African-American Children

Religion and Church Membership

Religion has been theorized to be an adaptive coping mechanism that has enabled African Americans to transcend the limitations and harshness of their social realities and to give meaning and direction to their individual and collective existence. During the 1980s, nearly 70 percent of African Americans reported themselves to be members of a church. Churches provide informal support (e.g., friendship, companionship, advice and comfort, help during illness, financial assistance), formal services (e.g., meals on wheels, transportation, group outings and vacations, ministerial counseling), and moral guidance. Religiosity and church membership enhance self-esteem partly as a consequence of the perception that one is held in high regard by other believers and by an omnipotent divine other who makes his/her presence felt in one's life. Religiosity also buffers the negative psychological effects of stress. Having a mother who seeks spiritual support is one of several factors that distinguishes African-American children who are stress resilient from those who are stress impaired.

Extended Family Relations and Social Support Networks

African Americans are more likely to reside in extended family households than are European Americans. Extended families are close kin relations within and across generations whose members are intensely involved in the reciprocal exchange of goods, services, and ongoing emotional support. As such, they are problem-solving and stress-coping systems. Typically, involvement with extended family is beneficial to young children and adolescents, partly because of increased support, monitoring, and supervision. African-American adolescents whose single parent is involved in extended family activities report fewer problem behaviors.

African-American and Latino adolescent mothers who report higher levels of grandmother support have fewer psychological problems, more positive interactions with their babies, and higher levels of educational attainment. Nevertheless, the impact of grandmother involvement, especially when mother and grandmother are co-residing and/or coparenting, is not uniformly positive. Researchers do not yet have a good understanding of what circumstances render different types of support from grandmothers helpful versus detrimental or inert. In general, though, parents' support networks reduce emotional strain; lessen the tendency toward punitive, coercive, and inconsistent parenting; and in turn, foster socioemotional development in children.

Racial Socialization

Given the especially virulent and egregious discrimination that African Americans have historically faced and continue to experience, it is not surprising that African-American parents generally provide more extensive racial and ethnic socialization than other parents of color who have been studied. For example, African-American parents are more likely to report talking with their adolescent children about racial and ethnic prejudice as a problem and how to handle it than are Mexican-American parents, who, in turn, are more likely to talk about these issues than are Japanese-American parents.

African-American parents convey messages about children's cultural heritage and the importance of racial pride more frequently than messages about racial discrimination and how to cope with it. Messages intended to promote racial mistrust are a comparatively minor, if not rare, element of racial socialization among African-American parents. It is not yet clear whether racial socialization consistently influences African-American children's racial identity, school achievement, or ability to deal with racial stereotyping and discrimination. There is evidence from studies of African-American adults, however, that both racial socialization and group identity (i.e., feelings of closeness in ideas and affect to one's self-identified racial group; race-linked self-image) protect physical/mental health in the face of perceived racial discrimination and unfair treatment.

Responsive Discipline

Urban African-American and European-American parents modify their strategies for managing their children's lives and behavior in accordance with the risks and opportunities afforded by neighborhood conditions (e.g., resources, level of crime). This responsiveness has positive effects on children's development. For example, parenting characterized by a combination of restrictiveness, extensive rule setting, and warmth appears to be especially beneficial to the cognitive and socioemotional functioning of African-American children living in high-risk, crime-laden neighborhoods. This parenting style shields children from noxious elements and bestows them with a positive self-concept that helps deflect negative influences in their extrafamilial environment.

African Americans are more likely to view physical discipline short of abuse as an appropriate display of positive parenting than are European Americans. African-American mothers consistently report higher frequencies of spanking than European-American mothers, even when socioeconomic status is taken into account (McLoyd, Cauce, Takeuchi, and Wilson 2000). Cultural variation in the acceptability, meaning, and parental attributes associated with spanking also may be the reason that parents' use of physical discipline predicts higher levels of behavior problems among European-American children, but does not among African-American children. That is, because of its commonplaceness in African-American culture, spanking may coexist with high levels of warmth to a greater extent in African-American households than in European-American households. African-American parents also may be less likely to administer spanking in an impulsive or excessively harsh, punitive manner. There is some preliminary support for these claims, but more rigorous evaluation of them is needed. In any case, existing research underscores how critically important it is that parental strictness not be equated with punitiveness and a cold emotional style. The latter qualities are risk factors for behavioral problems in children as indicated by evidence that mothers of stress-resilient African-American children (those exposed to high stress burdens, but who show no clinically significant behavior problems) are less rejecting and aggressive than mothers of stress-impaired African-American children (those exposed to high stress burdens who show clinically significant behavior problems).