Adults delaying conversations about race with children, according to report
10th September 2020 · 0 Comments
By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer
New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows that adults delay conversations about race with children due to a lack of knowledge of their development, believing that children should be almost five years old before discussing race despite data illustrating that infants as young as three months can recognize racial differences.
According to researchers, delaying conversations about race could make it more difficult to change children’s racist beliefs and misconceptions.
“Children notice that both societal and perceptual patterns exist in the world, and they will come up with their own explanations for the categories they see. Those explanations may be detrimental or inaccurate,” said Jessica Sullivan, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College who co-authored the study. “Children also might perceive that race is something that we shouldn’t talk about, and that it isn’t polite.”
Before surveying adults across the country, researchers reviewed studies establishing developmental milestones in children and set benchmarks which they later compared to participants’ responses. More than 600 people completed the survey online, with more than half of them being parents and 40 percent identifying as people of color.
“We used a sliding scale measure so survey participants could indicate at what age in months they believe certain developmental milestones occur,” Sullivan said. “Asking them questions like, ‘when do you believe children first perceive race as a category?’ and then comparing responses to current scientific estimates.”
Researchers found that adults estimated that children’s capacity for processing race began four and a half years later than available scientific evidence, believing that children begin to understand race around age five. Research has shown that 3-month-olds prefer faces from particular racial groups, and that 3-year-olds in the United States associate certain racial groups with negative traits before entering preschool. By age 4, American children associate white people with wealth. These beliefs lead to widespread discrimination that begins in early childhood.
The survey also measured developmental and social milestones independent of race, finding that, on average, participants’ estimates differed from best scientific estimates by less than a year for general developmental questions and by more than two years for social questions.
“So, participants were not fully accurate when characterizing general and social development, but they were uniquely bad at seeing when children can think about race,” Sullivan said.
Importantly, researchers found that the strongest predictor of when a parent would talk to their children about race was when they believed the child to be developmentally ready, meaning that the later a parent assumed a child’s processing capabilities developed, the later they would talk to them about race. Participants’ race, gender, education level and level of experience with children had no bearing on the findings.
In a third study undertaken after analyzing the online surveys, researchers educated participants on developmental milestones in children before asking them when to talk to children about race. Informing participants about the development of children’s race-related reasoning capacities caused participants to express willingness to talk with children about race more than a year earlier than they otherwise would have.
“The good news is, when you teach participants best estimates they learn, and then that also changes when they think we should talk to kids about race,” said study co-author Leigh Wilton, assistant professor of psychology at Skidmore College.
The study also analyzed the extent to which participants endorsed a colorblind ideology, and the extent to which they believe children hold a colorblind view of the world. Research has shown that ideologies like colorblindness harm race relations for both children and adults.
“Many white parents use strategies that are well-meaning but ultimately ineffective, like colorblindness, because these ideas ignore the realities of racism in the United States,” Wilton said.
While this study does not offer advice on how and when parents should talk to their children about race, Wilton emphasized the importance of parents, especially white parents, having these conversations, and maybe earlier than they anticipated. “Parents need to think about having conversations about race, and not employing a colorblind strategy, because it will become harder as the child ages. Having tough conversations about racial violence will be easier if there have been earlier, meaningful conversations about race,” she said.
This article originally published in the September 7, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
