Speaking of Right and Wrong: Parental Ethnotheories and Black Girls' Moral Development
Background and Purpose:
Child development research has engaged the concept of parental ethnotheories as a theoretical framework for understanding and analyzing how culture shapes child development. It assumes that a child’s environment is organized in part by a cultural system that forms a three component developmental niche including: 1) the physical and social settings, 2) the customs and practices of child rearing, and 3) the psychology of caregivers. Despite its use in child development research, the ethnotheory framework has been less prevalent in social work research. This paper presents a study whose findings describe parental ethnotheories related to African-American mothers’ beliefs about the moral development of their daughters. This research is relevant to increasing concerns regarding the development of conduct problems amongst African-American girls. It also furthers our knowledge about the process and mechanisms which characterize the mothers’ parenting.
Methods:
I conducted moral development interviews with 20 African-American mothers whose daughters (8-11) years old were participating in an out-of-school youth group. These interviews were part of a study in which their daughters responded to moral dilemmas. I developed the dilemmas after immersing myself in the group for 9 months. This immersion increased the mothers’ comfort with me and enabled me to develop dilemmas that were familiar to their daughters’ experience. I asked mothers to share both, how they would expect their daughters to respond to the dilemma, and how they would want their daughter to respond to the dilemma. I then asked a series of follow-up questions in order to understand both their goals, and related practices for their daughter’s moral development. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and uploaded to NVIVO qualitative software. I then coded the text guided by the principles of grounded theory and an inductive approach to qualitative analysis.
Findings:
Data analysis reveals that African-American mothers do have explicit moral development goals for their children and articulated a number of practices that enable those goals. Some goals are especially related to their expectation that their daughters will encounter racism. They taught their daughters to both retain a sense of moral worth in the face of racism and also to act in a way that they would expect to be treated with dignity. The mothers use religion, democratic dialogue and co-regulation as devices for transmitting moral goals.
Implications:
These findings suggest that if schools, youth programs and clinicians want to nurture the pro-social development of African-American girls, they should look to mothers’ ethnotheories. These frameworks not only provide a means for understanding the normative processes of the child’s home culture, they also provide the basis for engaging family in educational and treatment process.