Teaching Race to Children and Adolescents

The University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium, in collaboration with the Society for Research in Child Development, hosted a webinar on March 13, 2017 on teaching race to children and adolescents.

The focus of this webinar is on how recent and past events of racial dehumanization of Black and Brown people and children have left parents struggling with how to raise children in such an hostile public environment. The stress of parenting boys and young men of color requires a racial literacy or the ability to read, recast, and resolve racially stressful encounters for youth and the parents.

This webinar will illuminate the research on the emotional costs of racial dehumanization on health, identify strategies for parents, educators, and youth to counter that dehumanization, and demonstrate how children influence adults through their struggles, triumphs and questions about racial politics.

This webinar featured presentations by Dr. Howard Stevenson, Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, and Dr. Diane Hughes, Professor of Applied Psychology at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Development, and Education. It was moderated by Dr. Oscar Barbarin, Chair and Professor of the African American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. This webinar is adapted from a session at the 2016 SRCD Special Topic Meeting on Babies, Boys, and Men of Color.