Parental Ethnic Racial Socialization and Effects of Discrimination on Multiracial Youth

Background/Purpose: Multiracial youth in the United States are at substantial risk of experiencing discrimination and social isolation. Families who are racially minoritized frequently utilize parental ethnic racial socialization (ERS) across a range of domains, including promoting racial pride and heritage, socializing around police contact, teaching youth to straddle cultures (code-switching), and racially socializing youth around schools and achievement. ERS strategies are often the most common methods parents/caregivers of color use to prepare racially minoritized youth for discriminatory experiences in general and have shown consistent effectiveness in offsetting the known deleterious effects of discrimination. Yet many of these studies are conducted among monoracial African American and Latinx families, while ERS usage with multiracial youth is vastly under explored. Similarly, while a large body of research explores the association between parents’ ethnic-racial socialization and monoracial youths’ discrimination experiences, studies focused on youth identifying as multiracial are scarce. In response, the current study explores the relationship between parents’ ethnic-racial socialization practices and multiracial youths’ discrimination experiences. We hypothesized that among youth with similar frequencies of discrimination experiences, multiracial youth will report less ERS, leaving them more vulnerable to the harmful effects of discrimination.

Methods: Participants included 119 multiracial-identifying youth from a larger sample of more than 350 age 9 to 14-year-olds participating in a larger study on parental ethnic-racial socialization and educational involvement. The research team administered surveys in five partner schools collectively serving a majority of economically disadvantaged African American families. Multivariate regression was used to estimate the associations between levels of four ethnic-racial socialization constructs—pride and heritage socialization, police socialization, code switching, and racialized academic socialization—and the frequency of youth’s discriminatory experiences. Comparisons were made between descriptive and predictive statistics of monoracial and multiracial youth, controlling for relevant family dynamics, general parenting practices, and demographic covariates.

Results: In bivariate analyses, multiracial youth with above average discrimination scores invariably reported significantly lower-levels of ethnic-racial socialization across all four domains. In multivariate analyses, higher levels of ERS remained a significant predictor of encountering less discrimination while controlling for parenting practices, family dynamics, and demographics. However, post-hoc comparisons to monoracial youth showed that multiracial youth reported the lowest levels of ERS of any racially minoritized group, while paradoxically reporting the highest rates of discrimination experiences among them.

Conclusion/Implications: Results of this study show that otherwise similar racially minoritized youth exhibit report lower levels of discrimination experiences when they are exposed to higher levels of racial socialization. As such, findings may suggest PRS can significantly buffer risk of discrimination among racially minoritized youth, particularly multiracial youth, perhaps by desensitizing them to otherwise deleterious discrimination experiences. Social workers engaging with multiracial youth and their families should carefully assess and consider family relationship quality when working with this population. Treatment goals targeted at improving parent/caregivers’ ability to utilize racial socialization strategies may directly and indirectly decrease risk of discrimination among multiracial youth. Future studies should explore multi-step analyses to determine whether the reduced perceived discrimination is in turn associated with more optimal developmental outcomes.