Adolescents’ Resilience to Ethnic/Racial Discrimination: A Within-Family Design Reveals the Protective Role of Parents’ Ethnic/Racial Identities

• In Event: Health Disparities Across Borders: Global Approaches to Understanding Racism, Health, and Human Development

Abstract

Background: Ethnic/racial minoritized communities develop strong ethnic/racial identities to build interdependent networks to support their children’s development (Spencer et al., 2019). Within families, parents’ ethnic/racial identities may reflect their implicit and explicit ethnic/race-related beliefs transmitted through practices within the home to help children cope with ethnic/racial discrimination (i.e., differential treatment linked to differences in power, resources, and opportunities between ethnic/racial groups; National Research Council, 2004). Although reviews find that ethnic/race-centered parental beliefs and practices inconsistently reduce the harmful impacts of discrimination on adolescents’ adjustment (Hughes et al., 2006; Umaña-Taylor & Hill, 2020), these inconsistencies are likely attributable to most studies’ reliance on between-family comparisons, with confounding factors (e.g., family’s socioeconomic and structural characteristics) that can mask the protective effects of parents’ beliefs and practices. Alternatively, within-family/sibling designs adjust for such confounds when both siblings grow up in the same household (McGue et al., 2010). A within-family design may also reveal how parents treat their children’s siblings as references; specifically, discriminated children may develop resilience when they receive stories from parents about how their older siblings overcame discrimination.

We posed two research questions: (1) Does an adolescent who perceives more ethnic/racial discrimination relative to their sibling show more advanced pubertal development, and (2) does parental ethnic/racial identity reduce the effect of discrimination on pubertal development within a family? We distinguished between parents’ identity exploration versus commitment: Whereas exploration indicates parental ethnic/race-related activities without deliberately calling attention to ethnicity/race, commitment represents their proactive practices of cultural values and traditions, and involvement with same-race peers.

Methods: Data came from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, which surveyed siblings and their parents (N-adolescents=1,614; N-families=812; 34% Black, 37% Latinx/é, 3% Asian, and 26% Other ethnic/racial minorities; 51% females, 49% males; ages=9-11). Adolescents reported ethnic/racial discrimination (a=.76; Fisher et al., 2000) parents reported ethnic/racial identities (a-exploration=.87; a-commitment=.88; Phinney & Ong, 2007) and both adolescents and parents reported adolescents’ pubertal development (r=.63; Cheng et al., 2021). Covariates included adolescent- (i.e., sex, age, body mass index, substance use, and baseline-pubertal development) and household-variables (i.e., race, parents’ sex, educational attainment, income, and marital status). We estimated multilevel structural equation models (Level-1: Child; Level-2: Family) in Mplus v. 8.6 and accounted for site random effects.

Results: Within a family, a sibling reporting more frequent discrimination showed more advanced pubertal development than their sibling reporting infrequent discrimination. A cross-level interaction showed that parental identity commitment (but not exploration) reduced the relationship between discrimination and pubertal development within a family.

Discussion: Parental proactive practices promoting favorable in-group views protect children when they experience more frequent discrimination than their siblings. Our within-family design amplifies the depiction of resiliency and yields recommendations for analysis and implications for future research regarding the roles of ethnicity/race and culture in familial practices.

Authors

• Juan Del Toro, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Presenting Author

• Riana Elyse Anderson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Xiaoran Sun, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Richard M Lee, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities