A recent Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) study led by Dr. Natasha Cabrera, associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, challenges the assumption that minority and immigrant children are always disadvantaged or at-risk and sheds light on the strengths and assets that ethnic and racial minority families bring to raising healthy, well-adjusted children. The study encourages researchers and policymakers to pay closer attention to how minority families and communities promote childrens development, so that their efforts can be better supported with informed programs and interventions.
The studys findings reveal that minority children possess unsuspected strengths in three domains of development: social competence, language, and ethnic identity. Many low-income minority children exceed their peers in self-regulation, the ability to manage behavior, emotions, and attention which strongly influences social skills and academic success. Past research has commonly shown that low-income African American children face expressive obstacles and that bilingual children struggle to acquire vocabulary and understand the meanings of words, but Dr. Cabreras study reveals the limitations of that research. African American children, it turns out, command oral narrative skills which may uniquely help them read, and they produce narratives of higher quality and possess greater narrative comprehension than their white peers. Bilingual children have similar advantages, including better executive control in nonverbal tasks requiring conflict resolution. In later childhood and adolescence, the formation of a strong ethnic identity promotes self-esteem as well as positive peer and family relationships. A growing number of younger minority adults are civically active, leading them to exhibit more positive and less risky behaviors and to engage in citizenship and sustaining their communities..
So what are the sources of these good outcomes in ethnic and racial minority children? Dr. Cabreras study argues for the beneficial effects of three aspects of family life orientation and obligation, discipline, and cultural socialization. We know that families play critical roles in giving children love, support, and care and in teaching them culturally and socially relevant values, beliefs, and expectations. Somewhat less recognized is the strong cohesion in many minority families that encourages children to self-regulate and to avoid antisocial behavior and deviance. While a lot of attention has been paid to the negative effects of strict discipline in minority homes, the positive effects of protection and care in the context of parental warmth are now coming to light. Finally, Dr. Cabrera points out that teaching children about the familys culture and fostering their identification with its values, beliefs, and rituals offers such benefits as higher self-esteem, a greater sense of belonging, and a more positive outlook that helps protects them from discrimination and prejudice.
Significantly, Dr. Cabreras study also identifies gaps in the existing research on minority children. It notes that the bulk of research to date has been conducted with Latino and African American children and calls for more research on the cultural aspects of family dynamics among Asian American and Native American children.
Dr. Natasha Cabrera is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Her current research topics include father-child and mother-child relationships, predictors of adaptive and maladaptive parenting, children's social and emotional development in different types of families and cultural /ethnic groups, and the mechanisms that link early experience to childrens later cognitive and social development.
Click here to read the SRCD Social Policy Report, Positive Development of Minority Children.
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