Study: Maternal Ethnic-Racial Enculturation: Implications for Social Skill Development in Early Childhood
As children head back to school this fall, one of the most important lessons won't be found in a textbook. It will happen as they learn to share, cooperate and build friendships.
New University of Michigan research suggests that a mother's stronger connection to her ethnic-racial identity may help shape those social skills.
In a study of more than 3,000 children and their families, researchers found that Black and Latino children whose mothers had a stronger sense of ethnic-racial identity during infancy demonstrated higher social skills by age 5.
At the same time, widely used social skills assessments consistently rated Black and Latino children less favorably than white children, raising questions about whether those measures fully capture children's strengths across different cultural backgrounds, the researchers found.
"Our findings suggest that strong ethnic-racial identity within families can be an important developmental asset for young children," said Sunghyun Hong, the study's lead author and U-M doctoral student in social work and developmental psychology. "At the same time, they remind us to think carefully about how we define and measure social competence in increasingly diverse communities."
Hong and colleagues analyzed data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a long-running national study following children from birth through adolescence.
Among the study's other key findings:
- Current assessments may overlook children's strengths: Commonly used social skills measures consistently produced less favorable ratings for Black and Latino children than for white children, suggesting that some assessments may reflect dominant sociocultural expectations rather than the many ways children develop and express social competence.
- Cultural strengths remain important despite measurement challenges: Even when evaluated using assessment tools that may not fully reflect diverse cultural experiences, stronger maternal ethnic-racial identity was associated with better social development among Black and Latino children.
The researchers say the findings highlight the need for more culturally responsive approaches to evaluating children's social skills as the nation's child population becomes increasingly diverse.
"As we work to understand children's development, it's important that our assessment tools recognize the many ways social competence is expressed across families and communities," Hong said.
The researchers also note an important limitation of the study: Children whose mothers identified as "Other" were excluded because the available data did not provide sufficient ethnic-racial classification. They caution that this reflects a broader challenge in research and underscores the need to better represent underrepresented groups, including Asian American and Indigenous families.
The study, published in Infant and Child Development, analyzed publicly available data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The original data collection was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, along with other funding organizations.
Study co-authors were Fernanda Cross, Felicia Hardi, Deaweh Benson, Camille Quinn and Daphne Watkins.
