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Ethnic-racial socialization refers to the processes by which families transmit the significance and meaning of race and ethnicity to their children (Hughes et al., 2006). It serves as an important family process by which parents teach their children about race, culture, and minority status to protect the children from the burden of racism and the social strains as minorities (Coll et al., 1996; McAdoo, 1993). Furthermore, minority families socialize their children in ways that are closely related to their experiences of racism and discrimination (Coll et al., 1996). To date, most of the research on ethnic-racial socialization has been conducted among African Americans and have relied on either adolescent or parental reports, and less is known about the parent-adolescent mechanisms of ethnic identity formation among Asian American families. The present study investigates whether parents’ and adolescents’ ethnic-racial socialization mediate the relationships between their exposure to racial discrimination and adolescents’ ethnic and American identity among Filipino Americans (FA) and Korean Americans (KA).
Methods
The data are from the Midwest Longitudinal Study of Asian American Families Project. The study sample consists of 393 FA youths and 410 KA youths, and their parents. Dependent variables are youths’ ethnic and American identity. The key independent variables are racial discrimination reported by youths and parents. The mediators are youth- and parent-reported promotion of mistrust and preparation of bias, and parent-reported concern about their children’s minority status. Using the bootstrapping and maximum likelihood with missing values approaches, we conducted structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized associations for each ethnic group.
Results
Results show that parental ethnic-racial socialization fully mediates the relationships between parental racial discrimination and Asian ethnic identity among both FA and KA youths. For FAs, parental racial discrimination shows indirect effects on youth ethnic identity via parental promotion of mistrust (β=-0.03, p<05.) and concern about children’s minority status (β=0.05, p<0.10). For KAs, there is a significant indirect effect between parental racial discrimination and youth ethnic identity via parental preparation of bias (β=0.05, p<0.05). While youth and parental racial discrimination are significantly associated with their mediating ethnic-racial socialization variables, they did not directly explain the variance of the outcome variables. The models displayed excellent fit to the data for both ethnic groups (FA: χ2(55)=64.31, p=0.18, RMSEA=0.02, CFI=0.98; KA: χ2(55)=56.16, p=0.43, RMSEA=0.01, CFI=1.00).
Conclusions and Implications
The present study highlights the influence of parents’ exposure to racial discrimination on Asian youths’ ethnic identity construction through ethnic-racial socialization. While parental racial discrimination increases the parents’ ethnic-racial socialization, it in turn increases or decreases youth ethnic identity, but not American identity. We also found that the pathways are not homogenous across Asian subgroups. The findings of this study contribute to the current knowledge base by focusing on the experiences of both youths and parents among the understudied minority population in this field. Given that ethnic identity can mitigate stress and provide benefits for minority youths’ health and well-being, the findings have important implications for prevention efforts and practice with Asian families and their children.