White Italian Parents’ Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Children’s Prosocial Behaviors Toward Migrant-Origin Peers

Parents’ ethnic-racial socialization (ERS) plays a crucial role in shaping children’s attitudes toward individuals from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds. For instance, a review of 43 studies reveals consistent associations between parents’ conscious ERS strategies with their children’s greater awareness of racial inequities and more favorable attitudes toward people from different ethnic-racial backgrounds. However, these studies focus on entrenched racism resolution in the US, with few to no studies addressing tensions surrounding current issues of migration and integration in European countries. To assess the issue of growing migration flows and an increasingly multicultural society, we examined parents’ ERS in Italy and potential associations with children’s prosocial behaviors toward peers from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds. The study involved 312 White Italian parents (89.7% mothers; Mage = 39.02) and their children (48.1% girls; Mage = 51.94 months; range 31–75 months). Parents completed an adapted version of the White Racial Socialization Questionnaire (Hagan et al., 2023), which evaluates three ERS strategies: conscious, discussion-hesitant, and evasive approaches. Children’s prosocial behaviors toward migrant-origin peers were assessed using both parental reports and a sticker sharing task, in which children were asked to allocate resources to Italian native-born and migrant-origin peers. A structural equation model (SEM) was estimated to examine the associations between ERS strategies and children’s prosocial behaviors, controlling for children’s age and sex assigned at birth. Results indicated that a conscious ERS approach was significantly positively associated with children’s prosocial behaviors toward migrant-origin peers, as assessed through both parental reports and the sticker-sharing task. By incorporating both behavioral observations and parental evaluations, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the links between ERS and early prosocial development. These findings contribute to the growing body of research on ERS in European contexts and may have implications for fostering inclusive social development in early childhood.