As the White mom of Black kids, I see their 'adultification.' It's wrong. |
When actor Sterling K. Brown recently explained on Dax Shepard’s podcast why he posts photos of his sons online, many listeners were surprised. Shepard said he avoids showing his kids’ faces on social media for safety reasons. Brown said he does the opposite. For him, as the father to Black boys, visibility and proximity to celebrity can mean protection.
“Your children are obviously White; my children are Black. I feel like the more I put them on social, the safer they are," Brown said. "I’m trying to make sure that they make it home.”
For parents of Black children, his words reflect a reality that all of us are only too familiar with, a reality that begins far earlier than most Americans realize.
I’m a law professor who has represented survivors of domestic violence for decades in the family court system. I have seen firsthand how institutions treat people of color differently while insisting they are neutral.
I also find myself in a precarious position as a parent speaking about this because I am White. My children are Black. And that means I have become something I never expected to be: the sentinel standing watch over experiences that are profoundly different from my own.
Parents of Black children walk a tightrope
My children are often treated as if they are older than they are. They receive punishments that feel outsized for their transgressions. They are inappropriately sexualized. And yes, all of this happens while they receive education in the very same progressive and liberal institutions that I attended myself.
I suspect I share something with many Black parents in this position – a constant uncertainty about where to begin. How much do you push back? How loudly do you object? When does advocating for your child turn into becoming that parent – the difficult one, the hypersensitive one, the one schools and camps quietly begin to avoid?
Every decision feels like walking a tightrope. My instinct is to protect my children, but I also know that challenging authority can put a target on their backs. A parent who speaks up too often risks making life harder for the very child they are trying to defend.
There is another uncomfortable truth here as well.
If a Black parent wrote this – or felt these feelings – there is a real possibility it would not land the same way. Their concerns might be dismissed as anger, overreaction or grievance.
In fact, it wasn’t until my first husband died that I fully understood how early and how quietly bias can shape childhood. Today I am remarried, and our household is blended. My second husband and his daughter are White, and our kids are about the same age. Watching my daughter and stepdaughter grow up side by side has been like a control study: same clothes, same age, same household – yet only my Black daughter is punished.
When my daughter was in elementary school, she was told by a teacher in front of the entire class that her skirt was too short and sent to the nurse’s office to change into spare clothes. On another day, she raised her hand in class and was told her shirt was inappropriate because it showed her stomach. Again, she was sent to the nurse’s office. Again, she went home wearing spare clothes.
An administrator at my daughter’s school eventually apologized, but she never acknowledged the elephant in the room: my 6-year-old daughter was sexualized.
A Georgetown University Law Center on Poverty and Inequality study corroborates our experience. It found that, beginning at the age of 5, Black girls are perceived as more independent and needing less protection from adults. They are hypersexualized.
My son has experienced something similar: He was expelled from a camp. The reason? A group text among a dozen 11-year-old boys that involved inappropriate trash talking. The messages weren’t sent during the program and had nothing to do with behavior there. Every boy in the thread participated. None were expelled.
My son was the only one punished. The others, of course, were White.
According to research by the American Psychological Association, Black boys as young as 10 are more likely than their White peers to be mistaken as older and less innocent. Ten-year-old Black boys – babies, really – have experienced documented incidents of police violence.
Adultification of Black children transcends political sides
Both my daughter’s school and my son’s camp pride themselves on being progressive, inclusive institutions. The people running them would likely consider themselves deeply committed to equality. They would be horrified to hear that they harbor any sort of implicit bias against Black children.
Yet a study at the Yale Child Study Center found that, when expecting to see bad or challenging behavior on a screen, eye scan technology found that teachers looked more at Black children than White children, and they looked specifically more at the African American boy.
And when teachers harbor implicit bias, another award-winning study out of Yale, which included 1,339 teachers in 295 U.S. schools, found that teachers tend to punish Black boys more harshly than White boys for the same infractions.
This bias has a name: adultification. Researchers have documented this phenomenon for years. Adults across institutions often perceive Black children as older, less innocent and more responsible for their behavior than White children of the same age.
Teachers are more likely to interpret identical behavior by Black students as intentional misconduct. Black girls are more likely to be perceived as sexually mature.
What makes adultification so difficult to confront is that it rarely appears as overt racism. Instead, it shows up in small decisions – a dress code violation here, a discipline decision there.
Being politically liberal or culturally “woke” does not eliminate implicit bias. In fact, it can make it harder to acknowledge. When I raised concerns with my children’s institutions, I was told the accusations were “ridiculous.”
As a lawyer, I know that civil rights laws technically prohibit racial discrimination in education and youth programs. But in practice, they rarely offer meaningful recourse to families experiencing situations like ours. Discrimination almost always comes packaged with another explanation: policy enforcement, behavioral concerns, dress codes.
For most families, the remedy is far simpler: Move on. Find another school. Another camp. Another afterschool program. Hope the next place treats your child like a child. Teach your child that the world is not fair – hope that they learn how to stand up for themselves, but not too much, and not too threateningly. But that approach allows the problem to continue quietly.
We should be doing far more to address adultification where it begins – in the everyday institutions that shape children’s lives. Schools and youth programs should be required to track disciplinary patterns and report disparities. Staff should receive ongoing training on implicit bias.
Parents should have clear pathways to report discriminatory treatment to state civil rights agencies, like New York’s Division of Human Rights. And Georgetown Law Center has taken an important step by creating a portal for logging adultification bias.
None of these steps would eliminate bias. But they would at least acknowledge the problem.
Protection of our Black children takes exposure and recognition of something seemingly simple: Black children deserve what every child deserves – the benefit of the doubt, and the freedom to be seen as children.
Dale Margolin Cecka is an assistant professor of law and the director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at the Albany Law School.