Parent-Child Conversations About Inequality: Perpetuating or Disrupting an Inequitable Status Quo

Abstract

Recent calls have urged developmental scientists to consider how basic developmental processes are at play in upholding or disrupting systemic and structural inequality in the United States. The present study examined the intergenerational transmission of ideologies used to discuss systemic and structural inequality, and how ideologies that deny or explain inequality can be perpetuated or disrupted through developmental processes, in this case parent-child conversations about race and wealth inequality. Participant dyads (n = 16), consisting of primarily white and middle-class parents and their middle-school-aged child responded to individual surveys that included data on race and wealth inequality, followed by a conversation about the data, and then a “playback interview” to discuss the conversation with a research assistant. Using a qualitative thematic content analysis, we examined how interactions either reinforced ideologies that upheld an inequitable status quo (e.g., color-evasive) or disrupted such ideologies (e.g., resisting racial stereotypes). Results describe the ways that parents and children can perpetuate or disrupt an inequitable status quo, in both direct and indirect ways, how lived experiences informs these processes, and where levers for changing inequitable systems and structures might exist within the family.