Parenting, Prejudice and

Understanding the development of prejudice in individuals has received much attention over the past 50 years (Aboud & Amato, 2001). To address prejudice, it is necessary to examine how it is acquired and how it develops. A commonly held belief among laypersons, educators, and some psychologists is that parents are solely responsible for the development of prejudice in their children. In his classic examination of prejudice, Allport (1954) stressed the important role parents play in teaching prejudice to their children. Direct teaching by parents is the mechanism he used to explain how children are socialized to adopt prejudiced attitudes.

Developmental research has challenged this view of the role of parents in the acquisition of prejudicial attitudes. Current research, which has concentrated on the cognitive development, social cognition, interpersonal relations, and social change experienced by children, indicates that children's prejudice does not correlate with parental attitudes. While parental attitudes about race are fairly stable, children's attitudes about race change throughout childhood and adolescence. If prejudice were a direct result of imitation of parental attitudes, then there would be little change across the childhood years (that is, some children would be prejudiced based on parental attitudes, and some children would not). Instead, there are significant age-related changes in the manifestation of prejudicial attitudes, indicating that these attitudes are a reflection of social-cognitive and cognitive changes in children's thinking about others in the social world. [Page 800]For example, with age, there is a decrease in children's propensity to imitate their parents' emotional dispositions. Parental attitudes and those of their children are not highly correlated. Most significantly, researchers have found little or no meaningful relationship between parental prejudicial attitudes and those of their children for European American and African American families. Some studies have found that most children receive very little information about race or ethnicity from their parents. This suggests that children are influenced by their parents' attitudes only when parents explicitly talk about their views. Kofkin, Katz, and Downey (1995) found that African American parents were more likely to discuss race with their 3-year-olds, reportedly to protect their children from, or prepare them for, experiences of discrimination. There was no relation, however, between African American parents' talk of race and their children's attitudes.

While parental instruction in racism fits common-sense expectations, actual evidence supporting this view is scarce. Negative parental attitudes are not highly salient in adolescence due to the strong influence of peers, school experiences, and interracial encounters. Even if parents have negative attitudes, a child's attitudes can change as he or she grows older. Simply because a parent expresses negative views does not mean that the child will necessarily grow up to have the same views.

An alternate perspective, espoused by many researchers, is that parental influences on children's acquisition of prejudice take indirect and implicit forms, rather than direct and explicit. Social psychology research has demonstrated that while most adults today reject explicit forms of racism, many hold implicit and subconscious racial biases (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Thus, parents, as members of cultures, convey a complex set of implicit biases to children regarding expectations about friendship and intergroup attitudes based on race. For example, a European American mother may allow her daughter to be friends with an African American girl at school, but she might be uncomfortable allowing the friend to join a sleepover in her home. These messages may be conveyed implicitly, rather than explicitly, and may influence children's choice of cross-race friendships. This, in turn, can have a negative effect on children's prejudice levels, given that extensive research has found that cross-race friendships are one of the most significant predictors for a reduction in prejudice during development (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000).

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