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Abstract
Ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) is a complex developmental process through which youth learn about racial discrimination, future biases, and gain strategies and coping mechanisms to address these challenges. While ERS is a necessary developmental process for families of color, the messages shared can serve to either mitigate or exacerbate the influence of discrimination on well-being. Although foundational ERS research is rooted in understanding how Black and African American parents socialize youth around discrimination, research on other minoritized families, such as Latinx families, is less developed. Further, within the existing ERS literature, little is known about the role of extended family members, such as grandparents, in this socialization process. The present study aimed to address these gaps by examining the types of ERS messages shared by parents and grandparents with emerging adults, how these messages may be related to depressive symptoms, and whether they moderate the association between emerging adults and their self-reported depressive symptoms. To this end, 92 Latinx emerging adults completed self-report measures on their experiences of discrimination, parental and grandparental ERS, and depressive symptoms. Results revealed that parents and grandparents, on average, shared cultural socialization and egalitarian ERS messages more so than preparation for bias or promotion of mistrust. Parental and grandparental preparation for bias was related to participants’ experiences of discrimination, and parental and grandparental egalitarian messages were negatively related to participants’ depressive symptoms. Only parental cultural socialization was negatively related to participants’ depressive symptoms. Interestingly, only parental promotion of mistrust moderated the association between discrimination and depressive symptoms, but only at very low levels. The present study’s findings offer insights into the Latinx family dynamics of ERS. These findings highlight Latinx families’ emphasis on cultural pride, ethnicity, and heritage with youth. Further, the findings suggest that the promotion of mistrust might be supportive under certain conditions. A novel contribution of this study was the quantitative assessment of ERS, extending existing ERS frameworks to extended family members. Together, these findings help broaden our understanding of ERS in Latinx families.