Bronstein, 1994). In the interview with Ricky, he told me "The man is more dominant. Most often women tend to take care of the kids and cook by staying home. Traditional Mexican males don't tend to do much besides being the bread winner."".
In Mexican families the mother is the primary caretaker of the children. Typically, Mexican mothers are very affectionate especially to children under 3 years of age (Bronstein, 1994). While there appears to be defined roles for males and females, Mexican mothers did not differ in their treatment of children based on gender (Bronstein, 1994).
In traditional Mexican culture the male is the disciplinarian and his wife and children both respect him. The father's role has been characterized by "aloof authoritarianism". Recent research has shown that fathers in Mexico and in the United States are quite similar in their discipline style. In both countries, fathers from lower socio-economic status families were less nurturing and used more frequent and harsh discipline styles (such as spanking and yelling) than fathers from higher socio-economic status families (Bronstein, 1994; Mirande, 1988; Fox & Solis-Camara, 1997).
