Racial attitudes occur in and are experienced by children at an early age. A study published in Child Development has helped explore how parents react to their children’s’ racial biases, with important implications for reducing prejudicial attitudes.
Researchers conducted three studies to determine the relationship between parents’ internal motivation to curb their own prejudicial attitudes, and their reactions to displays of this behavior in their children.
Parents of 4‐ to 12‐year‐old children first responded to the Internal Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale (IMS). High scores typically correlate with feelings of guilt when one violates one’s own moral standards, and subsequent attempts to correct one’s behaviors. Individuals with low scores demonstrate no such affective or behavioral response.
Combined with surveys concerning their children’s behavior, these studies showed that parents high in IMS set stricter standards for their children. Additionally, they tended to have stronger self-directed negative feelings when presented with their children’s’ racial attitudes. The authors interpret this as meaning that they held themselves accountable for their children’s’ behavior. Low IMS parents experienced no such negative affect when presented with their children’s transgressions.
The study’s results have interesting implications for how to engage parents regarding their children’s biases. Most importantly, parents that have deeply internalized values prohibiting racially motivated judgements are probably highly motivated to align their children’s behavior with their own. These parents tend to experience a strongly negative emotional response (i.e. guilt) when presented with their children’s transgressions, which school systems, for example, can leverage to ensure their active involvement in reducing childhood biases.
This is particularly important because, as the authors point out, children lack the self-regulatory abilities to adjust their behavior. Rather, they rely on their parents’ ability to maintain moral standards and their guidance in adhering to them.
“Parents are in a unique circumstance for fostering behavioral change in children as they have extensive and continued contact with their children, have situational power over children, have opportunities to guide children’s behaviors, and have a responsibility to teach their children acceptable behavior,” the researchers said.
Additional studies would benefit from a greater variation in sample population. As noted by the authors, all parents had relatively high IMS scores, which greatly limits what kinds of generalized recommendations can be made. This is especially true given that the parents of children most at risk of holding racial biases would likely be low in IMS.
The importance of this and future studies for helping to curb racial prejudice in children cannot be overstated, and the authors’ findings contribute to a growing field of research that will aid greatly in this endeavor.
The study, “Parents’ Expectations for and Reactions to Children’s Racial Biases“, was authored by Katharine E. Scott, Kristin Shutts, and Patricia G. Devine.
