Parents’ Experience with Racial Discrimination Predicts their Positive Emotion Socialization

• In Event: Poster Session 14
  In Poster Session: PS 14 Topic - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Abstract

There is a growing body of research on parenting behaviors of African-Americans, but limited work that examines within-group variability and specifically, how African-American parents’ experiences with racial discrimination relates to their parenting. This study was the first to examine whether African-American parents’ history with racism and discrimination predicts positive affect (PA) socialization practices (modeling emotion regulation, discussing emotion, and reacting to their child’s emotions; Eisenberg et al., 1998). Prior research suggests that African-American parents tend to respond in supportive ways when handling PA (McKee et al., 2015) and engage in more PA talk with their children than White mothers (Garrett-Peters et al., 2008). It is unknown if these PA socialization patterns relate to parents’ experience with prejudice/discrimination. Parents who experienced discrimination may up-regulate their children’ PA to compensate for their child’s negative experiences (discrimination), or conversely, may downregulate children’s PA out of concern with repercussions of expressing PA (e.g., pride). Additionally, this study investigated whether parental beliefs about their child’s PA mediated the relationship between racial discrimination and PA socialization behaviors.
The study sampled 406 African-American parents with at least one child between 8-18 years of age from the US. Participants (53% male, Mage=35 years old, SD=6.76) completed a survey via Mturk. Frequency of discrimination experiences was measured using The Schedule of Racist Events (Landrine & Klonoff, 1996). Parents’ supportive (reward and magnify) and unsupportive (punish, neglect, override) socialization behaviors were accessed using parent-reported Emotions as a Child scale (Klimes-Dougan et al., 2007; Magai 1996). Lastly, parents reported on various PA beliefs (value PA and PA dangerous to express) using the original and adapted Parents’ Beliefs About Children’s Emotions questionnaire (Halberstadt et al., 2001; Halberstadt et al., 2013).
A structural model was conducted to examine the association of all the constructs (discrimination, emotion beliefs, emotion socialization) including covariates (parents’ age, sex, difficulty paying bills, and education). After achieving acceptable model fit, results indicated that racial discrimination did not predict supportive PA socialization behaviors (Table 1). However, parents’ discrimination experience was significantly related to greater unsupportive PA socialization. Thus, parents’ PA beliefs were examined as a mediator between discrimination and unsupportive PA socialization. A significant indirect effect was found (Figure 1). Specifically, parents’ racial discrimination predicted greater beliefs that positive emotions are costly/dangerous, which predicted higher levels of unsupportive PA socialization behaviors to their child’s PA.
This study provides novel information on how and why there may be variation in parenting within African-Americans. Overall, greater racial discrimination predicted unsupportive PA socialization. Additionally, the more African-American parents experienced racial discrimination, the greater their beliefs that positive emotions are costly/dangerous, which in turn predicted higher levels of unsupportive responses to their child’s PA. Unsupportive PA socialization behaviors are related to negative child outcomes such as depression (e.g., Katz et al., 2014). Thus, the associations in this study suggest there could be further harmful effects of parents’ experience of discrimination on children’s emotional development. Future research should investigate if altering parents’ emotion beliefs and socialization could help parents with extensive experiences with racial discrimination.

Authors

• Tyia Wilson, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Amy L Gentzler, West Virginia University
  Non-Presenting Author