Racial-ethnic socialization among Asian American families in the U.S.

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

As anti-Asian racism remains unabating in the U.S., it is necessary to better understand how Asian American parents are navigating conversations about race, ethnicity, and racism with their children (i.e., racial-ethnic socialization; RES; Hughes et al., 2006), and resulting consequences for children and youth’s development. This symposium collectively examines key correlates of parental RES and the downstream effects on children and adolescents’ developmental outcomes. Importantly, all three studies use a parental RES measure tailored specifically to the racialized experiences of Asian American families: the Asian American Parental Racial-Ethnic Socialization Scale (Juang et al., 2016).
The first paper examines how parents’ racial-ethnic and American identities, experiences of racial discrimination, and racial socialization confidence relate to their cultural and racial socialization approaches with preadolescent-age children. The second paper draws upon parent and child perspectives to longitudinally examine the cascading effects of parents’ COVID-19-related experiences of racial discrimination on their use of awareness of discrimination messages with their 10- to 18-year-olds, and in turn, their children’s anxiety across a two-year period. The third paper uses adolescent-reported survey data and latent profile analysis to examine parents' combined RES approaches and the effects of these messages on adolescents’ perceptions of family cohesion and sociopolitical values. The discussant, an expert on RES among Asian American families, will speak to how the study findings theoretically and empirically advance understanding of the racialized experiences of Asian American families and RES research more broadly.

Sub Unit

• Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Chair

• Rashmita S. Mistry, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussant

• Linda Juang, University of Potsdam

Individual Presentations

• Parent correlates of racial-ethnic socialization with Asian American preadolescents - Presenting Author: Anna M. Kimura, University of California - Los Angeles; Rashmita S. Mistry, University of California - Los Angeles

• Cascading effects of Chinese American parents’ racial discrimination experiences and racial-ethnic socialization on children’s anxiety - Presenting Author: Huiguang Ren, University of Maryland - Baltimore County; Charissa S. L. Cheah, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

• Parent socialization patterns and their associations with Asian American adolescents’ sociopolitical values and family cohesion - Presenting Author: Annabelle Atkin, Purdue University, West Lafayette; Lydia Harim Ahn, Arizona State University; Jacqueline Yi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign