Reprinted from Deadric T. Williams blog September 26, 2022

Critical and comprehensive theoretical frameworks connecting racism, race, and racial inequality are absent in family research. For instance, conventional research on racial variations in family formations and family processes is often reduced to simple average differences without contextualizing racialized groups as political, social, and historical categories. Even more, the term “family” in family scholarship appears to be shorthanded for “white families” whereas the use of “race” is shorthanded for “minority families”. Family scientists must abandon this logic because it limits fruitful and more accurate discussions about racial inequality. Instead, family scholars should view racial inequality as a two-sided coin with Black families’ disadvantage on one side and white advantage on the other side.

The purpose of this blog post is to present a brief note on racial inequality, racism, and race to family scientists. To help organize this brief note, I focus on three general questions: (1) What do we know about racial inequality? (2) How can centering race and racism better inform our understanding of racial inequality? (3) How can family scholars move racial inequality research forward?

Let’s begin!

What Do We Know About Racial Inequality?

Racial inequality is a social fact. That is, individuals racialized as Black are doing worse on every major indicator of well-being compared to individuals racialized as white. From early in the life-course such as stillbirths and maternal/infant deaths to later in the life-course such as adult mortality. And everything in-between such as income and poverty, unemployment, wealth, health, home ownership, student loan debt, and neighborhood quality. These inequalities persist over time.

How Can Centering Race and Racism Better Inform Our Understanding of Racial Inequality?

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Most reasonable people would not debate whether racial inequality exists. The debate tends to emerge when explanations are given about why racial inequality exists and persists. Some explanations focus on individual behaviors (e.g., the rise in nonmarital childbearing among Black women); and some explanations center on structural conditions (e.g., laws, policies, discrimination, etc.). The explanations—individual behaviors or structural conditions—make assumptions about race and racism that are taken for granted.

I highlight the assumptions undergirding these perspectives to provide a more holistic approach to the study of racial inequality, especially for scholars who study families.

The “individual behaviors” and “structural conditions” dichotomy falls within two broader theoretical camps—(1) essentialism (emphasizing individual behaviors) and (2) social constructionism (emphasizing structural conditions). These two camps are well known among scholars who study race and racism. They provide the rationale for why racial inequality persists. For a more comprehensive understanding, see here and here.

To better understand these two camps, we need to know what assumptions each camp—essentialism and social constructionism—make about race and racism. For example, from a racial essentialism perspective, the key assumption is that race makes racism possible. Thus, eradicating racism will lead to racial equity. From a social constructionism perspective, the key assumption is that racism makes race possible. Thus, “race can never be an explanatory factor apart from racism because race is always already a function of racism”.

In the sections below, I first elaborate on the assumptions of both camps and provide examples of how these perspectives guide our understanding of racial inequality. Next, I end this blog by discussing a new conceptual model for understanding racial inequality.

Essentialism versus Social Constructionism

Racial Essentialism. Although most scholars view race as a social construction, the social construction heuristic is seldom employed. In fact, conventional racial differences research almost always takes an essentialist approach—albeit unintentional. From this perspective, race represents biologically (or culturally) real groups.

Contemporary studies do not make explicit arguments about race as biology but cultural essentialism in family research refuse to die. In fact, the lack of conceptualization of race can lead to misconceptions that racialized groups are inherently biological (or culturally) different. This is especially important given that scientific racism persists in the U.S. One of the biggest limitations of contemporary research on racial inequality in families is that many studies run the risk of reproducing an essentialist logic of race by (1) presenting race as an ahistorical demographic variable, (2) assuming racism is episodic–or a relic of the past, and (3) framing individual-level behaviors as central explanations for racial inequality.

First, treating race as an ahistorical, demographic characteristic of the population reifies race as an essentialist characteristic. This happens when scholars begin studies with racial variations in a given outcome but does not explain what race is. This approach is limiting because Black families’ disadvantage becomes hyper-visible whereas white families’ advantage becomes hyper-invisible. Moreover, this approach treats Black disadvantage and white advantage as unrelated, and the point of emphasis in research is figuring out what mechanisms can make Black families “like” white families.

Second, the idea that racism is episodic draws attention to the belief that racism is a thing of the past and no longer a cause for racial inequality. Consider Figure 1 below. From an essentialist perspective, Black families’ adverse conditions are understood in the context of overt racism (slavery and Jim Crow laws). In the post Civil-Rights era, however, racism is no longer an issue. Thus, racism is era-specific and only happened during certain “episodes” of American history.

Third, given that racism is viewed as a thing of the past, individual-level “behaviors” are now the reason racial inequality persists in the United States, especially in the post Civil-Rights era (see Figure 2). This logic mirrors the post Civil Rights explanations of inequality. Contemporary research tends to over-invest in using individual-level characteristics or behaviors. For instance, family structure (marriage vs. non-marriage) is one of the most used individual-level behaviors to explain the Black-White gap across indices of wellbeing. This logic dates back to the 1960s. The general idea is that racial variations in these behaviors (e.g., unmarried childbearing) may help to understand variations in the outcome of interest (i.e., racial inequality). This approach has proven to be ineffective in addressing racial inequality (see here and here).

The challenge here is that there is usually no argument for addressing why racial variations exist in the so-called behaviors in the first place. Family formations is a great example of this. For example, decades of research on understanding racial variation in family formations relied on deficit approaches or economic reductionist arguments. Yet, scholarship on how Black mothers create adaptive strategies for dealing with omnipresent white supremacy and patriarchy has been largely ignored in conventional research–see Franke 1999; Frankel 1999; Hill 2006; Hunter 2017; Lenhardt 2014).

Ironically, contemporary research continues to operate from a “backdoor” essentialist approach. Figure 3 represents a typical conceptual model used in contemporary research. The conventional approach “mirrors” an essentialist perspective because the point of interest tends to focus on individual behaviors as mechanisms to account for racial inequality. For example, most scholars examining “racial differences” fall into the trap of (1) failing to fully conceptualized race at the onset of their studies, (2) treating individual-level characteristics as race-neutral in explaining the racial gap, and (3) employing race-comparative analyses that position white families as the standard against which people of color are measured. I have written about this here.

Social Constructionism. Social constructionists recognize race as a social invention—created to justify and maintain racial oppression, domination, and exclusion. From this perspective, racism makes race possible. Below, I elaborate on social constructionism to chart a path forward to studying racial inequality in family research. Specifically, I draw on three central tenets from Critical Race Theory: (1) race is socially constructed, (2) racism is a permanent feature in the U.S., and (3) ideas about individualism serve a new set of racist ideologies to maintain the status quo—colorblind racism.

How Can Family Scholars Move Racial Inequality Research Forward?

Adequately understanding race and racism matters for family scholars studying racial inequality. I discuss three interrelated ways family scholars can move racial inequality research forward. I offer a new conceptual model (Figure 4) that centers racism and race to provide a more adequate explanation for racial inequality than conventional approaches. This model is an updated version of my previous model published in the edited volume, Africana Demography.

First, Panel A (Figure 4) is an illustrative example of the social construction of race. This section of the conceptual model makes apparent that racism is composed of both ideology and structure. The ideology begins with the premise that human groups are biologically real and can be hierarchically ordered (Fields and Fields 2014; Shelby 2014). The structure component of racism refers to the micro- and macro-level practices that subordinates so-called inferior racialized groups (Golash-Boza 2016). Ideology and structure are mutually reinforcing.

Second, the path from Panel A to Panel C (Figure 4) illustrates the idea that racial inequities are measurable manifestations of racial stratification in the United States via racism. This path reflects the second CRT tenet, the permanence of racism. This tenet recognizes that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational” (Delgado and Stefancic 2017) and is sensitive to stability and change. For instance, although racism changed from overt (e.g., genocide, slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.) to covert (e.g., color-blind racism), racial inequalities
persist (Bonilla-Silva 2017; Feagin 2013; Mills 1997; Omi and Winant 2014). The racial hierarchy is resilient to social change by adjusting and altering the mechanisms responsible for racial inequality.

Last, Panel B (Figure 4) addresses the mechanisms maintaining racial stratification. Critical race scholars reject the idea of meritocracy and “colorblind” as explanations for contemporary racial inequality. Instead, scholars from this line of reasoning point to racism as responsible for persistent racial inequality. Thus, instead of focusing on individual-level behaviors as mechanisms to reduce or “account for” racial inequality, critical scholars tend to demonstrate how racism is embedded in the state and spatial dynamics maintaining and perpetuating racial inequality.

Moreover, this approach also highlights how focusing on individual-level characteristics contributes to the maintenance of racial inequality. Family structure is a great example. For instance, given that Black marriages were tied to citizenship laws, and marriage is a gendered institution, Black women have always created alternative family forms. The state interpreted these adaptive strategies (e.g., nonmarital childbearing) as deficiencies, resulting in out-of-wedlock childbirths becoming a central explanation for racial inequality. Thus, the state superimposed Eurocentric (or white) logic on Black families’ lived experiences while rendering white supremacy invisible–this is the recipe for maintaining racial subjugation. Instead of focusing on structural racism, policies concentrated on marriage as a way to reduce inequality. Yet, racial gaps in several indices of well-being have stayed the same and some even grew wider.

In the end, how, and in what ways, scholars approach racism, race, and racial inequality has real implications for how research studies are designed, what research questions are considered important, how data are analyzed, and what conclusions are drawn.

Conclusion

This blog post serves as a brief note to family scholars studying racial inequality. My central argument is as follows: to adequately address racial inequality requires a more critical and comprehensive understanding of racism and race. How scholars approach racism and race matters. Sadly, critical discussions on racism and race in family inequality research are largely absent. Scholars have, however, critiqued family scholarship more broadly (see here and here and here and here and here). Scholars should be clear about racism, race, and racial inequality in family research because it can help move studies away from maintaining the status quo by charting a path towards a family science of Black emancipation.

Deadric T. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Williams’ research focuses on race and racism, Black families, health, and inequality. Williams is a W.T. Grant Scholar. You can follow them on Twitter @doc_thoughts

Reprinted from The University of Texas at Austin Population Center

African American parents commonly socialize their adolescent children about race, ethnicity, and interracial relations. These racial socialization messages include communications about potential racial barriers – known as preparation for bias – and messages about African American culture, history and heritage – known as cultural socialization.

Cultural socialization has been linked to adolescents’ academic achievement, fewer problem behaviors, and better psychological functioning. Though the evidence is somewhat weaker than for cultural socialization, preparation for bias has been linked to reduced problem behaviors, increased self-esteem, and increased wellbeing in the presence of racial discrimination.

African American individuals can experience racial discrimination directly or vicariously. In addition, they can fear future discrimination, also known as anticipated discrimination. These race-related stressors may, in turn, influence African American parents’ racial socialization messages (see figure). For example, after parents are exposed to others’ racial discrimination experiences (e.g., the death of Trayvon Martin), they may prepare their children to cope with racial stressors. Moreover, parents’ worries about experiencing future racial discrimination may lead them to communicate about race with their children.

How parents view their race and think others view them (i.e., their racial identity), as well as whether they are a mother or father, can influence the relationship between race-related stressors and the racial socialization messages that they give their children (see figure). For example, previous research has found that parents who believe others view their race negatively (i.e., they report low public regard for African Americans) are more likely to communicate with their children about racial discrimination. Similarly, parents who hold positive views of their own race (i.e., they report high private regard for African Americans) share more positive messages about being Black with their children.

This research brief reports on a recent study that examined how parents’ race-related stressors, racial identity, and gender shape the racial socialization messages they give their adolescents. The researchers analyzed online survey data from a national sample of 567 African American parents of adolescents.

Key Findings

• Levels of discrimination: African American parents reported moderate levels of personal racial discrimination and vicarious racial discrimination experiences. They reported moderately high levels of anticipating future racial discrimination.
• Personal and vicarious racial discrimination experiences were related to the messages parents gave their adolescent children about African American culture, history, and heritage. However, anticipated racial discrimination was not associated with these cultural socialization messages.
  • Among mothers who held positive views about African American people (i.e., reported high private regard), higher reported experiences of vicarious racial discrimination were associated with more cultural socialization messages for their adolescents.
• The following groups had higher preparation for bias messages; that is, they did more to prepare their adolescent children for bias:
  • Parents who believe that others view their race negatively (i.e., reported low public regard) who also experienced high vicarious racial discrimination;
  • Mothers who reported higher anticipated racial discrimination; and
  • Fathers who hold positive views about African American people who also had high levels of personal racial discrimination experiences.

Policy Implications

Race-related stressors, particularly those associated with vicarious and anticipated racial discrimination, are common among African American parents and likely influence how they socialize their children about race. Reducing discrimination and helping African American parents cope with these race-related stressors would benefit parents and their children. Ways to achieve these goals include increasing resources available to schools, mental health providers, and institutions that serve African American families. 

African American parents often relay messages about race to their adolescents that promote pride in their ethnic-racial group and that warn of possible racial barriers. The colorblind approaches (e.g., “I only see one race, the human race”) that are sometimes emphasized in schools are in conflict with these racial socialization messages that African American parents share with their children. Therefore, schools should strongly consider curricula that include racial socialization messages to both instill students’ pride in their racial-ethnic group and prepare them for bias.

Finally, African American parents’ racial messages to their children vary based on personal characteristics such as gender and racial attitudes, as well as based on their exposure to different race-related stressors. More funding for culturally-relevant training and interventions is needed to support African American families with attention to how exposure to and processing of racialized experiences may differently influence Black mothers and fathers.

Reference

Holloway, K., & Varner, F. (2021). Parenting despite discrimination: Does racial identity matter? Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. Online ahead of print. 

Suggested Citation

Holloway, K., & Varner, F. (2021). The messages African American mothers and fathers give adolescents about race are shaped by their own experiences with racial discrimination as well as their observations and fears of racial discrimination. PRC Research Brief 6(10). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/15673.

About the Authors

Kathleen Holloway (kathleenholloway@utexas.edu) is a PhD candidate and graduate research assistant in the department of Human Development & Family Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin and Fatima Varner is an assistant professor in the department of Human Development & Family Sciences and a faculty scholar in the Population Research Center at UT Austin.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD042849), awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Reprinted from Gender & Society February 1, 2022

Why is there a gender gap in orgasms in heterosexual sex? Research has long shown a gender gap in orgasms between men and women in heterosexual sexual encounters. They have also shown that sexual practices that focus on clitoral stimulation reduces the gap. Since we know this, why are couples not engaging in the types of sexual activities that might reduce the orgasm gap?

In my recent research with Tina Fetner and Melanie Health in Gender & Society, we examine data from the nationally representative Sex in Canada survey and find that 86% of men had an orgasm in their most recent heterosexual sexual encounter compared to 62% of women. We found that women whose most recent encounter included receiving clitoral stimulation via oral sex are more likely to have had an orgasm than those who did not. Other recent studies have documented similar gender discrepancies in orgasm rates, but since many focus on a particular group, such as undergraduate students, it has been unclear until now whether this was a problem across heterosexual couples more generally. Our study shows that it is.

To better understand why the gender gap in orgasms persists despite all we know about what increases women’s likelihood to orgasm during heterosexual partnered sex, we conducted in-depth interviews with women and men across Canada. Our interview participants drew on traditional beliefs about gender to justify men’s orgasms as natural and expected and women’s orgasms as time-consuming work.

Three different perspectives stood out. Our participants voiced essentialist views of gender and sexuality that naturalized differences between men and women to explain why men prioritize physical pleasure, while women are expected to prioritize emotional intimacy during sex. Another theme was that many of the people we interviewed defined what counts as “regular” sex as equating to penile-vaginal intercourse. Through this narrow, phallocentric understanding of sex, stimulation of the penis (and consequently men’s pleasure) inherently becomes a part of “regular sex.” Alternatively, sexual behaviors focused on clitoral stimulation, like oral sex, were considered to be “special,” “separate” from the main event, and “extra work.” Finally, some of those we talked to relied on the sexual double standard to justify why women self-regulate their sexual expression. In these instances, women’s sexual desire and sexual practices focused on women’s pleasure were understood as dirty or wrong, and their bodies were considered simply too difficult to please. These narratives were produced by both men and women, revealing how heterosexual couples reinforce traditional, essentialist gender norms during sex.

Our participants’ explanations for the orgasm gap made men’s orgasms appear natural and expected and women’s orgasms as extra, more work, and more difficult. Their understandings contribute to the normalization that penile-vaginal intercourse is what constitutes “regular sex” and this itself privileges men’s pleasure and orgasms. Although women’s lack of orgasms compared to men may feel like an individual, intimate problem, we demonstrate that the gender gap in orgasms takes work. It is enabled by the gender essentialist beliefs embedded in the institution of heterosexuality. These findings help us move beyond essentialist “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” justifications that women simply do not care about orgasm to how gender beliefs deprive women of an equal opportunity to orgasm in heterosexual sex.

Nicole Andrejek (@NicoleAndrejek) is a qualitative researcher on the Sex in Canada project at McMaster University and at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. Her research interests include analyses of Canadians’ sexual practices, sexual health, and sexual pleasure. Her forthcoming book, Dating in the Digital Age (Routledge), examines undergraduate women’s experiences navigating sex, friendships, dating, and consent in university hookup culture.

Reprinted from Gender & Society February 4, 2022

September 27^th, 2021 kicked off the tenth annual Diaper Need Awareness Week in the United States where one in three families with infants and toddlers cannot afford enough diapers. City, state, and federal legislators across the country endorsed proclamations recognizing diaper deprivation as a problem and applauding the work of a growing national network of diaper banks and pantries that distribute free diapers to families and partner organizations. Privately funded diaper banks have proliferated in the United States since the 1990s and now number in the hundreds. Collectively they distribute millions of disposable diapers a year, and yet meet only about five percent of the estimated need. Diaper bank staff on the front lines of diaper advocacy face consistent criticism. What could possibly be controversial about providing financially strapped families with a basic need every baby has?

For starters, diapers are not officially recognized as a need. Diapers are not covered by existing public aid policies, including SNAP and WIC food assistance programs. Categorized along with hygiene and cleaning products, diapers are an “unallowable” non-food expense. Like other items deemed discretionary rather than medically necessary, diapers are still taxed in most states. Yet one would be hard-pressed to find any parent or caregiver who considers diapers optional. Although welfare cash aid can be used to purchase diapers, it’s not coincidental that the number of diaper banks in the United States has grown exponentially since 1990s welfare reform. Many fewer families now receive cash aid, and the value of that aid has dwindled. The average $80 monthly diaper bill for one child would alone use 8 to 40 percent of the average state benefit through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

But there’s another important reason that diaper bankers face consistent criticism and stalled efforts to pass policies that would provide public diaper support: cloth diapers. In my recent article in Gender & Society based on interviews with 40 diaper bank staff, most of whom were involved in diaper policy advocacy, and 70 mothers who experienced diaper need, I discovered a key case of how gender, class, and race inequalities intersect to impede policies promoting access to basic needs. Many diaper bankers shared stories of policymakers, community members, and other stakeholders who responded to requests for diaper support by asking Why don’t they just use cloth?

Embedded within this seemingly simple retort are numerous sexist, classist, and racist assumptions about easy individual solutions to structural problems like diaper need. Whereas policymakers are still predominantly white, affluent, older men unlikely to change many diapers, much less struggle with diaper need, the parents I interviewed were mostly mothers of color living in poverty who had tried cloth diapering but found it to be more expensive, labor-intensive, and time prohibitive. As Leslie, a Black 28-year-old mother of one, explained to me,  “That’s probably why programs don’t cover diapers, because they think cloth are free. But then you have to spend on washing, detergent, water, electricity, and all the work and worry. You still have to pay for it in some way.” For these reasons, cloth is the diaper type used by a very narrow segment of American families – typically married middle-class homeowners with an in-house washer and dryer and a stay-at-home parent. Most daycare facilities will not accept cloth diapers, and many states have laws prohibiting washing them in public laundry facilities.

Disposable diapers became almost universal during the last three decades of the twentieth century, the same time period when the labor market participation rates of mothers with children three and younger doubled from around 35 to over 70 percent. Now that over 95 percent of babies in the United States wear disposables for most or all of their diapering needs, mothers of color feared that having their children seen in public in anything but a “normal” disposable diaper – such as a cloth diaper presumed to be a “rag” – could invite suspicion about their parental fitness. As it turns out, parents most likely to struggle with diaper need can’t just use cloth diapers because the ability to do so is now profoundly influenced by middle-class, white, androcentric privileges.    

This is a case of what I call gendered policy vacuums, which refer to when gender disparities and ideologies result in policy gaps around caregiving and provisions needed to satisfy basic human needs for sustenance, health, cleanliness, and dignity. Gender policy vacuums have emerged around numerous related struggles, including food insecurity, housing instability, and most recently, childcare deficits in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The American ideology of individualism tasks mothers with responsibility for ensuring their children’s well-being through labor-intensive and time-consuming parenting practices, such as breastfeeding, home-cooking, and cloth diapering. But such directives devalue and render invisible feminized care labor, especially that performed by low-income mothers of color.

As mothers shared with me, the same social, economic, and political conditions that intersect to create their diaper need also prevent them from using cloth diapers as a way to meet that need. But the assumption that poor women’s labor can readily solve problems of gender inequality  – as the Why don’t they just use cloth? retort suggests – rationalizes lack of public redress for gendered inequalities and resultant policy gaps around caregiving. As one diaper bank founder, Janine, said of her continued efforts to advocate for diaper policies: “We expect so much more of poor mothers, so why not cloth, many ask. For families for whom that works, great! But why do we expect the poorest parents to do the most work? I want people to have what they need. Most of them need disposable diapers.” Let’s hope that our policies will eventually acknowledge that need, paving the way for public support for this basic need so easily taken for granted – unless your baby doesn’t have one.  

Jennifer Randles (@jrandles3) is Professor and Chair of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. She is the author of Proposing Prosperity: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America and Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering. She is currently writing a book on diaper insecurity, the diaper bank movement, and diaper politics.

Reprinted from The University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center February 2022

Hundreds of studies have documented the adverse psychological consequences after parents experience the death of a child. However, most of these studies are based on White populations, despite evidence that Black parents are more likely than White parents to experience a child’s death in the United States. Indeed, Black parents are about 2.5 times more likely than White parents to experience the death of a child by age 20. This disadvantage grows with age – Black parents in their 70s are about four times more likely to have experienced a child’s death.

Hispanic populations in the U.S. generally exhibit lower mortality rates than non-Hispanic Whites. However, mortality rates are higher for some Hispanic subgroups, particularly young adults and U.S.-born Hispanics. These patterns suggest that some groups of Hispanic parents may be at greater risk of experiencing a child’s death compared to White parents. But this risk has not been documented in previous research.

Therefore, very little is known about racial/ethnic variation in life course experiences following the death of a child. These gaps in knowledge are striking in the American context of systemic racism and recent public attention to grief associated with premature mortality in racial and ethnic minority communities.

The death of a significant other is a highly stressful life event, and the death of a child is often considered the most devastating type of bereavement. A child’s death at any age is associated with significant adverse effects on parents’ health and psychological well-being.

When considering the link between the death of a child and parents’ subsequent psychological distress, overall patterns of distress across racial/ethnic groups must be considered. A consistent epidemiologic finding is that Black and U.S.-born Hispanic Americans experience more psychological distress than White Americans. In addition, depressive symptoms are more prevalent for U.S.-born than foreign-born Hispanic adults in the United States. This last finding highlights the importance of considering where a person was born when exploring similarities and differences across Hispanic populations.

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, a large, nationally representative sample of the United States population over age 50, this research brief reports on a recent study¹ in which the authors consider whether experiencing a child’s death is associated with parents’ subsequent psychological distress in mid to later life.

The authors document variation in life course exposure to the death of a child for Black, White, U.S.-born Hispanic, and foreign-born Hispanic parents. Next, in recognition of systemic racism that contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in mortality and bereavement, they focus on racial and ethnic disadvantage in exposure to child death as a traumatic life course event that may add to racial/ethnic disadvantage in psychological distress. Finally, in light of greater stress and discrimination experienced by Black and Hispanic populations, they explore whether the death of a child has stronger effects on psychological distress for Black and Hispanic parents than for White parents. 

Key Findings

• Among mid to later life parents, Black and U.S.-born Hispanic parents have the highest likelihood of experiencing a child’s death in their lifetime: 21% of non-Hispanic Black parents and 20% of U.S.-born Hispanic parents have experienced the death of a child compared to 15% of foreign-born Hispanic parents and 13% of non-Hispanic White parents.
• A child’s death at any point in the life course is associated with increased psychological distress in mid to later life for Black, Hispanic, and White parents, further underscoring the lasting effects of the death of a child on parents. See Figure.
  • These findings add to growing evidence of the lifelong effects of experiencing the death of a child. Other recent studies from the authors show that the death of a child also increases mortality² and dementia risk³ during the life course.
• Black and Hispanic parents who have experienced the death of a child have the highest levels of psychological distress. See Figure.
  • Black and U.S.-born Hispanic parents are doubly disadvantaged by their greater likelihood of child bereavement and higher distress levels regardless of bereavement.
  • Foreign-born Hispanic parents are also disadvantaged by their greater vulnerability to high levels of distress in response to a child’s death.
• The effects of losing a child on later psychological distress persist beyond the effects of other major life stressors. This finding underscores the profound and lasting impact of a child’s death and the disadvantages experienced by racial and ethnic minority parents and communities.

Policy Implications

Higher exposure to stress among Black and Hispanic Americans compared to White Americans is central to the production of health disparities in the United States. The death of a child is a uniquely stressful life event with lasting consequences that add to racial/ethnic disparities in the health and well-being of mid to later life adults.

Currently, the significant health consequences of bereavement remain largely invisible and untreated in diverse older populations. Given the prevalence of child death – particularly in racial/ethnic minority populations – along with the lasting consequences of loss, greater attention should be directed toward screening and intervention. Routine doctor visits as well as emergency medical visits provide an opportunity to screen for bereavement-related risks. A national bereavement leave policy would bring attention to bereavement as a public health problem and make it possible for bereaved parents to receive needed care and time off work.

In addition, future studies should identify the pathways through which bereavement affects psychological distress. It will be by disrupting these pathways that future policy and practice efforts may help to reduce the long-term adverse effects of bereavement on psychological distress across diverse populations. Future data collection should also address racial/ethnic differences in the risks and consequences of bereavement so as to be able to better design policies and interventions to close the gaps between racial/ethnic minority and White populations.

References

¹Umberson, D. & Donnelly, R. (2021). The death of a child and parents’ psychological distress in mid to later life: racial/ethnic differences in exposure and vulnerability. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences Published online ahead of print.

²Donnelly, R., Umberson, D., Hummer, R.A., & Garcia, M.A. 2020. Race, death of a child, and mortality risk among aging parents in the United States. Social Science & Medicine 249:112853.

³Umberson, D., Donnelly, R., Xu, M., Farina, M. & Garcia, M.A. 2020. “Death of a child prior to midlife, dementia risk, and racial disparities.” Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 75(9):1983-1995.

Suggested Citation

Umberson, D. & Donnelly, R. (2022). The  unequal burden of child death adds to disadvantage in psychological distress for Black and Hispanic parents. CAPS Research Brief 1(1). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/23477.

About the Authors

Debra Umberson (umberson@prc.utexas.edu) is a professor of sociology; Christine and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Liberal Arts; co-director of The Center on Aging and Population Sciences and a faculty scholar in the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Rachel Donnelly is an assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant P30AG066614, awarded to the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin by the National Institute on Aging, grant R01AG054624, awarded to Debra Umberson, principal investigator, by the National Institute on Aging and by grant P2CHD042849, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

This brief is published in partnership with UT Austin’s Population Research Center, which provides CAPS with high-quality services and resources to facilitate large-scale, population-based aging research.

Reprinted from The University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center March 2022

Most students in the United States attend racially segregated schools. The average White student’s school is 70% White. Latinx and Black students typically attend schools in which 50% of students are from their own racial/ethnic group. And, although about 5% of the U.S. public school population is made up of people of Asian descent (hereafter described as “Asian” in this brief), the average Asian student’s school is 24% Asian.

To explain school racial segregation, researchers often highlight structural factors, particularly school assignment based on racially segregated neighborhoods. And while these structures contribute to segregation, schools in cities without residential school assignments are also segregated. Research has demonstrated that school segregation is actually intensified in communities that have adopted policies allowing for more school-choice options. For example, White families often enroll in schools with more White students than their neighborhood schools and charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools. 

Understanding families’ school preferences, particularly if they are motivated by race, is necessary to evaluate the impact on racial segregation of expanded school-choice policies.

Here, race is conceptualized as a historically and socially situated construction that categorizes individuals based on their phenotype and ancestry. Latinx people can be of any race. Given the race-based stereotypes and discrimination associated with Latinx people in the U.S., the author refers to Latinx as a racial category.

The U.S. racial hierarchy positions people on a continuum with White people at the top, Black people at the bottom, and Asian and Latinx people in the middle. The U.S. education system reflects, reinforces, and shapes the country’s racial hierarchy through multiple racialized mechanisms. 

Prior research has shown that many people hold academic stereotypes that White students are smart and peaceful, and Black students are lazy, violent and low income. Latinx students are sometimes seen are hardworking and other times as unintelligent or criminally inclined, and Asian students are seen as both intellectually superior and perpetual foreigners. White and Asian students have also been shown to receive preferential treatment (for example, receiving more referrals to advanced classes and less harsh discipline) compared to Black and Latinx students in the same school. In addition, on average, schools attended by White and Asian students have more resources than schools attended by Black and Latinx students. 

Within this larger context of race in U.S. schools, school preferences are likely guided by several factors related to race. Parents’ and students’ choices may be guided by their understanding and endorsement of the racial hierarchy operating in U.S. society. They may also be guided by their affinity toward their own racial/ethnic group, known as in-group affect. Finally, Black and Latinx families could be influenced by vulnerability to racism, or apprehension toward attending majority White schools because of the potential for racially biased interactions and policies.

This brief reports on a recent study¹ in which the author asked eighth-grade students and their parents who were actively choosing New York City (NYC) high schools to examine hypothetical schools with randomized majority White, majority Latinx, majority Black, and racially diverse compositions and other school characteristics. The 431 students and 403 parents evaluated five randomly assigned school profiles and then indicated their willingness to attend the schools. Across profiles, schools’ racial demographics, school safety rating, neighborhood safety rating, graduation rate, and metal detector presence were experimentally manipulated. The author then compared the experimental findings with administrative data on the full population of NYC families’ actual high school choices.

Key Findings

• Schools’ racial composition affects New York City families’ (parents + students) school preferences. Among schools with similar graduation rates, safety ratings, and other factors, school racial demographics affect White, Asian, Latinx, and Black families’ willingness to attend schools. See Figure
  • White families’ aversion to attending the majority Back and Latinx schools is twice that of Black and Latinx families’ aversion to attending the majority White school.
• Racial composition is an important factor for most parents, above and beyond other school characteristics. See Figure
  • White and Asian parents rate majority Black and Latinx schools lower than majority White schools, and Latinx parents prefer to avoid Black schools compared to other schools.
  • White, Asian, and Latinx parents’ internalization of the racial hierarchy could guide their preferences.
  • Black parents do not express race-based preferences for schools.
• White, Latinx, and Black students’ race-based school preferences differ from parents’ preferences. See Figure
  • White and Latinx parents are much more avoidant of Black schools than White and Latinx students.
  • Potentially influenced by in-group affect, White and Latinx students prefer schools in which their racial group was in the majority.
  • While school racial demographics do not influence Black parents’ school preferences, Black students desired to avoid the majority White school.
  • Asian students’ preferences are similar to Asian parents: they rated White and mixed schools as the most desirable.
• Actual school choices are similar to the hypothetical school choices. The patterns of NYC families’ race-based school choices on their actual applications to high schools are similar to the patterns of families’ race-based preferences in the study experiment. 

Policy Implications

Although policymakers often frame school choice as a race-neutral policy, school racial demographics are central to how families choose schools. School attributes related to race cannot fully explain racial sorting and segregation within and across school districts. Instead, families’ preferences to associate with or to avoid particular school racial demographics likely contribute to contemporary patterns of school and neighborhood racial segregation. 

Families’ race-based school preferences stem from a racial-educational structure that is made up of racial stereotypes and racist policies within and across schools. To increase racial equity and integration in schools, policymakers must dismantle educational practices, such as racially biased academic tracking and disciplinary practices, that perpetuate negative stereotypes and marginalize student populations.  

Reference

¹Hailey, C.A. (2022). Racial preferences for schools: Evidence from an experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian parents and students. Sociology of Education. Published online ahead of print.

Suggested Citation

Hailey, C.A. (2022). White, Asian, Latinx, and Black families express race-based school preferences. PRC Research Brief 7(2). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/31961.

About the Author

Chantal Hailey is an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty scholar in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD042849), awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE1342536, the Institute of Education Sciences–funded Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training (IES-PIRT) Program at New York University, and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Grant. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the other funders.

The month of May means graduation. This is the time of the year to celebrate accomplishment, take pride in completing degrees, and look to the future. In fact, college graduation is called “commencement,” signaling the beginning of something—for many, it’s what they hope is the beginning of independent adulthood.

But in our recently published research, we found that college graduation doesn’t always bring the commencement of “adulthood” if adulthood is defined as financial or residential independence. Especially among college graduates with loans.

To find out about how students and college graduates with and without loans rely on family for housing and financial help, what kinds of help they give to their families in return, and how they feel about it, we interviewed and surveyed students and graduates at two public universities. Our data were all collected before the pandemic-spurred loan pause started in March 2020, allowing us to examine how student debt repayment obligations shaped young adults’ experiences of relying on and helping family before and after graduation.

Our research suggests rising student debt is reshaping the experiences of young adulthood for college graduates. Graduates often must live with parents or other family members to be able to afford other expenses and student loan payments. We found that financial support from family and living with family were both common, and graduates with loans were more likely to rely on regular financial help from parents, even though they had been less likely to have that support while they were still in college. After graduation, Alice[1] was living with her mother and contributing to some household bills in exchange, and told us “It’s definitely saving me money, and I have to place a live, so I’m thankful for that.”

At the same time, research participants felt that living with family kept them from crossing a threshold to adulthood. Ava, who was living with her parents, told us, “I just feel like you can’t be grown up living with your parents.” Yet, delaying residential independence also positioned graduates better for loan repayment, a major obstacle in reaching financial stability—another marker of the transition to adulthood. Participants Leo and PJ were both able to pay off all their student loans while living with their parents rent-free!

Sharing housing and pooling resources with family members helps graduates with loans. But it also often feels like an obligation, since their resources help their families, too. Some interview participants shared that they faced expectations of reciprocity—obligations to help family members in return for help they received—that were sometimes quite burdensome. In our survey, both students and graduates with loans were significantly more likely to give money to their families compared to those without loans, deepening their financial difficulties.

Two years after graduation, Monique was giving $300 a month to her mother and did a lot around the house. Monique’s romantic partner was also staying there and contributing $300 a month. Monique reported feeling overwhelmed at times: “I do a lot around the house, like besides work. I come home and I’m cooking because I have three younger siblings. I’m cooking dinner, I’m getting kids home from school and giving baths and getting them to bed. I take them to school in the morning, I get them dressed…I’m doing a lot.”

But Monique reported mostly feeling like the arrangement was working well, even if there were days her contributions felt weighty, and she knew she did a lot around the house because she hadn’t always been able to contribute financially.

We found that it is common for graduates to contribute monetarily to their households, and over half of graduates with loans reported giving money to family (compared to 28% of graduates without loans). But among those who gave money to their family, over half of graduates with loans (and over 70% of graduates without loans) also lived with their families. The financial contributions they gave usually amounted to less money than they would have to pay for housing if they were living independently. Ashley said it would be “cheaper than it would be if I was living by myself.” Noah told us that his decision to live at home and pay his parents several hundred dollars each month was “just the smartest thing financially.” He explained that “I can save my money, pay my loans, and then help my parents too.” He added, “the fact that I can contribute, it just feels more like a partnership more or less…. We help each other out.”

The changing funding structure for higher education—coupled with steeply rising college costs over the last several decades—has made college far more expensive for students and their families. The majority take out thousands of dollars in loans to fund their education. Completing their degrees positions graduating students to be much more likely to pay off their student loan debt, but it can take years or even decades. The pause on student loan repayment, interest, and collections has now been extended through August 31, 2022 after being repeatedly extended. People are wondering now, will student loan payments resume September 1, be paused again, or might student debt even be canceled? We’ve written before about how college students and graduates would approach their futures if their student debt were forgiven.

Our new findings suggest that if debt payments resume, college graduates will increasingly rely on their families for help, affecting multiple generations. If public higher education were adequately funded, college costs would be lower, loans would be less burdensome, and the experiences of college students and graduates would depend less on family resources. In the current higher education funding system, the outsized role that family resources play in paying for higher education instead contributes to persistent and deepening inequalities.

But given the current system, family help can be vital in enabling some graduates with loans to pay down their debt and eventually transition to independence—even if that independence is a bit delayed. So this commencement season, if you or someone you love is approaching college graduation: remember that it’s now common for graduates to live with family after completing their degrees. Given the high cost of college and the difficult burdens loans create, it’s often the best—or only—option that graduates have.

—

Joan Maya Mazelis is the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor (NYU Press 2017). She is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice and Acting Director of the Gender Studies Program at Rutgers University–Camden. Follow her @JoanieMazelis.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Follow her @ATKuperberg

[1] All names used are pseudonyms.

Many young adults today say that they are anxious or afraid of divorce. In many cases, they saw their own parents’ divorce up-close and want to avoid a similar fate. In other cases, they saw divorce play out from a distance, in their broader social networks, and eventually reached the same conclusion. Whatever the reason, many young adults say that although they generally approve of divorce, they are worried that they may one day go through a divorce themselves. Indeed, research shows that divorce haunts cohabiting young adults like a “specter,” and many choose to cohabit first as a way of “divorce-proofing” their eventual marriage.

Still, when it comes to how young adults think about divorce, few have paid attention to sexual minorities. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, however, sexual minorities can now think about marriage, and divorce, with respect their own lives. That is why, in our recent study (2021), we looked at written responses to open-ended survey questions about sexual minority young adults’ thoughts on divorce. All 257 of our respondents are unmarried individuals between the ages of 18-35 who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or queer.

In stark contrast to the divorce anxiety so commonly reported by heterosexual young adults, the sexual minority young adults in our sample made clear that if they ever do get married, they would have no trouble divorcing. In fact, in response to the statement, “There are some circumstances under which I would consider getting a divorce,”approximately 81% said that they strongly agree, and another 19% said that they agree. To be clear, our respondents also indicated that they would try to avoid divorce, through active communication and seeking out marriage counseling if necessary. However, they consistently emphasized that they are not afraid of divorce and in many cases, do not see divorce as a negative outcome.  As one 30-year-old bisexual woman wrote, “I would absolutely get a divorce, and I don’t see it as a last-resort, ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ type of thing. If it’s not working and two people are no longer in love or simply don’t want to be married anymore, then they should split.”

In general, our respondents tended to explain their willingness to divorce in one or more of the following ways. First, many said that they value their individual happiness and well-being more than they would value being married. Although most (60%) did express a desire to get married someday, many also explained that leading a happy, healthy life is simply a bigger priority for them. Second, some respondents said that they would be willing to divorce because they see being “stuck” or “trapped” in a bad marriage as a far worse outcome. Flipping the divorce anxiety script, these respondents are more worried about the possibility of an unsatisfying or troubled marriage than they are about divorce. Finally, a few said that they reject the idea that marriage is a lifelong commitment anyway. As one 32-year-old lesbian woman put it, “The possibility of divorce is part of marriage…It’s not failure, just time to change the structure and expectations of a relationship.”

Given that worries or concerns about divorce are so well documented among heterosexual young adults, our findings raise the question of how and why sexual identities might matter so much here. Our study cannot address this question directly, but we suspect that a significant factor is how sexual minorities are, as research suggests, socialized in both the dominant, heteronormative culture, which continues to celebrate marriage as a lifelong relationship, and in a distinctive queer culture, where individual autonomy is considered paramount, even in committed relationships. Perhaps participation in queer culture offers a kind of license to pursue divorce and thus helps to alleviate some of the divorce anxiety that heterosexual young adults so often report? Although not all of our respondents connected their willingness to divorce to their sexual identities, those who did tended to be the most willing.      

It is important to note that some legal observers see warning signs that the Obergefell decisionmight soon be challenged and possibly overturned by the Supreme Court. But for now at least, national marriage equality is a settled matter, and as a result, we have a lot to learn about marriage and divorce in the lives of sexual minorities. Our study, like others, suggests that sexual identity does play a key role in shaping how people think about and approach marital relationships, and future research should continue this line of inquiry.

Aaron Hoy, Ph.D., is assistant professor of sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where his teaching and research focus on families, sexualities, and qualitative research methods. He is the editor of The Social Science of Same-Sex Marriage: LGBT People and Their Relationships in the Era of Marriage Equality (Routledge, 2022). You can find him (mostly inactive) on Twitter @AaronHoy4

Jori Adrianna Nkwenti is a graduate student and Teaching Fellow in sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She teaches Introduction to Sociology and is completing her thesis, “Accustomly Intermarried: Racial/National Intermarriages and their Negotiation of Family Celebrations.” Creator and author of Sprouting Sociologist and Soc.Sh*t, you can find her, iced coffee in hand year-round, scrolling through Twitter @tobor143.

Sachita Pokhrel is an undergraduate student at Minnesota State University, Mankato, currently pursuing a BS in Sociology and Psychology

In more than 30 states, more than 100 bills that target transgender youth are in the legislative pipeline. This is part of a coordinated nationwide effort over the past few years to deny that transgender youth exist. In 2021, Arkansas passed a law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth (by preventing doctors, for example, from prescribing hormone blockers during puberty). Although the courts are currently blocking the law, dozens of states have followed course. In Alabama, they are proposing that criminal penalties should be levied against physicians for providing gender-affirming care to youth.

       Beyond medical care, many states are also trying to prevent transgender youth from participating in school sports teams that align with their gender identity. A growing number of states now require that transgender students show medical proof of having sex reassignment surgery before they are allowed to register for sports in accordance with their gender identity. The argument that is repeated in these laws is that it is “unfair to girls,” a clear denial that trans girls are girls. One of the trans student athletes, Terry Miller, who was forced into the center of a lawsuit stated, “It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored . . . The more we are told that we don’t belong and should be ashamed of who we are, the fewer opportunities we have to participate in sports at all.”

                   In Texas, where they like to brag that “everything is bigger in Texas,” the discriminatory efforts are also bigger. Texas recently passed a law in which gender-affirming support by parents is now considered “child abuse” and supportive parents can lose custody of their child to the foster care system. Although the courts have recently issued an injunction to pause the execution of that law, similar laws are still being proposed across the U.S.

                   These government efforts to discriminate against trans youth will have devasting consequences on trans youth and their families. Already, according to studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide attempts among transgender youth is three times higher than among their cisgender peers (more than 40% of trans youth attempt suicide). This is due in large part to relentless face-to-face harassment, as studies show 83 percent of transgender youth have been physically harassed and 25 percent have been physically assaulted. Beyond that face-to-face harassment, however, are the politicians and the political movements that have very real consequences on youth’s lives. According to The Trevor Project, the number of trans youth who reached out in a mental health crisis more than doubled in in the week after the Texas legislature introduced the “anti-trans bathroom bill,” the bill preventing trans youth from using the bathroom at school that matched their gender identity.

                   These discriminatory efforts in Texas, and throughout the country, stand in direct opposition to what research shows is beneficial for the health and well-being of youth. For example, one way that parents can be supportive of their trans youth is by using their chosen name and pronouns. Research has shown that when trans youth can use their preferred name, especially at home, school, work, and with friends, they are less depressed and have fewer suicidal thoughts and attempts.^[i] For every extra context they get to use their chosen name, there is a 56 percent decrease in suicidal behavior.  

                   Supportive and accepting families play a critical role in improving the well-being of trans youth. For example, when researchers asked LGBTQ youth about how supportive their families were of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, youth whose families were unsupportive were more than three times as likely to report both suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts compared with those who reported high levels of family acceptance. More than half of LGBTQ youth who came from unsupportive families had attempted suicide. Supportive families lower the odds that their teen will attempt suicide, reduce depression and anxiety, and alleviate some of the stress faced at school.^[ii]

                   In other words, the culture that many politicians are trying to promote, one that refuses to acknowledge that trans youth exist by denying them medical care, therapy, sports participation, and name changes, is the very culture associated with shockingly high suicide attempts. Parents play an even more important role now than ever before, as the bullies are not simply on the school yard but on the campaign trail. 

^[i] Stephen T. Russell et al., “Chosen name use is linked to reduced depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior among transgender youth,” Journal of Adolescent Health 63, no. 4 (2018): 503-505.

[ii] Caitlin Ryan et al., “Family acceptance in adolescence and the health of LGBT young adults,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 23, no. 4 (2010): 205-213.

In more than 30 states, more than 100 bills that target transgender youth are in the legislative pipeline. This is part of a coordinated nationwide effort over the past few years to deny that transgender youth exist. In 2021, Arkansas passed a law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth (by preventing doctors, for example, from prescribing hormone blockers during puberty). Although the courts are currently blocking the law, dozens of states have followed course. In Alabama, they are proposing that criminal penalties should be levied against physicians for providing gender-affirming care to youth.

       Beyond medical care, many states are also trying to prevent transgender youth from participating in school sports teams that align with their gender identity. A growing number of states now require that transgender students show medical proof of having sex reassignment surgery before they are allowed to register for sports in accordance with their gender identity. The argument that is repeated in these laws is that it is “unfair to girls,” a clear denial that trans girls are girls. One of the trans student athletes, Terry Miller, who was forced into the center of a lawsuit stated, “It is both unfair and painful that my victories have to be attacked and my hard work ignored . . . The more we are told that we don’t belong and should be ashamed of who we are, the fewer opportunities we have to participate in sports at all.”

                   In Texas, where they like to brag that “everything is bigger in Texas,” the discriminatory efforts are also bigger. Texas recently passed a law in which gender-affirming support by parents is now considered “child abuse” and supportive parents can lose custody of their child to the foster care system. Although the courts have recently issued an injunction to pause the execution of that law, similar laws are still being proposed across the U.S.

                   These government efforts to discriminate against trans youth will have devasting consequences on trans youth and their families. Already, according to studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide attempts among transgender youth is three times higher than among their cisgender peers (more than 40% of trans youth attempt suicide). This is due in large part to relentless face-to-face harassment, as studies show 83 percent of transgender youth have been physically harassed and 25 percent have been physically assaulted. Beyond that face-to-face harassment, however, are the politicians and the political movements that have very real consequences on youth’s lives. According to The Trevor Project, the number of trans youth who reached out in a mental health crisis more than doubled in in the week after the Texas legislature introduced the “anti-trans bathroom bill,” the bill preventing trans youth from using the bathroom at school that matched their gender identity.

                   These discriminatory efforts in Texas, and throughout the country, stand in direct opposition to what research shows is beneficial for the health and well-being of youth. For example, one way that parents can be supportive of their trans youth is by using their chosen name and pronouns. Research has shown that when trans youth can use their preferred name, especially at home, school, work, and with friends, they are less depressed and have fewer suicidal thoughts and attempts.^[i] For every extra context they get to use their chosen name, there is a 56 percent decrease in suicidal behavior.  

                   Supportive and accepting families play a critical role in improving the well-being of trans youth. For example, when researchers asked LGBTQ youth about how supportive their families were of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, youth whose families were unsupportive were more than three times as likely to report both suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts compared with those who reported high levels of family acceptance. More than half of LGBTQ youth who came from unsupportive families had attempted suicide. Supportive families lower the odds that their teen will attempt suicide, reduce depression and anxiety, and alleviate some of the stress faced at school.^[ii]

                   In other words, the culture that many politicians are trying to promote, one that refuses to acknowledge that trans youth exist by denying them medical care, therapy, sports participation, and name changes, is the very culture associated with shockingly high suicide attempts. Parents play an even more important role now than ever before, as the bullies are not simply on the school yard but on the campaign trail. 

^[1] Stephen T. Russell et al., “Chosen name use is linked to reduced depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior among transgender youth,” Journal of Adolescent Health 63, no. 4 (2018): 503-505.

[1] Caitlin Ryan et al., “Family acceptance in adolescence and the health of LGBT young adults,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing 23, no. 4 (2010): 205-213.

Christia Spears Brown, Ph.D., is a Developmental Psychologist and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on how gender and ethnic stereotypes and discrimination shape children and teen’s development. You can follow them on Twitter @ChristiaBrown

Reprinted from The University of Texas at Austin Population Center December 2021

The United States’ educational system has long struggled with racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps among its students. Students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds often have poorer academic attainment compared to White students and those from higher-income families. Lower levels of completed education are related to a host of negative outcomes in people’s lives, including higher rates of poverty and incarceration. Moreover, educational achievement gaps contribute to socioeconomic disadvantages that persist across generations.

Understanding the processes that could reduce disparities in academic achievement are critical to improving educational practice.

Adults’ expectations for the educational futures of youth strongly influence how well the youth do academically. Low teacher expectations and bias – that is, teachers holding lower expectations than would be expected given a student’s prior achievement levels – are linked to young people’s poorer grades, lower achievement test scores, and a lower chance of graduating from high school. Conversely, parents’ high expectations are linked to youth’s academic achievement, grades, college attendance and completion. However, less is known about how teachers’ and parents’ expectations come together – particularly if the expectations do not align – to influence young people’s educational success.

In addition, adults’ expectations may influence the interactions and supports they provide to youth. For example, parents with high educational expectations for their adolescents may be more likely to volunteer at the school or participate in parent-teacher conferences. On the other hand, parents with low educational expectations for their adolescents may recognize their adolescents’ academic struggles and engage in frequent communication with the school in response to the academic challenges their children experience. These interactions between students and important adults may, in turn, either promote or hinder students’ achievement as well as students’ academic self-concept, or  perceptions of their ability to attain academic success.

The authors use data from the Education Longitudinal Study, a large, nationally‐representative sample of students who were high school sophomores in 2002. The students were again interviewed in 2006 to measure their educational attainment four years later. Educational expectations were measured by asking parents and math teachers to report the highest level of education they expected the student to complete on a continuum ranging from less than high school to an advanced degree. 

This research brief reports on a recent study¹ in which the authors investigated similarities and differences in parents’ and teachers’ educational expectations and how they may shape young people’s academic outcomes. They also explored whether measures of family-school connections and student academic self-concept served as mechanisms through which parent and teacher expectations influence later academic success. Finally, they examine whether variations existed in the relationships between adult expectations, family-school connections, and academic outcomes by students’ race and socioeconomic status.

KEY FINDINGS

High teacher expectations are critical for young people’s academic achievement (see Figure)

• Teachers’ educational expectations for students were more strongly linked to adolescents’ educational success than parents’ expectations.
• The positive effects of high teacher educational expectations:
  • were even stronger if parents had high expectations.
  • decreased the negative effects of low parent expectations.

Students’ race/ethnicity mattered in some cases

• White students experienced greater benefits from high parent expectations than did Black, Latinx, or Asian American students.
• For Asian American students, having a teacher with high educational expectations lessened the negative effects of low parent expectations.

Higher socioeconomic students benefited more from high parental expectations

• Students from high socioeconomic backgrounds experienced greater benefits from high parent expectations than did students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Lower adult expectations were linked to greater parent-school communication

• This is important because greater parent-school communication was linked to lower student grade point averages.

Two main family-school pathways describe how adult educational expectations operated

• Higher teacher and parent expectations were both linked to greater levels of parents’ involvement at school, which boosted students’ academic self-concept and subsequent educational success.
• In addition, when teachers had higher educational expectations for the student, they formed closer student-teacher connections, which promoted higher grade point averages.

Policy Implications

High teacher expectations and strong student–teacher relationships are crucial for improving youth academic achievement. Improving educational expectations that teachers hold for all students has the potential to greatly assist youth who are often marginalized in educational settings. Therefore, providing teachers with the tools to create classrooms where high expectations are the norm for all is likely a crucial means for improving student achievement. In addition, these interventions could also integrate methods for encouraging parents to enact more effective home‐based involvement strategies and providing accessible and welcoming opportunities for parents of marginalized students to be involved at school. Such work is crucial for ensuring the educational well‐being of all students.

Reference

¹Benner, A.D., Fernandez, C.C., Hou, Y., & Gonzalez, C.S. (2021). Parent and teacher educational expectations and adolescents’ academic performance: Mechanisms of influence. Journal of Community Psychology 49:2679-2703. DOI: 10.1002/jcop.22644

Suggested Citation

Benner, A.D., Fernandez, C.C., Hou, Y., & Gonzalez, C.S. (2021). How do teachers’ and parents’ expectations come together to influence adolescents’ educational success? PRC Research Brief 6(12). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/17720.

About the Authors

Aprile D. Benner, abenner@prc.utexas.edu is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) and a faculty scholar in the Population Research Center at UT Austin; Celeste C. Fernandez is a PhD student in HDFS and a PRC graduate student trainee; Yang Hou is an assistant professor of family sciences at the University of Kentucky; and Chelsea Smith Gonzalez is a senior analyst at Atlassian.