Early Adolescents’ Ethnic–Racial Discrimination and Pubertal Development: Parents’ Ethnic–Racial Identities Promote Adolescents’ Resilience

Ethnically and racially underrepresented adolescents are experiencing pubertal development earlier in life than prior cohorts and their White American peers. This early onset of puberty is partly attributable to ethnic–racial discrimination. To contribute to adolescents’ resilience and posttraumatic growth in the face of ethnic–racial discrimination, parents’ ethnic–racial identities may spill over into their parenting beliefs and practices. Parents who have a sense of belonging with and commitment to their ethnic–racial identities may be aware of discrimination and actively and consistently engage in practices that build supportive home environments to support their children’s development in the context of ethnic–racial discrimination. To assess whether parents’ ethnic–racial identity commitment predicted adolescents’ resilience against ethnic–racial discrimination, we used multiple waves of survey data from adolescent siblings and their parents participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (N-adolescents = 1,651; N-families = 805; 35% Black, 37% Latinx, 3% Asian, 25% other ethnically and racially underrepresented youth; 49% boys, 50% girls, 1% gender nonconforming youth; M_age = 11.49, SD = 0.51). Results indicated that adolescents who experienced more frequent ethnic–racial discrimination than their siblings showed more advanced pubertal development. Parental ethnic– racial identity commitment reduced the relation between discrimination and pubertal development within a family. Results suggest that ethnic–racial identity commitment in parents can protect children when they experience ethnic–racial discrimination. Building on extant propositions related to resilience (Infurna & Luthar, 2018), the present study amplifies the depiction of resilience, yields recommendations for analysis of future research, and provides implications regarding the role of ethnicity–race in familial practices.