Socialization of African American children: Environmental influences on parents' messages

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of predominantly White (heterogeneous) and predominantly Black (homogeneous) communities on African American parents' socialization agendas. This study investigated whether Black parents' socialization messages would be formed in accordance with the racial configuration of the socialization community, and, more importantly, in accordance with Black parents' perceived evaluations of their communities. Specifically, perceived experiences of challenge and discrimination, devaluation, and non-support from predominantly White socializing environments were expected to impel African American parents to bolster general socialization messages (i.e., autonomy, egalitarianism) with buffered or protective messages (Black history, racism difficulties, and group identity). Positive appraisals of predominantly Black socializing environments, on the other hand, were expected to allow Black parents to focus their socialization messages more on promoting individualism messages in their children. Contrary to expectation, analyses of variance revealed that neither group-validating, protective messages, nor self-appraisal messages were significantly impacted by the racial composition of the communities where socialization occurred. Also unexpectedly, community perceptions of non-support, difficulty, and devaluation were successful in predicting only group identity messages, only in communities perceived to be difficult. Socialization messages of Black history and racism difficulties could not be predicted from community perceptions. Hypotheses projecting that Black parents' perceptions of their communities would predict socialization messages (i.e., Black heritage messages, instructional messages to deal with racism, and group identity messages) better than would neighborhood type (heterogeneous/homogeneous) alone were supported for group identity messages. However, African American parents' perceptions of their communities were not better than the racial configuration of socializing communities at predicting pride development and racism-related messages. The nonsignificance of predicted hypothesized relationships led to a more inductive approach to the issues. Discriminant Function Analyses revealed that specific demographics (i.e., parent's age, child's age and gender, percentage of African American neighbors, racial composition of the total socializing community, and perceptions of neighborhood and school environments) seemed to play a role in accurately distinguishing parents at the extremes of conveying these types of messages. These exploratory analyses suggest that the joint influence of many factors may be most influential to Black parents' child rearing messages.