Parenting and White children's prosocial behaviors toward same‐race and other‐race peers: The moderating role of targeted moral emotions

• Published date: 01 February 2024
• Author: Jingyi Xu,Tracy L. Spinrad,Sonya Xinyue Xiao,Nancy Eisenberg,Deborah Laible,Rebecca Berger,Gustavo Carlo
• Date: 01 February 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12873

RESEARCH

Parenting and White children’s prosocial behaviors

toward same-race and other-race peers: The

moderating role of targeted moral emotions

Jingyi Xu

1

|Tracy L. Spinrad

1

|Sonya Xinyue Xiao

2

|

Nancy Eisenberg

3

|Deborah Laible

4

|Rebecca Berger

1

|

Gustavo Carlo

5

1

T. Denny Sanford School of Social and

Family Dynamics, Arizona State University,

Tempe, AZ

2

Department of Psychological Sciences,

Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

3

Department of Psychology, Arizona State

University, Tempe, AZ

4

Department of Psychology, Lehigh

University, Bethlehem, PA

5

School of Education, University of

California–Irvine, Irvine, CA

Correspondence

Tracy L. Spinrad, T. Denny Sanford School of

Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State

University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.

Email: tspinrad@asu.edu

Funding information

Research reported in this publication was

supported by the Diversity Science Seed

Funding of T. Denny Sanford School of Social

and Family Dynamics, and the Seed Funding

of Institute for Social Science Research,

Arizona State University. Faculty Innovation

Grant, Lehigh University.

Abstract

Objective: We examined the associations among parenting,

children’s moral emotions, and children’s prosocial behav-

iors toward Black peers and White peers.

Background: Parenting practices inform children’sprosocial

behaviors; however, the contextual andindividual factors

that predict children’s differentiated prosocial behaviors

have been understudied.

Method: Participants were 190 White children (5.4 to

8.91 yearsold,45.8%female)andtheirprimaryparents.

Parents reported parenting practices. Children’s prosocial

behaviors were assessed through distribution tasks; chil-

dren’s sympathy and empathic anger were observed in

response to films that depicted injustice toward others.

Results: Nurturant parenting positively predicted, whereas

restrictive parenting negatively predicted, children’s prosocial

behaviors toward diverse others. Additionally, parenting

predicted children’s prosocial behaviors toward Black peers

only when children expressed low levels of empathic anger

toward victimized Black peers.

Conclusions: Overall, nurturant parenting is positively

related, and restrictive parenting is negatively related, to

children’s prosocial behaviors toward different targets.

Children’s target-specific empathic anger moderated the

relation of specific parenting practices to children’s

prosocial behaviors toward racial outgroup peers.

Implications: White parents should understand the way

that restrictive parenting might impede children’s

Author note: We thank all the participating children, parents, teachers, and our research assistants. The data that supp ort the findings of

this study are available from the corresponding author, TS, upon reasonable request.

Received: 29 January 2022Revised: 30 November 2022Accepted: 29 January 2023

DOI: 10.1111/fare.12873

© 2023 National Council on Family Relations.

Family Relations. 2024;73:541–560. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/fare 541

generosity toward diverse others and engage in nurturant

parenting, especially when children do not naturally feel

concerned about distressed outgroup members.

KEYWORDS

empathic anger, parenting, prosocial, race, sympathy

INTRODUCTION

Given the systemic and interpersonal racism in the United States, it is important to understand

factors underlying majority children’s feelings and behaviors toward racial minority children.

Disparities in White children’s prosocial behaviors (i.e., voluntary behaviors that are intended

to benefit others; Eisenberg et al., 2015) toward White versus other-race peers may be one of

the first ways that racial discrimination is manifested in young children. Thus, understanding

the roots of prosocial behaviors in a privileged group with high social power (i.e., White Ameri-

cans) to marginalized groups (i.e., Black Americans) is of critical importance.

Researchers have identified various individual factors (e.g., sex, empathy-related

responding, emotion regulation) and contextual factors (e.g., parental socialization, teacher–

child relationship; Eisenberg et al., 2015; Ferreira et al., 2016; Padilla-Walker, 2014) that are

predictive of children’s and adolescents’prosocial behaviors. However, our knowledge of the

interplay between individual and contextual characteristics in predicting children’s prosocial

behaviors toward different recipients is insufficient. In this study, we examined the moderating

role of children’s target-specific, situational emotional responses to distress (i.e., sympathy,

empathic anger) in the association with nurturant or restrictive parenting practices toyoung

White children’s prosocial behaviors toward White peers and Black peers.

Children’s prosocial behaviors toward different recipients

Researchers argue that people often have different feelings and beliefs and display different

behaviors toward those who are similar to, versus different from, themselves. For instance,

according to social identity theory, individuals classify themselves based on their social catego-

ries. People tend to hold positive attributions regarding members of the same social group, and

favor ingroup members, relative to members from a different social group (Tajfel, 1974).

As an extension of the social identity theory, social identity development theory delineates

the development of children’s social group preferences and attitudes. Specifically, researchers

suggest that children younger than 2 years old show little awareness of social groups and start

todifferentiatethemselvesfromothersbasedonsocialgroupsaroundtheageof3 years.

Around age of 4 years, children begin to identify with, and express preferences for, their own

(vs. other) social groups, and this ingroup preference becomes more explicit around age of

7 years (Nesdale, 2004).Additionally, the common ingroup identity model posits that individ-

uals’cognitive, perceptual, affective representation, and environmental contexts are related to

how individuals think about and treat others, and people’s negative attitudes toward outgroup

members may elevate and reinforce intergroup bias that favors ingroup members (Gaertner

et al., 1993). All together, these theories suggest that many factors are related to children’s for-

mation of ingroup favoritism.

Children express ingroup bias during the early school years (Nesdale, 2004), and recent evi-

dence shows that children around this age sometimes express biased empathy-related emotions

toward diverse others (Spinrad et al., 2023). Furthermore, Hazelbaker et al. (2022) noted that

White children’s empathy and prosocial behaviors during early and middle childhood serve as

542 FAMILY RELATIONS