When 5-year-olds head back to school this fall, one of the most important lessons won't be found in a textbook. It happens as they learn to share, cooperate and build friendships. Now, new research from the University of Michigan suggests that a mother's strong connection to her own ethnic and racial heritage may give her children a meaningful boost in learning those skills.
Researchers studied more than 3,000 children and their families as part of a long-running national project called the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. They found that Black and Latino children whose mothers reported a stronger sense of ethnic-racial identity when those children were infants went on to show higher social skills by age 5. The findings were published in the journal Infant and Child Development.
Lead author Sunghyun Hong, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan studying both social work and developmental psychology, said the results point to a powerful but often overlooked factor in child development. "Our findings suggest that strong ethnic-racial identity within families can be an important developmental asset for young children," Hong said. "At the same time, they remind us to think carefully about how we define and measure social competence in increasingly diverse communities."
The study also found that widely used assessments for measuring children's social skills consistently gave lower ratings to Black and Latino children compared to white children. This raises questions about whether those tools fully capture the many ways children from different backgrounds learn to connect with others, solve problems together, and build relationships.
Even with those measurement challenges, the research showed that cultural strengths within families still mattered. When researchers looked closely, they found that children with mothers who had a stronger ethnic-racial identity tended to develop better social skills, regardless of how the standard assessments scored them.
The researchers noted one limitation: children whose mothers identified their ethnicity as "Other" were not included in the study because the available data did not provide enough detail to classify them. They said this highlights a broader need to better include groups like Asian American and Indigenous families in research.
As the United States becomes increasingly diverse, the researchers say their work points toward a clear opportunity. When parents and communities celebrate and pass along cultural identity, children may benefit in measurable ways. "As we work to understand children's development, it's important that our assessment tools recognize the many ways social competence is expressed across families and communities," Hong said.