"African American mothers talk to their preadolescents about honesty and lying"

Professor Gustavo Carlo is co-author of an article in Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology analyzing African American mothers’ conversations with their children. 

​The title of the article is “African American mothers talk to their preadolescents about honesty and lying.”
 
Additional authors are University of Missouri colleagues Jordan A. Booker, Assistant Professor (first author); Emerita Professor Jean M. Ispa; Research Associate Jihee Im; and doctoral students Sahitya Maiya and Joy Roos.
 
Carlo’s primary research interest focuses on understanding positive social development and health in culturally diverse children and adolescents. Many of his projects focus on U.S. ethnic/racial groups, including Latino/a youth and families. He has published more than 200 books, chapters, and research papers. He currently serves as a member of the Society for Research in Child Development Governing Council, as associate editor of the International Journal of Behavioral Development, and as co-editor of the upcoming APA Handbook of Adolescent Development. Carlo serves as director of UCI’s Cultural Resilience and Learning Center.

Professor Gustavo Carlo

Abstract

While existing work points to the ways parenting behaviors and specific value socialization approaches influence children’s internalization of moral values (Baumrind, Child Development 43, 261–267, 1972; Hoffman, Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice, 2001; Grusec & Davidov, Child Development, 81, 687–709, 2010), little work has considered the experiences of African American and lower-income families. The current study capitalized on the availability of 53 video-recorded mother–preadolescent conversations about their disagreements from the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project (Vogel et al., Early head start children in grade 5: Long-term follow-up of the early head start research and evaluation study sample. OPRE Report # 2011-8, 2010). Using inductive analysis, we assessed mothers’ affective tone, communication styles, and message content during the discussion of problems involving honesty and lying. Mothers tended to display warm yet firm affect, incorporate both autonomy-supportive and dominant-directive communication styles, assert that lying is never acceptable, and explain why lying is problematic. Mothers’ affect, communication styles, and message content reflected a no-nonsense approach to transmitting values about honesty to their children. To our knowledge, the current study is the first qualitative observational investigation of low-income African American mothers’ conversations regarding honesty with their children.