093: Parenting children of non-dominant cultures

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series.

We’ve done a LOT of episodes specifically for White parents by now:

White privilege in parenting: What it is and what to do about itWhite privilege in schoolsTalking with children about raceTeaching children about topics like slavery and the Civil Rights MovementDo I have privilege?

In this episode we turn the tables: listener Dr. Elisa Celis joins me to interview Dr. Ciara Smalls Glover, whose work focuses on building the cultural strengths of youth of non-dominant cultures and their families.  We discuss the ways that culture is transferred to children through parenting, how parents of non-dominant cultures can teach their children about race and racism, and how to balance this with messages of racial pride.

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Jen: 01:36

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get started with today’s episode, I just wanted to briefly remind you about a couple things I mentioned in our last episode. Firstly, I’m reopening the Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership group to new members in July. It’s a group for parents who love listening to the podcast and are onboard with the ideas that I described in it, but who find there is a pretty big gap between hearing something on a podcast once and actually being able to implement the idea in their real lives with their real families. So if you join, each month you receive a PDF guide on the specific topic that we’re covering that month. It isn’t a massive amount of new reading, but rather it synthesizes the most important points and walks you through a series of exercises to think through how to apply the principles in a way that’s relevant to your real family.

Jen: 02:22

You have a group call with me in the first half of the month to help you overcome any initial problems. And then a second one towards the end of the month as you refine your approach and by the end of the month you haven’t just read about some new thing you’d like to try, you’ve actually thought through how you’ll really implement it. You’ve tried it, maybe tripped up a bit and tried again and received support from me and all the other amazing parents in the group and you’ve actually started to see a shift in the way your family members interact with each other. So, you can find more about the group at YourParentingMojo.com/Membership. Secondly, if you’d like to see how the group works, please do sign up for the free online Tame Your Triggers workshop that starts on July 8th, which will help you to understand why you feel triggered by your child’s behavior and what you’re gonna do to avoid feeling triggered in the first place, and also manage your feelings better on the fewer occasions where they do still crop up.

Jen: 03:11

I see so many parents in online forums looking for help with the frustration, anger they feel when their children do things that just push their parents buttons, but it turns out there’s actually an enormous amount that we parents can do to avoid and manage these feelings rather than waiting for our children to grow out of these behaviors or trying to change the way our children behave. So, if you feel triggered by your children sometimes or perhaps quite a lot, then do head over to YourParentingMojo.com/Triggers to sign up for this completely free online workshop. You’ll get one email a day for the nine-week days following July 8th, each one containing information on a different piece of this puzzle along with a homework assignment that might be completing a quiz or responding to a journaling prompt. Now, I’ve put hundreds of hours of work into developing this workshop and I know that if you put in a little time and effort with me over those nine days, the payoff in your relationship with your child can be huge.

Jen: 04:04

So, do go to YourParentingMojo.com/TameYourTriggers to sign up for that free workshop. And finally we are inching ever closer to our hundredth episode. This is episode 93 and if you’d like to record a message for me to play in the hundredth episode, whether it’s letting me know about something you’ve learned from the show and how it’s impacted your family or a question that you have about the research on parenting or child development or a question for me about my life or my family, then do go to YourParentingMojo.com and look for that record icon to send me a voicemail. If you can use a headset that came with your smartphone then other listeners will surely appreciate it because it will dramatically improve the sound quality, but if you need to just talk straight into your phone or your laptop, then that will work too.

Jen: 04:46

I can’t wait to hear from you. Now on to today’s episode. Those of you who have been with the show for a while have probably been following the series of episodes I’ve been doing on the Intersection of Parenting and Race. The majority of these have been focused on Whiteness, partly because I’m White and I felt that I needed to explore these issues for myself and partly because I know that a good chunk of my audience is White and needed to explore these issues as well, but also a decent number of review are people of nondominant cultures. And when listener Elisa Celis who’s Mexican reached out and said, “Hey, what about an episode for us and what it means to parent a child of a nondominant culture?” I said, absolutely and you should come and co-interview with me. Elisa is also known as Dr. Elisa Celis, Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University where she studies the societal and economic implications of things like fairness and diversity and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Jen: 05:38

Welcome Dr. Celis.

Dr. Celis: 05:39

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Jen: 05:41

We are here today to talk with Dr. Ciara Smalls Glover, who is Associate Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University. Dr. Glover obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and she studies the role of identity and parenting on reducing risk for communities of color with particular emphasis on academic and psychosocial outcomes for African American youth. She’s investigating patterns of racial socialization and racial identity as factors that promote positive development and reduce the impact of racial discrimination, which contributes to the development of interventions that build on the cultural strengths of youth and their families. If you’re interested in this topic and would like to continue the conversation with her, you can actually reach her on Twitter @CSmallsGlover. Welcome Dr. Glover.

Dr. Glover: 06:24

Thank you for having me.

Jen: 06:25

All right, so let’s dig right into the meat of this. I’m really curious about parenting styles and what parenting style is appropriate for children of nondominant cultures because it seems to me as though the vast majority of this research is done on White children and for them it’s relatively unequivocal and more democratic style where the parents are setting boundaries, but explain their reasoning to the child and incorporate the child’s views promotes the best child outcomes. But I’ve also seen research showing that a more authoritarian style where the parent kind of lays down the law and doesn’t really explain their reasoning or consider the child’s input actually isn’t terrible for African American children. And Elisa also mentioned having heard parents ask their children (they’re presumably rhetorical question), but how would you know your parents care if they’re not yelling at you? And they see shouting is normal because everyone loses their temper. But timeout, which is recommended by pediatricians is downright cruel. So firstly, I guess if we could start with how the perceptions of the way a person is parented intersect with outcomes?

Dr. Glover: 07:29

Oh, okay. This is a really thoughtful question Jen. So, we’ll back up a bit and talk about the way in which parenting is associated with different outcomes for children of different backgrounds and I think it’s important to preface this conversation by recognizing the heterogeneity within children and even within children of a particular cultural background and it’s in fact one of the reasons why we do find differences in how parenting and parenting styles play out in terms of child outcomes. So you’re right. In terms of the field, a lot of the literature has looked at a thing we call authoritative parenting, which is usually warmth and quality time coupled with a firmness and discipline and understanding that there are going to be rules that have to be respected and authoritarian parenting takes on a little bit of a different approach and that there’s usually a less warmth or fewer perceptions of warmth while still having these firm rules.

Dr. Glover: 08:36

And often these firm rules are a little less open to the input of the child. There are at least two other types of parenting styles that we could add to this conversation as well. One of which is more of a permissive style where there are fewer rules, a lot more openness as essentially the child is determining what the household rules are. And I’m more of a parent-as-friend approach and I can tell you about (those are not the only ones but for the sake of time I’ll just kind of focus on those) where we have seen research looking at outcomes for children of color. We do find differences in these three and we find universally both for children of color and children from dominant backgrounds. The permissive parenting is problematic for children’s adjustment. Children need rituals, they need a bit of routine to develop trust.

Dr. Glover: 09:33

So, in homes where there’s less of that, it makes it harder for the children to establish them. Where there is less consistency then is between the authoritative and the authoritarian. In families where the cultural norm is a firmer rule, a firmer hand, if you will in the home, less openness to hearing what the child’s input is in setting the rules. It’s actually perceived as loving and understanding by the child. So, we don’t see the strength of the same negative outcomes for child adjustment for families of color as we do with majority families with respect to the authoritarian. I’ll give one caveat to that though, and that is the perception really does matter, right? So that in families where the child perceives the stronger hand is being used because the parent loves them or the caregiver loves them and they’re doing it to protect them and keep them safe.

Dr. Glover: 10:37

It offers a safeguard from some of those more negative adjustment outcomes that we see in the literature. But where there’s universal agreement that what the family or caregivers doing is not out of love. We also see consistency and how that’s associated with poor outcomes for children. So, this is very much the case that children understand the cultural norm. Children understand the norm of the family, the individual family, the norm of the individual neighborhood. And that’s important to recognize as we talk about heterogeneity in families that the differences we see in child outcomes related to authoritative and authoritarian parenting are both a byproduct of cultural norms of the individual family as well as the norms that are demanded by the neighborhood and the context that they’re in.

Jen: 11:31

Isn’t that fascinating? I’ve definitely seen that result in studies of Chinese children as well, where a much more sort of strict style is perceived by the child as warm and loving. So that sort of brings me to the next question, which is, is it more important then to parent kind of in a way that’s in line with your culture in a way that’s line with the way that everybody else around you is parenting or more in line with these studies and what’s known in the literature about authoritative parenting and that often having better outcomes?

Dr. Glover: 12:04

Well, this I think is a two-part question and that what we do in families, we often do based on our own experiences in our families. So when we talk about what’s typical and what’s expected, well oftentimes parents are relying on the way that they were raised to inform what they’ll use with their families and using that as experience. Either they appreciated the way that their parents raised them and they’re going to parent in ways that are consistent with that or they’ve reflected on it and decided they want to intentionally change some things. So, I think that’s an important piece to this conversation. The parents are weighing on their own experiences. They’re also weighing on, when we think about parenting and the goal of parenting is raising an independent child, I think many families are thinking about what’s going to help that child get to a level of independence.

Dr. Glover: 13:00

And that’s really motivating a lot of their strategies in raising that child. So that might include things like recognizing. In order for my child to get to a level where they can be independent, I need to keep them safe. I need to keep them out of trouble. That requires that I parent them in such a way that they stay safe and that’s going to be dictated by the neighborhood, by the context that they’re in, whatever the threats are to the safety of that child where that family is living. It would also be determined by what the parent perceives as the responsibilities the child should be able to take on that are of course, developmentally appropriate. And Jen, I know you’ve raised this question earlier as well, inspired by I think what could be perceived as this cultural difference, but are there thoughts that either of you have about the parent that does want to parent more in line with their culture?

Dr. Celis: 14:03

Well, I think, I mean one thing for me and I think for many people we as a family keep moving, right? So kind of the culture that one had growing up either for myself or for my husband is I think for many people quite different than the one you ended up in now. So there’s also a bit of tension between even things that perhaps worked really well for you. They worked really well for you in that context and now you’re not in that context. So there’s a little bit of tension as to, well, did it work because it objectively works or did it work because of the surrounding neighborhood and with all changes now that I’m in this kind of new place with perhaps a different surrounding culture, raising my children here.

Dr. Glover: 14:49

That’s such a great point. It actually reminds me of a few television shows that kind of capitalize on that where you see a family that’s relying on the way they were raised to inform the way they raise their children, but their children are in an entirely different context and that’s a source of humor for these television shows, right?

Jen: 15:08

Ok, what show are you thinking of here?

Dr. Glover: 15:10

Well, I’m thinking of a couple and I don’t know this might take you back but the first example I’m thinking of is old sitcom called the Bernie Mac show. If you know anything about Bernie Mac, he grew up in a very rough side. He’s a comedian, grew up in a very rough side of Chicago, primarily raised by his grandmother who rule with an iron fist, if you will, because the neighborhood dictated that. He brought that parenting style to where the celebrities live in California and just for the sitcom in raising his nieces and nephews who could not be raised by their parent, he raises them with the same authoritarian lens where they’re saying, we want to go out and play with our friends.

Dr. Glover: 15:54

And he’s saying, you can’t. He’s raising them as if they were still living on the south side of Chicago, but they’re not, right? They’re living in this very beautiful home where celebrities live and he’s living the life of a celebrity. Another I think more recent example would be, Black-ish has a little bit of the same theme where the father was raised in a very rough neighborhood and brings that perspective to raising his children who also live in this very lovely suburb in California where the neighborhoods not necessarily demanding that he raised them in the same way and they use it as a source of humor because his wife grew up in a very different context that didn’t have those same demands in terms of safety.

Dr. Glover: 16:39

They get into discussions often about how they’re going to approach different choices with their children because they come at it with different experiences. You talk about this happening in real life because it very much makes a difference and what we think is working and whether we choose to continue to use something or not. I don’t think I mentioned this at the beginning of the broadcast, but I also have a very young child and so this has been a wonderful opportunity for me to both think about my upbringing which wasn’t a very rough neighborhood originally and then moved to a much nicer neighborhood in conjunction with the research that I do and consume. I love reading research on families and strengthening families and then my child’s lived experience where I need to take into account that child’s personality, the context that they’re living in and recognize how different it is from the one that I grew up