Socialization and caring for hospitalized African- and Mexican-American children

This article is based on the premise that African- and Mexican-American children's responses to health and illness are rooted in their socialization into group perspectives that have been shaped by particular social and economic realities. Nurses are expected to provide care to African- and Mexican-American children, even though nurses may not have been educated to understand the effect of socialized perspectives on their practices. The purposes of this article are to highlight how differences in perspectives and ideologies create misunderstanding and to provide nurses with some examples of how their behavior might be interpreted by African- and Mexican-American children. The major practice implications center around the points that the motivations for African- and Mexican-American children's behavior may be different from those of European-American children, even though the observable behaviors may be similar and the children of these two groups may bring additional socialized fears and anxieties to the hospital setting. Examples of actual practice situations are used to illustrate the major points.