Black Americans experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, and it is a cause of chronic and pervasive stress. It is known to contribute to elevated risk for poor mental health outcomes, but most research has focused on individuals. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at the interpersonal effects of discrimination on parents and their adolescent children.

“A person’s experiences with racial discrimination are not just their own but may spill over into the family and affect the mental health and perceived social support of other family members. We underestimate the impact of discrimination if we're only looking at the individual level,” said lead author Shardé Smith, associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

Smith and co-author Robyn Gobin, associate professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology at Illinois, drew on a longitudinal Chicago neighborhood study examining the impact of social interactions and environments. Based on data from the study’s third wave, the researchers included 401 Black parent-adolescent dyads, with an average age of 15 for the children. Participants answered questions about their experiences of racial discrimination over the past year, as well as their psychological well-being and perceived family support.

Analyzing the data for patterns, Smith and Gobin identified four clusters of responses: One group in which both the parent and the adolescent reported exposure to discrimination, another group where only the parent had experienced discrimination, a third group where the adolescent but not the parent had experienced discrimination, and a fourth group where both parents and children had a low likelihood of exposure to discrimination in the past year.

Specifically, parents were likely to experience racial discrimination at work, and both adolescents and their parents were likely to experience discrimination outside of their neighborhood and when they were receiving services. Furthermore, adolescents were likely to experience racial discrimination from the police.

As expected, the researchers found interactive effects of exposure to racial discrimination, consistent with the concept of “linked lives” that indicate people’s life experiences impact their family members. Overall, parents and adolescents in the three risk groups reported more psychological distress and lower levels of family support.

However, adolescents indicated significantly less family support when their parents also experienced racial discrimination. For parents, the combined exposure to racial discrimination did not diminish their perceptions of social support any more than the other risk groups.

It’s possible that parents struggle to support their children when they are also experiencing racial discrimination themselves, or perhaps children are not reporting the experiences to their parents, the researchers noted.

“It’s important for adolescents to talk to their parents and be able to receive support in managing racial trauma. If they can’t talk about these things in their family of origin with people who really understand it, then they may be left on their own trying to manage it, which could further exacerbate the mental health challenges they might be experiencing,” Gobin stated.

The researchers did not find any differences based on demographic characteristics. This demonstrates these effects are not unique to one population, but affect people across gender identity, age, and socio-economic status, Smith said. 

These findings show the importance of developing interventions to address the psychological effects of discrimination in a family context, particularly focusing on how to help adolescents receive the support they need.

“I want to highlight that the goal in an ideal world is to dismantle the systems that create the discrimination. However, given how difficult that will be over time, we still need to engage in more malleable approaches to tackle these issues. We need to make sure healing frameworks are trauma-sensitive and culturally sound, helping to capitalize on the strengths within the Black community,” Smith concluded.

The paper, “The Dyadic Effects of Racial Discrimination: Using Latent Class Analysis to Explore Patterns of Racial Discrimination Among Black Parent–Adolescent Dyads,” is published in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology [DOI: 10.1037/cdp0000678].