The Family Socialization and Stage-Environment Fit of African-American Adolescents’ Academic and Recreational Talent Development

African-American families are powerful sources in supporting adolescents’ developing academic and recreational talents. Such an endeavor can be tricky, however, as the nature of parent-child relationships shifts in adolescence. African-American parents face the task of helping their children develop talents and skills while also responding to adolescents’ growing needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness outside of the family. This dissertation integrated the family socialization model of Eccles’ Expectancy-Value Theory and Eccles and Midgley’s Stage-Environment Fit Theory to investigate the heterogeneity in African-American mothers’ talent socialization behaviors and the extent to which the links between mothers’ socialization strategies and adolescents’ talent-related outcomes are contingent upon the individual developmental needs of adolescents. In Chapter 2, using exhaustive, open-response data, I examined the content of African-American mothers’ socialization strategies for specific domain talents their adolescents possessed. I uncovered socialization strategies encompassing close parent-child interactions, use of resources, and regulation that mothers used to help adolescents develop academic and recreational talents. I also found gender and SES differences that highlight the ways in which these talents and strategies are driven by prevailing gender stereotypes and economic constraints across families. In Chapter 3, using a pattern-centered approach, I examined patterns of African-American mothers’ talent socialization within different talent domains. I found that most mothers engaged in only a few key socialization strategies frequently. Only a small proportion of mothers engaged in socialization strategies at uniform levels (i.e., high overall), challenging assumptions by studies using holistic, variable-centered approaches. I also found that moderate and specialized profiles were better or just as good at predicting higher achievement and engagement of talented adolescents. In Chapter 4, I examined African-American mothers’ educational involvement behaviors and their differential links to adolescents’ academic motivational beliefs and achievement based on adolescents’ academic talent. Patterns of moderately low involvement and higher use of material provisions were linked to higher academic motivation and grades, especially among adolescents identified to be academically talented. In Chapter 5, I discuss the key implications of the dissertation for research, calling for future studies to probe a more complete set of African-American parental strategies, to attain more concrete, holistic ideas of family socialization within these households, and to deeply consider the developmental needs of adolescents when hypothesizing the degree and types of socialization that are most optimal for positive talent development