When children socialize parents just as parents socialize children this is known as?

Siblings

Work on parental socialization has taken care to contextualize their work in a Family Systems approach (Fingerman and Bermann, 2000; Feinberg et al., 2012), which acknowledges the complex and reciprocal impact each member of the family has on one another and on the family unit as a whole. Siblings appear to play an important role in parental gender attitudes and children's gender socialization. Fathers raising sons have stronger traditional gender attitudes compared with fathers raising mixed gender children (Endendijk et al., 2013). Further, the sex of a second born sibling may have a greater impact on a first born sibling's experience of gender socialization in adolescence than parental factors (Crouter et al., 1995) and first born siblings may be a stronger influence on second born sibling's gender socialization than parents (McHale et al., 2001).

2 New Research Directions

Older socialization perspectives focused on a small set of parental socialization strategies (modeling, punishment, reward, and reasoning). A generalization from this literature was that parents who had a warm relationship with their children, who were firm but not overly restrictive, and who used reasoning and persuasion more than power assertion are the most effective in enabling their children's internalization of values. Critiques of this literature are that it ignores impact of culture, and of a multitude of child characteristics (temperament, age, mood) on parental actions. It also is not consistent with findings that parents use different methods and adopt different goals depending on the varying demands of situations (Grusec and Goodnow 1994). Newer approaches that maintain a focus on socialization strategies of parents include an interest in parental flexible and responsive use of strategies and on an expanded range of socialization strategies. These are strategies that accommodate the agency of the child, attend to the construction, maintenance and repair of the relationship context of parenting interventions, and strategies that prevent or modify the impact of societal influences on children's socialization. There is a growing interest in the impact of unconscious, unplanned processes in the development of values (Bugental and Goodnow 1998). These include cultural practices in which values are learned in the doing of everyday routines and interactions. These practices are difficult to resist because they are taken for granted as ‘the way things are’ and are rarely open for examination or challenge. A second arena concerns the automatic processing of interactions where, for example, a parent's behavior during parent–child conflict occurs in a script-like, reactive manner, such as in mutually coercive interactions (Patterson 1997). When considered in the context of the conscious processes, a new question emerges: what aspects of value socialization develop from conscious vs. unconscious socialization processes? It is possible, for instance, that some cultural and familial values have nothing to do with specific parenting practices but are transmitted passively from parent to child as a consequence of everyday immersion in cultural practices. Other values may be inculcated by the deliberate activity of socializing agents. Conscious socialization might occur especially when parental values are not unambiguously supported by the surrounding culture or when parents deliberately prepare their children for a social context that differs substantially from the circumstances of their own socialization. Parents may also cycle through ‘automatic’ vs. conscious interactive processes during daily interchanges with their children (Kuczynski 1984). For example, parents may use unsophisticated power assertive strategies, such as unexplained commands and prohibitions during routine interactions when no more than a loose immediate control of a child's behavior is required. At other times, parents may shift to a more deliberate style of interacting, planning their communications or using effortful reasoning strategies, when the situation has implications for the child's long-term well being or invokes a strongly held parental value.

Most contemporary theories emphasize active, constructive processes of parents and children in value socialization and internalization. However, research is just beginning to describe these processes empirically. Research is needed on parental constructive processes concerning their own values. For instance, how do parents think about their socialization experiences and how do they select which values to pass on, abandon, or modify when they come to socialize their own children? Research is also required on children's perspectives on their parent's socialization efforts. How do children interpret, resist, and negotiate parental messages? Lastly, the phenomenon of bidirectional influence needs to be better understood. This is because the processes underlying children's receptivity and resistance to parental influence and of parental receptivity and vulnerability to children's influence are still largely unexplored.

2.2.2 School/neighborhood socialization

The impact of racial socialization through schools and neighborhoods has received less attention than parental socialization. Specific socialization practices in these settings remain unclear, even as it is quite clear that school and neighborhood environments are associated with children's racial cognitions. For example, studies suggest that preschool children who live in racially diverse environments exhibit less outgroup stereotyping than preschool children in racially homogenous environments (Rutland, Cameron, Bennett, & Ferrell, 2005). The role of diverse schools and neighborhoods becomes even more pronounced as children get older, and this age-based effect could be driven by emerging beliefs in race essentialism. Specifically, children who grow up in racially diverse (vs racially homogenous) neighborhoods exhibit less race essentialism as they age and this trend is correlated with age-based decrements in outgroup stereotyping (Pauker, Xu, Williams, & Biddle, 2016). Exposure to racial diversity at school has similar effects: one study found that a group of White elementary school children who attended a racially diverse school were less racially biased than a similar group of White children who attended a racially homogenous school (McGlothlin & Killen, 2010; essentialism was not measured in this study). These studies suggest that exposure to individuals from different racial groups is associated with children's beliefs about race, yet the messages communicated in diverse vs homogenous schools/neighborhood remain somewhat unclear.

One possibility is that messages of colorblindness are less prevalent in diverse schools and neighborhoods. The colorblind approach to handling racial diversity promotes the avoidance of discussions about race and is often featured in schools in the United States (Apfelbaum, Pauker, Sommers, & Ambady, 2010; Lewis, 2001; Schofield, 2007). Although this school-based socialization practice may be common, studies suggest that exposure to colorblind ideologies do not increase egalitarian beliefs (as they purport), but instead, lead children to ignore instances of racial discrimination (Apfelbaum et al., 2010). To our knowledge no studies have examined whether colorblind approaches are more prevalent at racially homogenous schools and whether adoption of colorblind approaches accounts for increased racial biases at homogenous schools. The lack of causal evidence for how homogenous vs diverse environments shape children's beliefs is only one unresolved piece of a complex puzzle.

Another critically important piece is the concrete practices through which schools and neighborhoods might communicate race-based beliefs, ideologies, and norms to children. Research on normative patterns of race-based behavior rarely refers to the specific practices that convey those norms, but instead focuses on how children respond to abstract norms produced in specific schools or psychological laboratories. This research suggests that children quickly adopt appropriate, normative behaviors (Nesdale & Dalton, 2011; Nesdale & Lawson, 2011). In these studies, children are randomly assigned to a team that is explicitly described as “friendly” and as “liking kids on other teams” or to a team described as “not friendly” and “doesn’t like kids on other teams.” Children's resulting behavior toward peers on “another team” tended to be consistent with their own team norm (Nesdale & Dalton, 2011; Nesdale & Lawson, 2011). One study directly tested how explicitly communicated norms influence children when they pertain to racial groups. In this study, a small group of middle school students at five different schools was trained to confront instances of prejudice at their school. After 5 months, the close friends of these “trainers” also engaged in more tolerant behavior, such as having discussions about discrimination and standing up for peers who are teased (Paluck, 2011). This study suggested that norms surrounding prejudice can spread through peer groups. Collectively, existing studies suggest that normative beliefs that are explicitly communicated by ingroup members can cause children to behave in ways that are consistent with such beliefs. However, explicit communication of normative beliefs (i.e., telling children that their ingroup is either “friendly” or “not friendly”) may not represent the way that norms are typically communicated. If such communication is typical, it will be important to identify what sorts of explicit statements are frequently encountered by children. If such communication is not typical, it will be important to determine how children typically learn ingroup norms toward outgroups and other races.

With respect to other means of communicating norms, more subtle forms of communication may be especially effective. For example, Castelli et al. (2008) had children view interactions in which a White adult made positive verbal statements while directing either friendly or unfriendly nonverbal behaviors toward a Black adult. Children expressed more negative attitudes toward the Black adult in the video—as well as a new Black adult that they had not seen before—after seeing the Black adult receive friendly nonverbal behavior than after seeing the Black adult receive unfriendly nonverbal behavior. Although there are few such experiments on racial socialization, studies with generic (minimal) groups replicate the findings of Castelli and colleagues. Children in these studies behave less prosocially toward members of novel groups who received negative nonverbal behaviors (vs positive nonverbal behaviors) from an adult (Skinner, Meltzoff, & Olson, 2017). Moreover, children apply more positive academic stereotypes to novel groups to the extent they see those groups receiving positive nonverbal behaviors from a teacher (Brey & Pauker, under review). These studies suggest that simply observing adults’ subtle behaviors toward different races may socialize children to have specific racial attitudes and stereotypes; however, further research is needed to uncover the kinds of subtle behaviors children frequently encounter in their schools and neighborhoods, or simply to identify whether children systematically encounter any subtle patterns in the interactions they observe.

In general, existing research suggests that socialization in schools and neighborhoods is a likely cause for children's beliefs and behaviors about race. This conclusion is supported by several findings noted previously. First, children in racially diverse vs racially homogenous environments systematically differ in race essentialism, stereotyping, and bias. Second, children's beliefs about outgroups, including racial outgroups, seem to coincide with explicitly communicated norms about outgroups. Finally, norms that are communicated more subtly (e.g., via nonverbal behavior) seem to influence children's racial prejudice and stereotypes. As with research on parental socialization, however, there is a lack of knowledge about the concrete socialization practices that are (a) frequently encountered by children and (b) shape the cognitions and behaviors of those children.

3 Adolescent Socialization in the Family

More is known about adolescent socialization in the family than about socialization in other contexts, although far more is known about the influence of parents than about other family members, such as siblings. Research on parental socialization has traditionally examined the links between variations in adolescent functioning and variations in parenting practices (the specific things that parents do to influence their child in one way or another, such as close monitoring of the child's whereabouts) or parenting styles (the general affective climate of the parent–child relationship). Over the past 25 years, several broad conclusions about socialization in the family context have emerged (Steinberg 1990).

First, most research indicates that adolescents fare better developmentally when their parents combine firm and consistent discipline with affection and involvement in the adolescent's life. This combination of ‘demandingness’ and ‘responsiveness’ is referred to as authoritative parenting. In many studies, adolescents raised by authoritative parents have been compared with their peers who come from homes that are authoritarian (demanding but relatively less responsive), indulgent (responsive but relatively less demanding), or neglectful (neither demanding nor responsive). Generally speaking, adolescents raised in authoritative homes score higher on measures of psychological adjustment and academic achievement and lower on measures of psychological and behavior problems than adolescents from other households. Adolescents from neglectful homes, in contrast, score lowest on measures of adjustment and highest on measures of maladjustment. Adolescents from authoritarian or indulgent homes generally score somewhere between the two extremes.

Second, research indicates that adolescent development is more closely linked to the nature of their family relationships than to the composition of their household. Studies of adolescents from single-parent homes or stepfamilies, for example, find only small differences between adolescents from these sorts of families and those who live with their two biological parents. Similarly small differences emerge in studies that compare adolescents whose mother works outside the home with those whose mother do not. For the most part, the benefits of authoritative parenting transcend variations in household composition. Most, but not all, research indicates that the benefits of authoritative parenting also cut across ethnic and socioeconomic groups.

Finally, research on socialization in the family indicates that the broader context within which the family lives affects the ways in which parents behave and, as a consequence, the impact that parents have on their adolescent's development. Authoritative parenting is more likely to occur in families with greater financial and social resources, and who live in neighborhoods populated with other well-functioning families. In contrast, studies of families living under stressful conditions, such as poverty, neighborhood deterioration, or high rates of crime, indicate that such conditions tend to foster parenting that is hostile, inconsistent, or uninvolved. As a result of these variations in the broader context of socialization, adolescents growing up under different circumstances often exhibit different levels of psychological adjustment.

A different line of research has examined changes in family relationships over the course of adolescence. This work has pointed to the importance of puberty as a period of significant transformation in family dynamics, although it is not clear whether these changes in relationships are triggered by the physical or hormonal changes of puberty per se or by other, co-occurring events (e.g., the transition out of elementary school, the development of abstract thinking). Whatever the causes, during puberty, adolescents often become more assertive toward their parents, and parent–child conflict, especially over issues concerning the adolescent's independence, tends to increase. Most families report that this phase is temporary, however, with relationships becoming closer and less conflicted toward the middle adolescent years (Steinberg 1990).

Conclusions

Ultimately, children are socialized in the context of close relationships with parents, and both the dyadic relationship quality (including warmth and security) and the parenting practices that parents use influence children's willingness to attend to and accept parental socialization messages. These effects, though, are not straightforward and are both transactive and interactive, so there is a growing interest in examining the interplay between child characteristics, relational quality and/or parenting practices, and child outcomes. For example, there is growing evidence that some genes may enhance a child's sensitivity to contextual factors, including the influence of parents (Belsky and Pluess, 2009). In a longitudinal study, maternal insensitivity in infancy predicted toddler externalizing behavior, but only for children carrying the 7-repeat DRD4 allele (associated with low dopaminergic efficiency) (Bakermans-Kranenburg and van IJaendoorn, 2006). Children with this allele who had insensitive mothers had the most externalizing problems, but those who had both the allele and sensitive mothers had the lowest levels of externalizing behaviors. This type of work is an exciting new direction and captures the complexity of transactive relationships that exist between parenting and child outcomes.

Adult caregiver socialization of aggression and prosocial behavior

Approach. The socialization of children's moral behaviors has focused predominantly on children's social interactions with their parents (Hastings et al., 2015), but some research has also looked at teachers, while other research has included cultural considerations in their research on parental socialization. Across these contexts of caregiver socialization, this general body of literature conceptualizes socialization and development in terms of separate variables (Raeff, 2014). Aiming at causal understanding and prediction, the traditional logic is that parent-child interactions express certain characteristics, such as parental sensitivity or relational warmth (socialization variables), and these variables are then used to predict the emergence of developmental variables representing, for example, prosocial behaviors or aggression.

This causal process, whereby socialization and development are divided into discrete factors, can be conceptualized as a linear or cyclical process of causation. Thus, although much research has conceptualized the causal process as linear, researchers have increasingly called for bidirectional, transactional, and interactional processes. For example, bidirectional approaches put forth a reciprocal conception of causality, such that children's moral behavior impacts the way that parents parent them. These approaches prioritize longitudinal studies for their ability to tease apart the causal direction of socialization effects, by assessing the presence of parent-effects on children, child-effects on parents, and bidirectional effects (Spinard and Eisenberg, 2019).

Parents as caregivers. The socialization of children's moral behavior by parents has been theorized predominantly through the lens of parenting styles and parenting practices, focusing on the dimensions of behavioral control and affective warmth, as well as specific practices surrounding discipline (Hastings et al., 2015; Mounts and Allen, 2019). Research on behavioral control is more limited (Mounts and Allen, 2019), so this review focuses on discipline practices and warmth.

Parenting practices surrounding discipline involve three main techniques: inductive reasoning, power assertion, and love withdrawal. Induction involves discussing consequences for others and rationales for rules, power assertion involves parental authority over the child, coercion, overly harsh and punitive, and love withdrawal involves manipulating children's emotions such as through criticism, derogatory statements, infantilizing. While induction is generally positively associated with children's prosocial behavior, especially for young children, power assertion is generally negatively related, and love withdrawal only minimally related, to children's prosocial behavior and sympathy toward others’ distress (e.g., Hoffman and Saltzstein, 1967; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996; Slagt et al., 2016; see Hastings et al., 2015 and Mounts and Allen, 2019 for reviews). Spinard and Eisenberg (2019) argue that when parents express hostility toward children, it can lead children to become self-focused, that is, concerned about their own well-being and, therefore, less able to focus attention to another's wellbeing.

In addition to induction as a disciplinary practice, research has also identified how parental warmth and sensitivity relate to prosocial behavior and sympathy in toddlers, children, and adolescents (Spinard and Eisenberg, 2019). Parental warmth is defined as interactions that are supportive and affectionate to the child while parental sensitivity is defined as emotional availability and responsiveness to the child's needs, wants, and preferences (Spinard and Eisenberg, 2019). These qualities facilitate children's prosocial behaviors because they make the child receptive to parent's socializing messages (which presumably advocate prosocial behavior), cultivate a positive parent-child relationship, and model prosocial behavior itself. Supporting the latter claim, parents who are sympathetic and prosocial usually model these behaviors for their children, and consistent with this theoretical claim, research has found positive associations between parental empathy and their children's empathy (Farrant et al., 2012) and between parental volunteering and adolescent volunteering, which happens indirectly through influencing youth's sympathy and in turn, their prosocial tendencies (McGinley et al., 2010).

At the same time, Hastings et al.’ (2015) review of the literature on parental warmth and children's prosocial behavior notes that some studies have found null effects and consequently these authors conclude that warmth may be better conceptualized as a relational factor rather than as a quality of the individual parent. Studies conducted within the theoretical framework of attachment theory—which focuses on the secure emotional bond between the caregiver and child—offer corroborating evidence. Specifically, children who are securely attached to their primary caregivers are more prosocial and sympathetic toward others than insecurely attached children (Carlo et al., 2012; Van der Mark et al., 2002). Insecurely attached children may tend to be disinterested in others’ states or over-aroused with their own personal distress when seeing another in distress (Gross et al., 2017). It is unclear if secure attachments in adolescence facilitate prosocial behavior beyond the benefits already conferred by secure attachment foundations in early childhood, and longitudinal studies of adolescent attachment and subsequent prosocial behavior show mixed results (see Hastings et al., 2015).

Child characteristics moderate the effect of parenting qualities on children's moral outcomes, with these causal effects holding more strongly, or only, for children with certain dispositional, temperamental, or genetic qualities (Knafo et al., 2011; Padilla-Walker and Nelson, 2010; Slagt et al., 2016). For example, Slagt et al. (2016) found that the predictive link between harsh parenting and children's decreased prosocial behavior was especially strong for children with average or high (but not low) negative emotionality. Additionally, children's moral behavior can also elicit certain messages from parents and can shape how parents communicate those messages (e.g., warmly), demonstrating the “bidirectional” nature of socialization (Grusec and Davidov, 2010; Maccoby, 2014). For example, some studies have demonstrated how prosocial children evoke subsequent warmth from their parents over time (Carlo et al., 2011; Padilla-Walker et al., 2012), but the findings are mixed. Daniel et al. (2016), for example, found that self-reported parental warmth, for both fathers and mothers, predicted children's later prosocial behavior over 36-months, but that children's prosocial behavior did not reciprocally predict their parents’ later warmth. Overall, scholars in this tradition advocate for more studies that examine the role of children in moderating the impact of parenting practices and in reciprocally shaping parents’ socialization practices (Mounts and Allen, 2019; Spinard and Eisenberg, 2019).

Teachers as caregivers. The work on parental socialization of children's moral behavior in the home context has provided a model and framework theorizing and studying teacher socialization in the school context. In particular, studies show that teachers who can create an emotionally supportive bond with their students—and one that is also perceived as such by their students (e.g., Batanova and Loukas, 2012)—have students who are more prosocial with their peers (Luckner and Pianta, 2011). Importantly, close teacher-adolescent relationships can serve as a protective factor, buffering against the negative effects of parent-daughter conflict on the development of girls’ perspective taking (Batanova and Loukas, 2012).

Cultural communities. Culture also moderates links between parenting qualities and children's prosocial outcomes. For example, while parents have been emphasized in work on the socialization of prosocial behavior in general, Carlo and Conejo (2019) argue that the family is particularly and especially important for Latino families in the U.S., captured by the value referred to as familismo (which involves family as a source of social support, decision-making, and obligation). Indeed, the link between familismo and children's prosocial behavior has been demonstrated both concurrently and longitudinally in research using reports of these two constructs (e.g., Calderón-Tena et al., 2011; Knight et al., 2018). As Latino children acculturate to the U.S., their cooperative behavior decreases and competitive behavior increases (Knight and Carlo, 2012; also see De Guzman and Carlo, 2004). The link between acculturation and prosocial behaviors can be interpreted in terms of increasing exposure to and adoption of U.S. mainstream majority values around personal achievement, materialism, and wealth accumulation. It may also be interpreted in terms of the stress involved in the process of acculturating (e.g., due to discrimination, racism, language difficulties) which may overwhelm youth, requiring increased inward attention to themselves, rather than outward to others (see Brittian et al., 2013; Davis et al., 2015). At the same time, however, some forms of prosocial behaviors do increase with these kinds of stressful experiences, perhaps because such experiences attune youth to the suffering others, thereby increasing certain prosocial inclinations (Davis et al., 2015; McGinley et al., 2010).

It is also true that the functions and meanings of parent-child relationships and prosocial behavior vary across cultural contexts. In terms of parent-child relationships, researchers have argued that the typical typology of parenting styles does not fit well with certain cultural groups beyond the European-American context in which it was theorized and researched. These scholars have put forth culture-specific parenting styles (Chao, 1994). For example, White et al. (2013) propose a “no-nonsense” parenting style in order to capture the styles of some Latino fathers. Subsequent research has demonstrated that the specific parenting practices that typically associate with maladaptive outcomes for children in the literature with European-American samples (e.g., high demandingness and control) do not show the same outcomes in Latino groups (see Halgunseth et al., 2006). This may be because such parenting qualities are normative in these cultural contexts, because they foster desirable modes of being (e.g., interdependence), and because they occur in a constellation of parenting qualities and practices (e.g., warmth and support) that shape the meaning of control. Overall, these studies suggest “culture-specific mechanisms [that] promote prosocial behaviors in US Latino youth” (Carlo and Conejo, 2019, p. 260).

Child Characteristics

Child characteristics take two forms: universal predispositions that are shared by all children and individual differences in particular characteristics. Infants are biologically prepared for social, cognitive, and perceptual challenges and these prepared responses play a significant role in facilitating children’s adaptation to their environment. Under the influence of recent advances in behavior genetics, there is increasing recognition of the role of individual differences in temperament on parenting behavior. Although debates about the relative contributions of genetic and experiential factors to the emergence of individual differences in temperament continue, temperament clearly is a determinant of parental socialization tactics. Children who are more difficult may elicit increasingly coercive strategies from parents. In contrast, fearful children may respond optimally to subtle parental socialization strategies such as reasoning or re-direction rather than harsh, punitive, or coercive tactics. Infants with difficult temperaments elicit more arousal and distress from caregivers than less difficult infants. The impact of these individual differences on parental socialization behavior is not independent of environmental conditions. As Susan Crockenberg has shown, the impact of a difficult infant temperament on the parent–infant attachment relationship varied as a function of the degree of social support available to the mother, which underscores the potential modifiability of temperament-based influences. Other characteristics, in addition to temperament, have been examined, including activity level, social responsiveness, and compliance level. In general, the more active, less responsive, and more noncompliant child elicits more negative parenting and more negative parental arousal and affect.

More recently, under the guidance of scholars such as Robert Plomin, Michael Rutter, and their colleagues, gene–environment interaction models for understanding the interplay between genetics and child-rearing contexts have gained prominence in our theories of socialization. In such research, specified genetic variations in combination with particular environmental circumstances can reveal associations with child outcomes. With respect to adverse outcomes, such genetic variations can be thought of as susceptibility factors whose impact depends on the type of environments to which the child is exposed during socialization. For example, Avshalom Caspi and colleagues found that men with a variant of a normal but low active gene that is associated with inhibition of aggression (MAO-A), and who were exposed to severe abuse were more violent as adults than individuals exposed to the same abuse but had a more active aggression inhibitory gene. Similarly, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg and Mariunus Van IJzendoorn from the Netherlands recently found that maternal insensitivity was associated with externalizing (oppositional, aggressive) behavior but only in the presence of a specific gene (seven repeat DRD4 polymorphism), a part of the dopaminergic system. As these studies illustrate, contemporary researchers emphasize a model of ‘gene environment interplay’ as a framework for understanding development in which both behavioral predispositions, such as temperament and specific genes, interact with parenting strategies in determining socialization outcomes.

4.8 Aggressiveness and hostility

Though anger-proneness is correlated strongly with indices of poor self-control, it is discussed separately because aggression or conduct disorder in children has been studied as a risk factor for problem behaviors. Physical aggression is highly stable over time from childhood onwards, leading to difficulties with parental socialization and peer social relationships, and aggressive tendency is a strong predictor of substance use and other problem behaviors. A predisposition to respond aggressively in interpersonal situations is conducive to injury through violent encounters and hence makes this an important factor in adolescents' morbidity as well as injury to others (Goreczny and Hersen 1999). It should be noted that overt physical aggression is only part of a predictive syndrome that also involves impulsiveness and negative affect, and diagnostic studies sometimes show the majority of children with conduct disorder also have depressive disorder. The combination of high levels of aggression and depression (referred to as comorbid disorder) is a particular risk factor for both substance abuse and suicide in adolescents. However, clinical-level disorder is not a necessary condition for risk, as simple measures of irritability or hostility predict substance use in adolescence and adulthood (Wills et al. 2001). Thus, the core characteristic for risk is probably a complex of attributes that reflect difficulty in regulating reactions to irritation or frustration.

3.1 Life span perspective

The life span perspective conceptualizes human behavior as influenced by developmental processes across biological, historical, sociocultural, and psychological factors from conception to death (Lerner, 2002). It extended the theoretical focus of historically traditional developmental psychology with a focus on intra-individual processes for incorporating sociocultural influences. This allows researchers to evaluate the impact of social experiences on psychosocial processes and behavioral outcomes for children of color. Some of the most prolific work that exemplifies this perspective focuses on the role of racial socialization and intergenerational communication on children's racial attitudes and preferences. Socialization opportunities exist in contexts where children have experiences and receive feedback about the explicit and implicit meanings regarding behavior and expectations. For illustrative purposes, highlighted are studies that have addressed parental socialization practices on children's racial identity.

Parental teaching about racial history and strategies for addressing discrimination influences children's racial attitudes and preferences (Hill, 2006). Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the nature of communications from parents to children regarding ethnicity and race and the role these communications play in shaping or modifying racial identity attitudes. Race-related messages (racial socialization) contribute significantly to children's identity development and well-being. Stevenson (1994) posited that racial socialization was necessary to ameliorate the impact of racial hostilities and for African American children to achieve and develop positive self-images. Studies have frequently examined these processes through two broad dimensions that represent messages about cultural socialization and preparation for bias.

Research suggests that Black parents embrace both American and African-based values and endeavor to instill both value systems in their children. Given the historical factors explored under a life span perspective, adults' values and history of sociocultural experiences with discrimination affect parental socialization strategies (e.g., see Hughes & Johnson, 2001). Black parents value honesty, academic success, and family responsibility, and they teach these values to their children. They are also likely to embrace culturally distinct values, which include kin networks, respect for the elderly, and mutual cooperation and sharing (Hill, 2001; Murry et al., 2005). Parents emphasize humanistic values over more ethnic-specific parenting practices and values (Marshall, 1995). African American parents also wish to raise children with values and expectations common for all. They come to understand that although they may raise their children to treat others with respect—given the myriad contexts navigated—they and their children will not always encounter respect from others. Nonetheless, racial and ethnic minority parents report more frequent cultural socialization than preparation for bias for their school-age children (Hughes, 2003). Given the intersectional impact of minority status and social class bias confronted, one wonders if the orientation for more general cultural socialization alone is enough for combating the actual synergistic and adverse impact of bias. Contextual experiences of less than ideal “individual-context fit” may result in positive or negative adaptive processes.

Salient is that a life span perspective provides a framework for exploring multidimensional processes that impact individual developmental outcomes. The focus emphasizes the fluidity of development over time and affords opportunities for considering the impact of contextual influences on the development of children of color.

Parents and Siblings

In most theories, parents are singled out as major agents in primary socialization, and at the same time they are assumed to play an important role in secondary socialization. A little more than a decade ago, Judith Harris challenged the prevailing views of the parental role in socialization. According to her argument, findings suggesting parental influence on children have been misinterpreted in terms of what she referred to as the nurture assumption while actually reflecting genetic transmission. Socialization would rather take place in the peer context. While Harris rightly pointed out the methodological shortcomings of many a study on parental socialization such as the lack of control of genetic influence and the causal interpretation of correlational evidence, her review of the literature seems not to sufficiently acknowledge that, over the years, a considerable body of finely crafted research has accumulated supporting the nurture assumption.

If, then, it is not peers instead of parents who are the major agents of socialization, could there be an age-graded change of sources of influences, with parents playing a prime role during childhood giving way to peer socialization in adolescence? Not really – studies speaking to this point rather suggest that parents remain important agents of socialization during the second decade of life when age-mates enter the scene as additional sources of influence. However, taking a more differentiated view, a certain variation in the major domains of influence of parents and peers can be observed. In a chronological frame of reference, parental socialization seems to more strongly address domains on the vertical (i.e., future-related) dimension such as education and occupational orientation, whereas peer influence rather affects issues on the horizontal (i.e., contemporaneous) dimension, including the domains of same-sex and romantic relations or leisure issues.

Siblings' contributions to socialization in the family have been addressed by research to a lesser extent than parental influences. After all, even in industrialized countries that experience a systematic decline of birth rates, more children grow up with one or more siblings than as an only child. However, with numbers of large families including young children and middle or late adolescents dropping, present-day adolescents in the Northwestern hemisphere are, indeed, only rarely expected to get systematically involved in the care or socialization of their younger sibs for an extended period of time. At the same time, research findings point to socialization effects by way of social learning mainly with younger siblings observing and listening to the older ones and picking up knowledge, attitudes, and habits from them. Not surprisingly, there is quite an overlap of what is learned from parents and siblings. Still, siblings seem to play a particularly important role in modeling informal behaviors. A case in point is the domain of sexuality, in which siblings serve as important sources of advice. This is particularly true of older brothers or sisters of adolescents who may take the lead on the way into different aspects of popular culture, typical leisure pursuits during their second decade of life, and romance.

Besides modeling, a second process is suggested to operate among siblings referred to as de-identification. When striving for parental acknowledgement and affection results in rivalry between siblings, the search for one's own niche – that is not occupied by a sib – offers a viable solution. Given the central goal of deidentification to develop an own identity (different from sibs' identities), the process is more likely to take place among siblings who are similar to one another such as close in age and of the same sex. Obviously, the nature and strength of influences operating among siblings in the family can be assumed to be moderated by parental behavior, which may, for instance, foster positive relations or create rivalry.