African and Latino American adolescents are disproportionately represented among adolescents living in low-income households. Adolescents living in poverty have been described as being at high risk for both externalizing and internalizing behavior problems (McLoyd & Smith, 2002) and poor academic achievement (Sirin, 2005). To investigate protectors for this specific population, the present study examined facilitators and impediments to mothers' monitoring knowledge and whether mothers' monitoring knowledge prevents adolescents' internalizing and externalizing behavior problems and delinquency among African American and Latino low-income families. Four main questions were addressed: 1) how does mothers' monitoring knowledge change over time? 2) what factors impede mothers' knowledge? 3) what factors facilitate mothers' knowledge? and 4) how mothers' long-term knowledge predicts externalizing and internalizing behavior and school delinquency in late adolescence. All the questions were addressed by using the Three-City Study. This study recruited 1,160 low-income households with at least one child aged 10-14 in three cities, i.e., Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. The present study focused on the adolescents being reared by continuous caregivers and participating in all the three waves of interviews, yielding 319 African American and 354 Latino mother-adolescent dyads. Analyses involved four steps: 1) to conduct growth mixture modeling to identify trajectory groups of mothers' monitoring knowledge; 2) to conduct logistic/multinomial logistical regression to examine relations of trajectory groups of mothers' knowledge with familial, community, and adaptive cultural factors; 3) to conduct multiple regression to predict adolescents' externalizing behavior problems and school delinquency with trajectory groups of mothers' knowledge; and 4) to conduct ordinal logistic regression to predict adolescents' clinical classification for internalizing behavioral problems with trajectory groups of mothers' knowledge. The findings suggest that for both ethnicities, the majority of mothers maintained monitoring knowledge in high levels over time. The present study identified family routine as a common facilitator and harsh discipline as a common impediment to mothers' monitoring knowledge for both ethnicities. Two facilitators were identified only for the African American families, i.e., grandmothers' childrearing involvement and neighborhood cohesion. Adolescent gender difference in mothers' monitoring knowledge was only found for the African American families, with the mothers who rear boys being more likely to experience a sharp decline in monitoring knowledge than those who rear girls. Positive implications of mothers' monitoring knowledge for developmental outcomes were found. Specifically, stable high or slowly declining monitoring knowledge in adolescence prevents maladjustment, particularly in terms of internalizing behavior for the African American adolescents and externalizing behavior for the adolescents in both groups. The present findings shed light on potential preventions and/or interventions to improve adolescent developmental outcome and family environment of low-income African Americans and Latinos. Social workers can advance preventions to educate low-income African American and Latino mothers about the positive implications of gaining information about their children's daily life in adolescence for preventing externalizing and/or internalizing behavior problems. My findings also indicate the potential benefit of programs that aim to promote low-income mothers gaining monitoring knowledge, such as establishing family routine. Specifically for the African American mothers, this study advocates developing programs aiming to strengthen mutual supports and trust among neighbors and understand positive implications of grandmothers' childrearing support. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
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