An Integrative Conceptual Model of Parental Racial/Ethnic and Emotion Socialization and Links to Children's Social-Emotional Development Among African American Families

Abstract Researchers have called for increased evaluation of the processes that contribute to African American children's successful emotional development in the face of discrimination. Parents’ racial/ethnic and emotion socialization have been linked to children's emotional adaption. Although few studies have explicitly evaluated their joint influence on African American children's emotion adaptation, researchers studying racial and ethnic socialization have indirectly incorporated emotion socialization through evaluating parents’ guided emotion regulation strategies as ways to cope with discrimination. Similarly, researchers who study emotion socialization have described emotion socialization practices among African American parents as intentionally preparing children for racial bias regarding how others perceive their emotions. In this article, we synthesize two separate and emerging literatures—the racial/ethnic socialization literature and the literature on emotion socialization among African American families—and outline a conceptual model illustrating the overlap in the two constructs and their joint influence on African American children's social-emotional adjustment.