Legitimizing Parents’ Rules and Messages: Urban Adolescents and Everyday Understandings Of Gendered Hazard

• In Event: 304 - Regular Session. Children/Youth/Adolescents: Youth Identities: Voices and Perspectives

Abstract

Past research on parental regulation has left youth’s capacity to engage in interpretive processes, especially those related to hazard, understudied. To address this gap, I conducted an in-depth examination of urban African American adolescents’ (n=64) explanations for parents’ controlling practices and messages. Adolescents legitimized parents’ practices and messages as reasonable, as appropriately attuned to hazards, and as consequential for achieving future goals. Specifically, both boys and girls validated parents’ practices and messages as helping them stay safe. The majority of girls also legitimated their parents’ efforts to help them maintain a style of self-presentation that signaled gendered respectability. I explain these findings by pointing to the realities of structural racism and the gendered risks that participants faced. I also refine current conceptualizations of parental regulation by showing that adolescents bring an implicit understanding of hazard to bear on their understandings of parents’ controlling practices and messages.

Author

• Simone Ispa-Landa, Northwestern University