Partnerships in Action: Supporting Spanish-Speaking Parents of Adolescents with Sistema Escolar USA 

By Sarah Bahn, PEPS Communications & Marketing Manager (Estimated reading time: 5 minutes)

Mental health, schoolwork, sexuality, substances — parenting an adolescent comes with a new set of challenges, questions, and uncertainties. Now, imagine navigating these challenges in an unfamiliar culture without access to support and resources in your native language.  

Planting the Seed 

As PEPS created the Parents of Adolescents and Teens (PAT) Program in 2020, we knew that developing partnerships with diverse organizations would be an important way to expand access to this new program. The PEPS Community Partnerships model acknowledges that local organizations already embedded in their communities are often best suited to deliver PEPS programming in a culturally relevant way.  

While developing the PAT program, we sought out community feedback to understand families’ needs during the adolescent parenting phase. PEPS connected with Sistema Escolar USA’s founder, Liliana Medina, who helped distribute a survey to Spanish-speaking families to better understand their needs and desires for a program like PAT.  

Connecting Through Shared Immigrant Experiences 

When the survey results showed that Spanish-speaking families were eager for the support, resources, and community that the PAT program could provide, Liliana worked with PEPS to “transcreate” the PAT curriculum into Spanish. Unlike direct translation, transcreation involves adapting the text to make it culturally relevant and easily understandable by people who speak the language it is being translated into. Liliana not only translated the text into Spanish, but ensured the structure and context of the curriculum would resonate with Hispanic families in the community. Sistema Escolar USA began hosting PAT Groups in Spanish in 2021 and has run several groups since. For parents navigating cultural gaps between their own upbringing and their children’s experiences in the US, connecting with others who have shared linguistic and cultural backgrounds has proven to be a powerful source of support.  

“I wanted to bring this to the Spanish community because I needed it when I was raising my own child. I didn’t have access to any program like this and all the resources were in English. So I really, really wanted to be part of this in Spanish for my community.”

Liliana Medina, founder of Sistema Escolar USA

Learning in Community 

PEPS programs focus on learning from and with other parents. As parents in the Spanish-speaking PAT Groups gained comfort over the course of the program, they shared more openly, bringing their own parenting challenges to the group each week for advice and support. Gloria, a PAT Group facilitator, reflected on how parents evolved during the group: “At the beginning of our sessions, we always start with the highs and lows and it’s incredible to see that they are talking about how they adjust, or they adapt things that they learned in the previous sessions.” Real-time support from other parents is part of what makes PEPS programs unique. 

Sistema Escolar USA has been incredibly successful in building community among its participants. Parents stay in touch through WhatsApp group messages, sharing advice, resources, and workshops even after the group ends. Gloria shared that the parents who participated in PAT “are sharing the information that [they] are learning with their partners, with friends, with people in their community… I think that as an immigrant we always want to support each other. We feel like we are like the family that we don’t have in this country and for that reason we are always trying to provide more support, resources, exchanging all the opportunities that are in the community to the people that we know.” By bringing culturally relevant resources and support to Spanish-speaking families, Sistema Escolar USA is creating ripple effects through the broader community. 

Trickling Down: The Impact of PAT on Families 

The PAT program helps parents connect with their children and better understand the developmental phase they are going through. Liliana shared that “another need in the Hispanic community is to talk about mental health and being able to talk about that in a way that is not judged or criticized but understanding what the real need is out there in the teens at this time of their lives.” By bridging cultural differences to support Hispanic parents in understanding and supporting their adolescents through mental health struggles, Sistema Escolar USA has empowered parents to communicate better, seek to understand more about their children’s experiences, and build stronger relationships within their families.  

One parent reflected to Velia, a PAT facilitator, “now I can understand better that raising a child is not just like directing the traffic, like giving orders and do this, do that. Raising a child is more like taking care of a garden. Like you invest time, you have to learn, you need to know your child in the way that you can understand him or her better and take care of this beautiful flower that is going to bloom later in the future.” Participating in PAT helped many parents develop a more harmonious relationship with their children and a better understanding of developmental phases that happen during adolescence.  

“Many parents have said when I came here, I came looking for a tool to change my kid. Now I understand that I have to change.”

Liliana Medina, founder of Sistema Escolar USA 

The partnership between Sistema Escolar USA and PEPS exemplifies the power of effective collaboration in delivering tailored support to families. For Spanish-speaking families, learning with and from other parents with shared linguistic and cultural backgrounds enhances the PAT program’s effectiveness. By combining the research-backed PAT curriculum from PEPS with the community-based wisdom and knowledge of Sistema Escolar USA, we’ve been able to collaboratively support families in a new and meaningful way.  

Want to hear more about the PAT program at Sistema Escolar USA? Watch our 2023 PEPS Benefit Luncheon video featuring Liliana, Gloria, and Velia.  

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