The Black Family: The Impact of Race, Socio-Economic Status, and Parental Gender Roles on Childhood Development
The purpose of this study is to examine how past scholarship has addressed the impact of race, socio-economic status, and parental gender roles on childhood development within the Black family. Scholars have focused on the "so-called" unconventional lifestyles and family structure, with the mother as the head of the household, as a reason to believe that Black families are not aware of what it means to be a family. Compared to White middle-class ideas of a nuclear family, the Black family is seen as unstable and untraditional. Some scholars writing about Black families fail to consider how history, socioeconomics, and political disenfranchisement affect the Black family. Instead the Black family is seen as unconventional with arrangements and lifestyles that easily misleads some Whites and some conservative Blacks to assume that Black families are not capable of passing traditions, values, and culture down to their children. This research will challenge past research on the Black family and grapple with how past scholars have misrepresented the Black family, especially the experiences of Black childhood. By focusing on the impact of race, class, and parental gender roles, this research will explain how past scholarship has addressed as well as ignored inequalities that Black families have faced and in return has lead to the assumptions that the arrangements and lifestyles that Black families adopt to are non-traditional, most importantly, non-nuclear.
School:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department:
Political Science
Research Advisor:
Karen Flynn
Department of Research Advisor:
African American Studies
Year of Publication:
2006