Young Mothers' Early Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Children's School Readiness

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

I am interested in understanding normative and adaptive processes of immigrant and ethnic minority families, particularly with respect to examining how parents perceive, react to, or account for discrimination, bias, and racism as a context for their interactions with their children during the early childhood years. Examining these processes is critical to informing the diverse ways in which children healthfully mature and develop competence; and reveals how families are situated within socio-structural inequalities that directly and indirectly determine early childhood health and well-being.
The substantive focus of my dissertation research is the phenomenon of ethnic-racial socialization. Examining ethnic-racial socialization may be critical to understanding adaptive family processes because it represents the strategies and behaviors parents employ, in part, to respond to the challenge of marginalization: it is the dynamic process by which parents provide messages to their children regarding ethnicity, race, culture, and social stratification (Hughes et al., 2006). Broadly, ethnic-racial socialization strategies have been conceptualized as mediating mechanisms for the school achievement and adjustment of ethnic minority children (García Coll et al., 1996; Rodriguez, Umaña-Taylor, Smith, & Johnson, 2009); and the specific links between these socialization strategies and education outcomes have received much attention in empirical studies of adolescents. While many studies have examined parents’ use of ethnic-racial socialization with their adolescent children, only limited research has been conducted on those processes with young children. Those few that have been conducted reveal that certain dimensions of these behaviors act as important protective factors for young children’s school readiness as represented by children’s socio-emotional and cognitive health (Caughy, O’Campo, Randolph, & Nickerson, 2002; Caughy & Owen, 2014).
Building upon Caughy and colleagues’ work in this area, my research seeks to understand, in a diverse sample of young mothers (n = 490), the extent to which mothers’ early ethnic-racial
socialization behaviors are adaptive in promoting the school readiness of their children. My dissertation consists of two substudies: First, as this is the first study to examine these behaviors in a young parent sample, Substudy 1 addresses issues of measurement; next, Substudy 2 examines predictive associations among ethnic-racial socialization behaviors, family characteristics, and early childhood competencies in a correlational design. Employing a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework, I aim to make a sensible contribution to the field through four main objectives: In Substudy 1 I am testing: (a) the validity of replicating a 2-factor model prominent in the ethnic-racial socialization literature of older parents in a young parent sample; and (b) the measurement equivalence of the ethnic-racial socialization instrument across the sample’s ethnic/racial groups. In Substudy 2 I am examining: (c) the extent of variation in early ethnic-racial socialization behaviors of young mothers across maternal, child, and context characteristics; and (d) indirect pathways among mothers’ ethnic-racial socialization behaviors, children’s intellectual and socio-emotional competencies, and participation in HFM.

Author

• Mariah M. Contreras, Tufts University