Discussing Race and Racism with Young Children: A Qualitative Longitudinal Investigation

Racial socialization, a process in which parents communicate beliefs and values about children’s race and cultural backgrounds to help children prepare for their current and future social interactions, has lasting effects on child development. Understanding the extent to which children understand race in the context of racialized violence, and the extent to which parents are willing to engage their children in such conversations, is critical for professionals who work with and support families through these challenging contexts. Existing evidence suggests parents in racially minoritized groups often put more conscious efforts into racial socialization than their White parent peers. Although recent years have witnessed increasing attention to exploring White parents’ racial socialization beliefs and strategies, much of this work has occurred with older children and their parents. Understanding of racial socialization with young children remains limited. We followed 20 predominantly White families of young children (ages 3–6) over time across two years (2019 fall and 2020 summer) and elicited parents’ experiences and perspectives in discussing race. Inductive analysis using a grounded theory approach with peer debriefing helped us generate three major themes and a theoretical model. We found that (1) there were various levels of efforts to engage in color conscious socialization among parents of young children. Importantly, these efforts were often shaped by (2) the variable levels of parents’ (un)certainty, focus, and interpretation of current events in consideration of their child’s own characteristics in addition to (3) parents’ social locations including but not limited to their childhood, current family and social relationships, and their educational background and occupation. Practical and policy implications are discussed to provide resources at various ecological levels to support parents’ efforts. We followed 20 predominantly White families of young children (ages 3–6) over time across two years and conducted two sets of in-depth interviews with the parents. Parents who did not view the murder of George Floyd as a racialized or racist event often maintained a colorblind approach to racial socialization of their children across time periods. In contrast, parents who felt a sense of urgency to protect their children in the face of racialized violence changed from colorblind to color conscious racial socialization efforts, or increased color conscious socialization efforts and discussions following the murder of George Floyd.