Valuing What Your Parents Taught You: The Moderating Role of Personal Valuation of Parental Ethnic-Racial Socialization in Emerging Adults

Parental ethnic-racial socialization (PERS) represents distinct family cultural practices through which parents communicate important ethnic-racial information to their children. To date, there has been a dearth of quantitative research on how youths value these family practices. Drawing on a sample of ethnically-racially diverse emerging adults (N = 263), this study examines personal valuation of PERS (i.e., the perception of how valuable or important PERS practices have been in one’s life) and its relations to components of subjective well-being (satisfaction with life, positive affect, negative affect). Personal valuation of cultural socialization and promotion of mistrust emerged as significant moderators of the link between respective PERS frequency and negative affect. There was a significant positive association between frequency of cultural socialization and negative affect for those who endorsed relatively low personal valuation of cultural socialization. For individuals who indicated a relatively high level of personal valuation of promotion of mistrust messages, a greater frequency of these messages was associated with more negative affect. Results highlight the practical relevance of exploring youths’ subjective evaluations of these family cultural practices on subjective well-being.