The Parenting Shift Latino Families Are Navigating

When my kids are playing in the living room and they spill a cup of water, my first instinct is to explode. Especially after warning them multiple times to be careful. 

This isn’t because I’m a bad father. 

I was raised in a household where that’s exactly what would have happened. A spilled cup wasn't just a spilled cup. It was an invitation for a sharp reaction, a loud reminder of the rules, or maybe even a spanking. 

That was normal. That was how order was maintained. And that programming is still in me, thirty-something years later, overreacting the moment something goes sideways.

However, the difference now is the pause.

I have two boys who are eight and four years old. Two brothers, just like I had growing up. We are a family of four, just like I had growing up. The mirror is almost exact, which means I constantly feel the pull between those two models. Sometimes daily. 

There are moments when my kids do something that, in my childhood, would have been met with yelling, a chancla, or a look that told you everything you needed to know — and I have the responsibility to stop myself. I have to override something that feels completely automatic.

What I tell myself in that moment is simple: these are just kids. If I react like that, they’re going to be scared of me. And I don’t want them to live scared of me. I want them to know it’s okay to make mistakes around their father.

That one shift from control to safety is harder than it sounds when control is all you ever saw modeled.

Our parents weren’t wrong for how they parented. They were using the tools they had, shaped by the environments that formed them. In many Latino households, especially immigrant ones, control was a survival mechanism. You kept the kids in line because chaos was a luxury you couldn’t afford. Loudness, firmness, and physical discipline weren’t signs of bad parenting. It was just a family trying to hold itself together under real pressure.

These parenting tools got passed down without the context. We inherited the methods without the circumstances that made them necessary. And now we’re raising kids in environments our parents would have considered stable and safe, and still reaching for the same old tools instinctively.

We didn’t inherit bad values. We inherited survival tools that were never updated for a different set of conditions.

The modern Latino parent is caught between two operating systems. One says that respect is earned through fear, order is maintained through control, and emotions are managed by suppressing them. 

The other says that regulation is modeled, not demanded, and children learn to manage themselves by watching you manage yourself.

Those two systems are in direct conflict. And the anxiety, guilt, and confusion that comes from living between them is something I hear from Latino parents constantly.

So how did I start changing this? I stopped thinking of parenting as controlling my kids and started thinking of it as role modeling for them.

When my boys are fighting, and I feel that familiar surge to explode and scare them into stopping, I now pause and ask myself: what do I actually want them to learn here? Because what they’re learning isn’t what I say. It’s what I do. 

If I regulate their behavior by dysregulating myself, I’m teaching them that the way to handle conflict is to get louder and scarier than the other person. That lesson will follow them into their marriages, their friendships, their workplaces.

I also didn’t get here alone. My wife and I are both in therapy. We communicate constantly about our parenting style, including what we want to bring into our home and what we’ve decided not to pass down. That ongoing conversation keeps us accountable to each other. Without it, the default instinct always wins. The default is whatever was modeled for you when you were eight years old.

But there’s something else I want to mention, something that I watched growing up in Latino households and saw clearly even as a kid.

Parents who excused their own behavior while holding their children to a completely different standard.

I couldn’t raise my voice, but they could. 

I couldn't lose my temper, but that was just how they were. 

I was expected to be regulated, respectful, and controlled, while watching adults around me be none of those things. 

And we saw it. Yes, we always saw it. 

That contradiction doesn’t go unnoticed by children. It just goes unnamed.

We cannot demand from our children what we refuse to practice ourselves because that’s not parenting. It’s just performance. 

The shift to emotionally regulated parenting isn’t about being permissive. It’s not about letting everything slide or eliminating expectations. It’s about holding yourself to the same standard you're trying to build in them and being the evidence that what you’re asking for is actually possible.

My kids are going to spill things, fight with each other, and test every boundary I set. I will react every time to any of these moments because I was raised that way, but it’s more about taking that beat between the trigger and the response.

That brief second is where the generational shift actually happens. Not in the big conversations, not in the parenting books, not in the therapy sessions, even though all of those matter. In that one second, in the living room, over a spilled cup of water.

That’s where it changes.

Chris Bustos is a Latino father, business coach, and the host of Waking Up His-panic — a podcast and YouTube channel exploring emotional awareness, Hispanic identity, and what it means to evolve as a man. His work helps professionals and entrepreneurs grow without losing themselves in the process.

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Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.

The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. Submission guidelines are here. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet or its employees.