Mexican-Origin Couples in the Early Years of Parenthood: Marital Well-Being in Ecological Context

In this article, we draw from Huston's (2000) 3-level model of marriage to provide an informed and integrative template for organizing current knowledge and guiding future inquiry into the study of marital well-being among a rapidly growing segment of the United States' population: low-income, Mexican-origin couples in the early years of parenthood. More specifically, we advocate for a dyadic approach that attends to elements of the macroenvironment, such as cultural background, and how those elements interact directly and indirectly with spouses' individual characteristics and marital behavior. In so doing, we demonstrate the value of an ecological approach for understanding current research and for informing future work studying marriage among new parents of Mexican origin. ecological context | Latinos | marital relationships | Mexican couples | parenthood