Latino Babies Healthier, Despite Poverty

Latino babies are healthier than their white counterparts even though Latinos are on average poorer, less educated and receive worse health care than whites, according to several major new Harvard-sponsored studies.

The finding is “perhaps the greatest scientific paradox of our time,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, professor of education and an editor of a new book that compiles the studies.

The book, Latinos: Remaking America, presents landmark research on Latino education, health, language and politics that was first unveiled last week.

The current Latino population in the U.S. is more than 35 million. And the Bureau of Census has reported that by 2050 one-quarter of those living in the country will be of Latino origin.

Among others in the book, a study of New York City teenagers found that young Latino women are more upwardly mobile than men.

For example, the study found Mexican-American women navigate the school system better than their male counterparts.

Men attend local, ethnically homogeneous high schools that frequently lead to gang involvement. But women seek out more options for high school and frequently attend diverse schools.

Women were also found to have more responsibilities in the home, including caring for siblings after school, that eliminate the free time that leads the men to join gangs.

In related research, the authors looked to demonstrate the effects of these differences. They found that 17 percent of the women in their study were employed in technical or professional fields, compared to 9 percent of the men.

An included study on language found that bilingual infants develop language skills at the same rate as infants who are raised to speak just Spanish.

On average, bilingual infants showed the beginnings of speech four days earlier than the monolingual children and were able to learn new words just as quickly.

The study’s authors wrote that their findings dispel myths that bilingual babies develop slower.

Suarez-Orozco said common misconceptions about Latinos, such as slower language development for bilingual babies, are due to insufficient scholarly research on Latinos.

A related study of older children found that those who were exposed exclusively to Spanish in their homes until age five had stronger Spanish skills at age 10 than their bilingual counterparts.

But by age 10, both bilingual and Spanish-only children had achieved equal proficiency in English—thus disputing claims that bilingual children would have been at a disadvantage.

The studies also found that Latinos are three times as likely to lack health insurance as whites. While four out of five whites have employee-provided health insurance, just over half of Latinos receive such benefits.

Suarez-Orozco said he hopes the studies wil make policy-makers more aware of the health issues confronting the nation’s largest minority group.

The book, which had been three years in the making, involved 50 leading researchers across many of Harvard’s schools, including the Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Medical School, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Education.

—Staff writer Maria S. Pedroza can be reached at pedroza@fas.harvard.edu.