For years, psychologist Sylvia Perry studied bias awareness among adults — how people come to understand their own prejudices toward different social groups.
And then, the Northwestern University professor says she set out to answer: “How does this kind of thing develop? How do people come to be bias aware? Could this be happening with children, and might parents play a role in this development?”
In 2018, Perry began experiments in her lab. She brought in nearly 90 white parents and their 8- to 12-year-old children to discuss kid-appropriate situations dealing with prejudice and racism — and she measured whether those chats had any effects on the racial biases.
The results were clear.
“An overwhelming majority of them, their data points are showing a reduction [in bias]. It’s a very large effect,” Perry says.
While experts and advocates have long called for open conversations between parents and children about racism, Perry said her study, published recently in the journal Developmental Psychology, demonstrates the direct effect of such discussions on racial bias. With ongoing efforts throughout the country to ban books on race and with diversity and equity programs under attack, advocates say conversations on these issues are more important than ever.
Perry conducted the experiments on the Evanston campus between 2018 and 2020, just before the pandemic shutdowns. They involved starting with an implicit bias test, which has subjects linking positive and negative words with images of Black and white people. Then, Perry had the parent and child watch animated videos together about white kids interacting with Black kids. They discussed the situations before Perry administered the implicit bias test again.
“What parents are saying in the lab can have a direct effect on their kids’ attitude,” Perry says.
The scenarios in the videos range from two friends happily riding the bus together to a white child deliberately kicking a ball at a Black classmate. There are also more subtle situations where, for example, a white student feels uncomfortable or nervous around a Black student.
Perry says the largest reductions in bias occurred “when parents and children were discussing subtle examples of prejudice. … We think that one of the reasons this is occurring is because these are the kinds of things that most white children from day to day are more likely to engage in.”
Research on racial attitudes has grown and become more controversial since George Floyd’s murder
While Perry has been studying racial attitudes for more than a decade, she says the 2020 murder of George Floyd precipitated an increase in research around the topic.
But there has also been backlash, with parents at school board meetings demanding that teachers and students not discuss race and racism, the overturning of affirmative action and other points of tension around the topic.
Andrew Grant-Thomas is co-founder of the nonprofit EmbraceRace, which provides resources for parents, caregivers and educators on how to talk about race. He says the groups pushing back on race are “a minority but a mobilized minority.”
His group conducted a nationally representative survey of U.S. parents, and Grant-Thomas says the vast majority said “it was very important or extremely important that their kids be educated about race.”
Grant-Thomas says Perry’s study confirms that race-conscious conversations matter.
“The conviction of so many well-meaning people [is that] not talking about race was a way to get to racial fairness,” he says. “The evidence overwhelmingly does not support that.”
Grant-Thomas says parents need to continue such discussions for there to be lasting effects, and talking about race should also be accompanied with creating intentional environments for children.
“In other words, who are your friends? Who are your loved ones? Who do you show affection to?” he says.
For Perry’s part, she hopes to dig into those topics as well. She plans to expand the research by seeing how neighborhoods and friendships can affect children’s biases. There are plans to also open up the study up to include other racial groups.
For her, the bottom line is kids are not colorblind.
“We know that by the age of 3, white children are starting to develop these negative attitudes toward Black children, and that by age 8, a majority of children of color are reporting that they have experienced discrimination,” Perry says.
