In the African American culture, parenting has been referred to as demanding, directive, and non-responsive discipline that can be viewed as negative parenting in other cultures. Parenting can be defined as the process of showing and giving physical, social, and emotional upbringing of a child. The word parenting is referred to the activity of raising a child and usually provides a child 's physical needs and protecting them from harm; while having an impact on skills and cultural values. There are three different sets of forces that are used to validate the dynamics and structure of an African American family. These forces can be determined to be the integration into family life of cultural practices, the structural adaptation from the ancestors in slavery, and past and current discrimination and economic inequality.
Over the years, researchers have found that these parenting styles develop positive implications in many African American cultures. There are other researches of African Americans and childrearing styles and the most common continues to have impact between intervention and prevention studies that are conducted in the troublesome populations or with families from a much lower socioeconomic area (Apfel & Seitz, 1997; McLoyd, Cauce, Takeuchi & Leon, 2000). While the goals of human parenting can be widely debated, the main challenges in African American families may include limited finances, premature pregnancy, and neighborhood dangers. These findings show the significance of subculture and neighborhood environmental context in African American parenting and childrearing styles.
Because of the physical and cultural characteristics, African Americans are singled out from other cultures in society in because African American families live within differential and unequal boundaries that can be considered as objects of a collective discrimination. Because of the struggles that are present in African American families,
References: Apfel, N., & Seitz, V. (1997). The firstborn sons of African American teenage mothers: Perspectives on risk and resilience. In Luthar, S. S., Burack, J. A., Cicchetti, D. & Weisz, J. R (Eds.), Developmental psychopathology: Perspectives on adjustment, risk, and disorder (pp. 486–506). New York: Cambridge University Press. Cutrona, C. E., Russell, D. W., Hessling, R. M., Brown, P. A., & Murry, V. (2000). Direct and moderating effects of community context on the psychological well-being of African American women. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 1088–1101. McLoyd, V. C., Cauce, A. M., Takeuchi, L. W. Leon (2000). Marital Processes and Parental Socialization in Families of Color: A Decade Review of Research. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62 (4), 1070–1093.