Cultural socialization and ethnic-racial pride
Livas Stein, Christophe, Castro-Schillo, Alvarado & Robins (2023) published “Longitudinal links between maternal cultural socialization, peer ethnic-racial discrimination, and ethnic-racial pride in Mexican American youth” in Child Development. This article is available as full text so I am dramatically editing it here:
As marginalized communities continue to face systemic oppression and discrimination, it is imperative to identify culturally resilient factors that support the psychosocial development of minoritized youth. Ethnic-racial pride (i.e., affirmation and positive affect about one's group membership) serves as a cultural resource for youth as they navigate racially stratified and potentially hostile environments. Cultural socialization messages focus on instilling ethnic-racial pride and imparting the history, norms, beliefs, and values of one's ethnic-racial heritage. At the same time, the development of ethnic-racial identity is also embedded within experiences of ethnic-racial discrimination (i.e., unfair or differential treatment due to ethnicity and race), as these experiences also serve to foment ethnic-racial identity exploration, resolution, and content in Latinx youth across high school.
To best characterize change over time in our sample, we compared different cross-lagged panel models to examine whether maternal cultural socialization and peer ethnic-racial discrimination predicted ethnic-racial pride longitudinally (e.g., at the following time point) and whether these associations differed across three different time points in adolescence.
The consistent delivery of messages reminding youth of their Mexican cultural traditions and legacies, instills and maintains youth's pride in their Mexican/Mexican American heritage starting in 5th grade and consistently throughout high school. It may be that other aspects of identity are more responsive to parental messages later in development (e.g., exploration and resolution) but feelings of ethnic-racial pride emanate from the cultural knowledge that starts to get passed on much earlier in development forming the foundation of ethnic-racial pride. It is likely that the content of these maternal messages provides the cultural and ethnic knowledge that serves as the content aspect of their identity (i.e., what they are proud of). Indeed, our measure of ethnic-racial pride specifically tapped into participating in cultural traditions and feeling proud of successful Latinxs and Mexican Americans as well as general feelings of connection and pride in their Mexican American heritage. Recent lifespan models of ethnic-racial identity highlight that ethnic-racial knowledge in middle childhood may serve to help youth reflect on their ethnicity, contribute to feelings of pride, and help youth gain an understanding of their identity; this may be particularly important earlier in development as this knowledge is likely more established by adolescence.
Our findings suggest that this knowledge passed down through maternal cultural socialization in late childhood does, in fact, not only influence ethnic-racial pride, but also continues to do so across adolescence. Because the auto-regressive path was constant across adolescence, this suggests that mothers' messages remain consistent, but, as mothers provide more messages relative to themselves, they continue to contribute to growth in ethnic-racial pride. Furthermore, ethnic-racial pride continued to grow in adolescence demonstrating stronger associations across time (e.g., stronger auto-regressive paths), and this suggests that the seeds of ethnic-racial pride planted and tended to across adolescence by maternal cultural socialization, indeed, grow stronger as youth age.
Maternal messages predicted greater ethnic-racial pride, but reciprocal effects were evident such that greater ethnic-racial pride promoted more maternal cultural socialization messages. Our findings underscore the importance of examining cultural socialization processes in a bidirectional manner to fully explicate how youth influence these processes either by initiating these conversations as they explore their identity or by eliciting messages from parents.
Consistent with other work that has found that ethnic-racial peer discrimination serves to erode ethnic-racial commitment and private regard across the middle and high school period, we extend this work by demonstrating that peer ethnic-racial discrimination led to decreases in ethnic-racial pride as well, and this negative effect was consistent across 5th–11th grade. However, we did not find support for either the rejection-identification model (i.e., greater discrimination leads to more connection and pride in the group) or the identification-attribution model (i.e., greater ethnic-racial pride associated with more discrimination), and instead, our findings suggest that, as youth experience their peers as devaluing their ethnic-racial group through discriminatory attitudes and statements, this undermines their developing sense of pride and connection with other Mexican Americans. Because peers serve as an increasingly important source of socialization in adolescence, it is not surprising that peers’ stereotyped attitudes and beliefs about Mexicans influence how Mexican American youth connect to their ethnic-racial group. Supporting this notion, peer ethnic-racial discrimination has uniquely predicted ethnic-racial commitment and private regard relative to adult ethnic-racial discrimination. Although our study did not include adult ethnic-racial discrimination, it does suggest that these peer effects remain when considering maternal cultural socialization in the model further supporting the damaging effects of peer racial-ethnic discrimination on identity.
Although we did not find support for the notion that effects of socialization and peer discrimination are more potent later in adolescence, cultural socialization and peer discrimination predicted later levels of youth ethnic-racial pride. Furthermore, the endorsement of ethnic-racial pride elicited subsequent cultural socialization from mothers across adolescence. Finally, the significant random intercept for maternal cultural socialization provides evidence that there are stable between-person differences in the frequency of messages one receives regarding their group's values and traditions and that the level of socialization youth receive remains largely the same across adolescence. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of examining these factors longitudinally across broad swaths of adolescence and reaffirms the importance of cultural socialization in fostering positive psychosocial outcomes. Targeted interventions starting in elementary school supporting cultural socialization processes are imperative, but these need to be maintained through high school to continue to support the deepening of ethnic-racial pride and counter the harmful assaults of peer discrimination on identity development. For Mexican American families, there is a risk with generational time in the United States that these cultural resilient factors will diminish, and policies that prevent these lessons from being taught at school suggest that there is an urgency to continue to build this resilience in Mexican American youth as they may not get these lessons in their schools. Community-based organizations can help bridge this gap by celebrating Mexican and Mexican American heritage to give families space to celebrate and enjoy their culture supporting pride.
This is a well-designed study with important implications, especially in the context of efforts to deny the cultures of minoritized youth in some educational arenas. It also highlights the complexity of affirming cultural heritage as young people navigate adolescence and early adulthood. While some traditional theory had assumed that adolescents separate from their parents and move toward creating their own independent identities, this work makes clear the reality that identity formation in a multicultural world requires constant transactions between teens and their parents, hopefully ones that affirm the paths of both.