Poster #90 - How do parents think their children identify with social groups?

• In Event: Poster Session 13

Abstract

Prior work finds that children form strong expectations and preferences about others on the basis of several social group markers: race and ethnicity (Dunham et al., 2006), religion (Heiphetz & Young, 2019), language (Kinzler, 2021), wealth (Shutts et al, 2016), and gender (Shutts et al, 2010). However, little work has investigated how these social group markers are socialized in early development.

In study 1, we surveyed 100 parents of 5-10 year-old-children about their beliefs about their children’s identification with 6 social group markers (race, ethnicity, religion, language, gender, wealth, and political party). Parents indicated whether their child identifies with a given marker (e.g., a race) and how confident they were that their child would identify with that marker on a 7-point scale, Thus, each marker was given a score ranging from -7 (parent is completely sure the child does not identify with the marker) to 7 (parent is completely sure the child does identify with the marker).

The primary goal of the study one was to examine how parents in our study would perceive their child’s social group identification. A mixed effects model predicting parents’ social group identification found that there were significant effects of age and (p < 0.001) social group maker effect (p = 0.009) (see Figure 1). Parents of older children believed their children identified with each social group marker than parents of younger children. Parents were the most confident that their children identified with gender and native language, followed by religion and ethnicity. Parents were the least confident their children identified with race, wealth, and politics.

We found that the frequency with which parents discuss social groups at home explained some of the age- and social group marker changes in parents’ beliefs about child’s identification. Parents discussed race, ethnicity, wealth, and politics less for children of all ages, discussed gender the same for all ages, and discussion of religion and language decreased with child age. This establishes that frequency of conversation about social group markers not only varies based on the social group marker, but that the amount of conversation is linked to parent’s predicted confidence of identification.

This study is consistent with prior work finding age-related changes in children’s biases based on these social group markers. Specifically, while certain biases are considered early-developing (biases based on own gender and language), others biases show a relatively later developmental onset (e.g., Weisman et al., 2016) and have been found to show cultural and individual differences (race, ethnicity, religion). In a follow-up study (N = 48; Target N = 72), we investigate the accuracy of parents' beliefs by asking 5-10-year-old children directly whether they identify with these social group markers.

Authors

• Cassidy Faith Wolfe, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine