Free NurtureShock by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman Page B

contemporary discrimination from today’s newspapers, it’s quite possible
     it would have made the whites defensive, and only made the blacks angry at whites.”
    Another scholar has something close to an answer on that. Dr. April Harris-Britt, a clinical psychologist and professor at
     University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies how minority parents help their children develop a racial identity from
     a young age. All minority parents at some point tell their children that discrimination is out there, but they shouldn’t let
     it stop them. However, these conversations are not triggered by their children bringing it up. Rather, the parent often suffers
     a discriminatory incident, and it pushes him to decide, “It’s time I prepared my child for this.”
    Is it good for them? Harris-Britt found that some preparation for bias was beneficial to children, and that it was necessary—94%
     of African American eighth graders reported to Harris-Britt that they’d felt discriminated against in the prior three months.
     But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less
     likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers—whom they saw
     as biased against them.
    Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual
     discrimination: “If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be
     hostile—you’re just not valued and that’s just the way the world is.”
    Preparation-for-bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category
     of conversation, in Harris-Britt’s analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud
     of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children’s self-confidence; in one study, black children
     who’d heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort
     and ability.
    That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If “black pride” is good for African American children,
     where does that leave white children? It’s horrifying to imagine kids being “proud to be white.” Yet many scholars argue that’s
     exactly what children’s brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group
     with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth,
     and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent—it’d be
     redundant.
    When talking to teens, it’s helpful to understand how their tendency to form groups and cliques is partly a consequence of
     American culture. In America, we encourage individuality. Children freely and openly develop strong preferences—defining their
     self-identity by the things they like and dislike. They learn to see differences. Though singular identity is the long-term
     goal, in high school this identity-quest is satisfied by forming and joining distinctive subgroups. So, in an ironic twist,
     the more a culture emphasizes individualism, the more the high school years will be marked by subgroupism. Japan, for instance,
     values social harmony over individualism, and children are discouraged from asserting personal preferences. Thus, less groupism
     is observed in their high schools.
    The security that comes from belonging to a group, especially for teens, is palpable. Traits that mark this membership are—whether
     we like it or not—central to this developmental period. University of Michigan researchers did a study that shows just how
     powerful this need to belong is, and how much it can affect a