Synthesizing a Special Issue on Parenting Adolescents in an Increasingly Diverse World

Abstract

Our goal is to identify integrative themes in this special issue on “Parenting Adolescents in a Multicultural World”. Specifically, we identify themes that may generalize largely from studies of marginalized families to guide American families more broadly as youth navigate an increasingly diverse world. We describe three broad diversity socialization goals that may foster greater intercultural maturity in youth. These include helping youth find their place and value in a multicultural world, increase the value that they place on others and decrease their fears of difference, and prepare to respond to biased or perceived rejection. And we offer five directions for future research to help build a path forward in this important area of study.

Classic theories of parenting adolescents continue to heavily shape current research in this field. For example, in the 1960’s Diana Baumrind first published her groundbreaking work on styles of parenting (Baumrind, 1967). In the brewing cultural scene of Berkeley, California, her team surveyed over 100 parents of white, middle class families. She and her colleagues found that preschoolers whose parents were “authoritative” - supportive, yet firm – had better social and emotional outcomes. Other researchers extended this work to adolescents and found that teens with authoritative parents had lower rates of drug use, delinquency and internalizing disorders (Steinberg & Silk, 2002). Although both criticized and acclaimed, Baumrind’s parenting theory (as extended by Maccoby & Martin, 1983) remains widely cited for defining how best to parent adolescents (see McKee, Jones, & Forehand, & Cuellar, 2013).

But in the 50 years since this work first appeared, both the world of adolescents and our understanding of that world have changed (Dahl, Allen, Wilbrecht, & Suleiman, 2018; Patton et al., 2018). Teens are digital natives, never having known a world without the internet and cell phones. They are targeted consumers, having more disposable income and freedom to purchase than ever before. And, they traverse a longer adolescence, reaching puberty younger and entering adult social roles later than their predecessors. These changes in adolescence are also embedded in an increasingly diverse world. For the first time, the two-parent, white middle class, heterosexual families - that dominated family demography in Baumrind’s era - make up less than 50% of US families today (Pearce, Hayward, Chassin, & Curran, 2018). Growing diversity in who makes up a family, race and ethnicity, parent and youth sexual orientation, and social class, challenge youth to navigate an increasingly multicultural world. In the face of such change, how has parenting itself changed?

In this special issue, we presented articles from leading scholars who worked together for two years to address this question. In early 2016, we formed a faculty working group funded by the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) to review theories about parenting adolescents in light of recent advances in understanding adolescent development, parenting systems, and family demography. We set out to answer a seemingly straightforward question. With all the changes in the world today, both in the experiences of families and in our scientific understanding of adolescence, do we need new theories about the parenting of adolescents? In our first meeting (in May 2016), it was immediately clear that this was not a straightforward question. Participants shared differing views and identified important nuances pertaining both to whether we need new theories and to what is new in the world to challenge those theories. Little did we know that by our next meeting (on November 11, 2016), the changing national (and international) climate would spur our group to a quick consensus that among the pressing challenges facing American families today is how to prepare adolescents to successfully navigate an increasingly diverse world.

The challenge of navigating an increasingly diverse world is not new – socially marginalized youth have long lived with a foot in more than one world (see Mills-Koonce, Rehder, & McCurdy, 2018; Stein, Coard, Kiang, Smith, & Mejia, 2018 for examples). However, given changing demography in the United States along many dimensions (including family structure, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class as highlighted in this special issue), this challenge may become more common across youth in American society. Because studies about parenting around difference and diversity in socially marginalized youth may provide lessons that are broadly applicable to navigating a diverse world, several papers in this special issue focus on lessons from these families. Here, we integrate this work and focus on four lessons learned about the ways in which parents can help their adolescent children navigate a multicultural world and five salient future directions for research in this area.

What can we learn about helping children to navigate a multicultural world?

Across articles in this special issue, authors returned to the centrality of classic parenting theories as defining a universal context for helping children navigate a multicultural world (Jones, Loiselle, & Highlander, 2018; Lansford et al., 2018; McBride Murry & Lippold, 2018; Mills-Koonce et al., 2018; Stein et al., 2018). As McBride Murry and Lippold (2018) note “regardless of family structure and the fact that some families confront a myriad of stressors, parental monitoring and exposure to emotionally connected, warm, and supportive family environments are pivotal leveraging points for positive youth outcomes across all social classes, regardless of the diversity of family structure” (page #, this volume). Evidence for the universality of the link between these dimensions of parenting and positive youth outcomes was provided by Lansford and colleagues (2018) who showed that across nine countries warmth and control were similarly related to youth internalizing and externalizing symptoms.

As noted by several authors in this special issue, these parenting styles function within a larger family system and other theories likely present universal models that continue to define how parenting works today. For example, as noted by family systems theory, the family is a set of interlocking relationships that influence and are influenced by one another with the goal of creating a self-stabilizing system when inevitably met with destabilizing challenges (Cox & Paley, 2003). Families function within a series of interlocking contexts in which what happens outside of the family (within peer groups, neighborhoods, work places, extracurricular activities, media platforms, and larger societal groups) may impact what happens within the family and vice-versa (Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Cummings, Davies, & Campbell, 2002). Within these intersecting contexts, the primary function of family, as socioecological models assert (Cox & Paley, 2003), is to provide security. But as the world changes, does our understanding of security and how we secure our place in the world need to evolve? More specifically, how do parents ensure security for adolescents in an increasingly diverse and multicultural world?

Authors in this special issue offered other theories to describe how this question may be answered for families whose members may face different forms of marginalization (e.g., family stress theory, Conger, Ge, Elder, Lorenz, & Simons, 1994; racial and ethnic ecological theory, Hughes et al., 2006; lifespan sexual identity development theory, D’Augelli, 1994; and various economic theories including those related to social drift, see Jones et al., 2018; McBride Murry & Lippold, 2018). Together, these theories emphasize the common threats faced by marginalized families around power, resources, and equality. The ways in which these challenges manifest for those in various marginalized groups vary, however, as well as how groups respond to these challenges (Jones et al., 2018). With the increasing diversity of the US population, we anticipate that these same basic concerns – regarding power, resources, and equality - will be perceived (or even faced) as challenges to many more cultural groups than ever before. So, then, how do parents socialize youth to navigate a world with these challenges?

Parent socialization has been defined slightly differently across various subfields in the literature, including the papers in this special section. That said, a representative definition operationalizes socialization as “transmitting values, norms, information, and social perspectives to children to instill a sense of self-pride and to help them prepare for potential barriers and biases that they may encounter” (page #, this issue McBride Murry & Lippold, 2018). Theories about parent socialization often focus on developmental niches, including parent cultural socialization (Garcia Coll et al., 1996; Hughes et al., 2006). Parent cultural socialization refers to one aspect of racial ethnic socialization and is perhaps the most well developed articulation of diversity training currently in the literature (see Stein et al., 2018). (Note that we use diversity socialization to refer to a variety of socialization practices regarding a much broader set of social groups than those defined by race and ethnicity. We avoid using the term cultural socialization that is already part of the psychological nomenclature and refers to ways in which parents teach youth about their racial and ethnic background.) Much of this literature has focused on the messages that parents might provide African American and Latino youth regarding race, ethnicity and culture that lead to developing cultural pride and preparing to face bias in the future. However, Jones and colleagues (2018) also describe other diversity socialization messages delivered by parents to poor and working-class White youth involving self-protection (through social isolation, determination and grit) and avoiding disappointment in achieving less than their parents’ generation (by pursuing short-term goals aligned with a live fast, die young orientation).

The extent to which such diversity socialization messages are helpful for youth may depend on a variety of factors, three of which we highlight here. First, these messages may be most successful when they occur within a larger parenting context of warmth and structure like those described in classic theories of parenting. Mills-Koonce and colleagues highlight this point in describing the importance of the coming out experience for LGBTQ youth with their parents. This experience, they note, “occurs against a backdrop of relationship histories, and the decision to come out to a parent is made in the context of an ongoing attachment relationship” (page #). Second, these messages may be differentially successful depending on whether the focus is on short-term or long-term goals for youth development. As noted by Jones and colleagues (2018), “in the context of a sense of isolation, hopelessness, and an extreme present-focus, … low-income and working-class White parents may convey messages that while adaptive in the short-term may undermine their adolescent children’s capacity to survive let alone thrive” particularly when taught singularly, which may make it “more difficult for adolescents to stand out or excel in academic and/or employment settings when skills such as assertiveness are rewarded and necessary” (page #). Third, these messages are likely to be more successful when they are part of a larger set of diversity socialization practices. To this point, Stein and colleagues (2018) argue that cultural socialization (in particular) is about much more than the singular messages that parents offer their children. For example, these authors describe cultural parental self-efficacy as a novel parenting skill, involving “the extent to which parents believe they can effectively instill cultural knowledge, values, and pride in their children” (p. 4; Kiang, Glatz, & Buchanan, 2017).

Across these theories of parenting and diversity socialization, the developmental goal for youth may be what those in the education field have called intercultural maturity. King and Baxter Magolda (2005) describe intercultural maturity as a wholistic developmental process involving advances in cognition, interpersonal skills, and intrapersonal competencies that grow rapidly in adolescence. The endpoint is youth who can retain their own cultural identities while appreciating those of others by using a flexible, adaptive worldview. Beyond a focus on cultural awareness and knowledge, this view of cultural competence emphasizes the importance of acting on that knowledge in ways that lead to rich interactions with those from various social groups, flexible decision making and conflict resolution, and a strong sense of self and place in the world.

The intersection of what parents need to do (vis-à-vis diversity socialization) and what children need (vis-à-vis becoming interculturally mature) point to three broad tasks of diversity socialization pertinent to all youth (whether from marginalized groups or not) that are highlighted throughout articles in this special issue. First, some of what parents may need to do as part of diversity socialization is to lift up their adolescent children’s place and value in a multicultural world. This may include helping youth develop a positive racial/ethnic/cultural identity, instilling cultural pride, responding supportively to youth in defining their sexuality, and recognizing the rewards and connections offered by those living in varied family structures. In some instances, this aspect of diversity socialization occurs at a family level, when family members identify with the same social group (e.g., racial/ethnic or social class), but this may not always be the case (e.g., in multi-racial families where members have different racial/ethnic identities or parents and youth who differ in sexual orientation). Regardless, parents are cautioned to recognize the intersectionality of these social identities that may lead to differences in how culture is experienced by themselves versus their teens (e.g., being a young black teen boy versus a mature black woman; being a gay, Irish Catholic girl versus a heterosexual, Irish Catholic father). Indeed, when parents and youth differ in their intersectional identities, challenges in diversity socialization may be most acute (as noted by Mills Koonce et al., 2018 in discussing the experiences of gay youth coming out to their heterosexual parents).

A second task of diversity socialization is that parents may need to help their adolescent children increase the value that they place on others and, in turn, decrease their fears of difference. This may include activities linked to developing intercultural maturity like increasing awareness and knowledge about other social groups as well as exposure and connection when youth are learning to think about the world more flexibly. Such parenting practices may target, enhance or counter those found in the broader offline and online media that perpetuate cultural stereotypes. As Jones and colleagues note (2018), “it is unfortunate, but true, that such bias and stereotyping toward low income Whites begets subsequent prejudice [as well], particularly in the context of economic insecurity”. Examples of the same process underlying acts of prejudice and hatred toward other groups are equally evident in the popular media and may underlie what Stein and colleagues (2018) note is an all-time low in Americans’ confidence that societal racial problems can be resolved (Pew, 2017).

And third, for diversity socialization to be successful parents may need to prepare their adolescent children to deal with a world that sometimes reject them based on difference. The racial ethnic socialization literature describes one such strategy as preparing youth to face bias, a practice that may be most successful when balanced with messages about cultural pride and coping with stress more generally (Stein et al., 2018). For other groups, like poor and working-class Whites, such preparation may occur via tacitly preparing for this bias by selecting regional or cultural isolation or by focusing on present attainable goals rather than future ambitious goals that may lead to experiences of perceived bias. As youth grow in intercultural maturity, they are likely to encounter more ambiguous situations and parents may also play a role in helping youth perceive and interpret situations in terms of potential bias and prejudice. How youth experience and respond to bias and rejection are potential threats to other diversity socialization goals.

These aspects of parent diversity socialization may be particularly important during adolescence as they align with key development tasks of this period (Stein et al., 2018). Lifting up to an adolescent’s place and value in a multicultural world may be one part of parents’ role in helping youth develop identity and a sense of self. Increasing the value that adolescents place on others and decreasing their fears of difference may be part of parents’ role in helping youth navigate normative social changes associated with independence, connection and seeking social prestige. And dealing with a world that sometimes rejects adolescents as different may be part of a parent’s role in helping youth navigate issues of belonging (involving not only peers, but extracurricular groups, work places, and social media platforms) as well as acceptance and rejection.

Future directions for research

The articles in this special issue include empirical work and literature reviews but also a great deal of theory development. As such, each article provides a rich set of directions for future research. Augmenting these suggestions, here we discuss what we view as five key areas for novel inquiry that pull across areas of social diversity as presented here (race/ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and family structure), as well as some key areas of social diversity not included in this issue (religion, immigrant status, and health/disability). These five directions for future research include (a) creating a tighter integration of diversity socialization practices with our current understanding of adolescence, (b) developing models and methods to capture family diversity, (c) testing theories focused on family processes rather than demographic proxies, (d) placing the study of parent diversity socialization and adolescent intercultural maturity within larger ecological contexts and ways of interacting across those contexts, and (e) learning about these processes from the broader changing world (outside of the US and other high income countries) in which most of the world’s adolescents now live.

Parent diversity socialization and adolescence

In this special issue, Stein and colleagues make a compelling case that diversity socialization in adolescence may be particularly important as it intersects with developmentally stage salient tasks. The growing developmental capacities (e.g., more abstract cognition to consider constructs like class and ethnicity; more experience to construe interpretation of cultural experiences) and challenging developmental tasks (e.g., individuation, identity development) of adolescents mean that, whether implicit or explicit, adolescents are undergoing a process of diversity socialization.

But we also know more about adolescence today than we did when classic parenting theories were first offered. The new science of adolescence may provide important guidance in how to best nest parent diversity socialization within the unique developmental experiences of this period. For example, adolescence is a sensitive period emphasizing prestige or status seeking that is in part driven by neurobiological changes in the brain. Research in recent decades highlights the importance of biological-environmental interactions that shape how adolescents engage in and respond to the world. As noted by Dahl and colleagues (2018), neurobiological development in mid-adolescence occurs in sync with improvements in learning from novel experiences including integrating information from different experiences with imperfect feedback. This mode of learning may be particularly important for parents helping youth navigate multicultural contexts because learning about individual differences and complex social processes is not simply a matter of reasoning or memorizing rules. Links between neurobiological development in adolescence, learning styles, and parent diversity socialization may be one fruitful avenue for helping parents and others who work with youth to best support the goal of intercultural maturity.

A second unique feature of adolescence relates to growing autonomy and changes in the relation between parenting behavior and youth outcomes. Notably, Lansford and colleagues (2018) provide evidence for the importance of youth behavior in shaping parenting. In their cross-national study, they show that youth problem behavior predicted parenting with the entry to adolescence but not the reverse. Thus, although many articles in this special issue focus on parenting behavior as shaping youth outcomes, clearly youth behavior may be evoking parenting more so with ontogeny. Diversity socialization may become more about parents helping youth interpret and respond to what is happening in their worlds as much or more than about parents proactively shaping the attitudes, value and behaviors of youth. Indeed, youth may lead the family in raising cultural awareness, identifying inequities, shaping cultural identities, and interacting with others across social groups. This may be especially true for older youth as they leave the family home in an extending adolescence to explore the world on their own in different roles. Popular youth culture is increasingly filled with diverse voices and understanding the shift in parent-child influence during this time is an important area for future inquiry.

Defining Family

As noted by Pearce and colleagues (2018), “when family forms are changing so fast, and society holds strong to nostalgia for the idealized family of the past, there is great potential for suspicion and condemnation of non-nuclear families, same-sex families, or foster/adoptive families that stem from a failure of inadequacy on the part of the biological parents (page #, this issue).” Indeed, McBride Murry and Lippold (2018) also warn researchers to not equate family form with family quality and function. Yet most research on parenting and family development has sampled heterosexual, white, middle-class families and we know much less about parenting adolescents in families that vary in household structures (including parent, sibling and grandparent relationships and roles) and transitions (related to divorce and remarriage, custody and living arrangements, and boomerang children who return home after first leaving).

In our own work, we have defined three types of overlapping families in which adolescents might be raised; namely, those identified by biology, by residence, and by caretaking. Biological families include adolescent’s biological parents (mother and father) and perhaps grandparents in addition to full- and half-siblings. Residential families include those individuals who co-habitate with the adolescent (often defined as residing in the adolescent’s home at least two nights per week and perhaps specifying more than one dwelling). Caretaking families are comprised of those who spend time with the adolescent, provide resources for the adolescent, or engage in daily support activities (like serving meals, supervising chores, etc.). Each type of family may be relevant for different types of research questions, and indeed for some types of research questions more than one type of family (or the intersection among them) may be of interest. For example, studies examining gene-environment mechanisms may seem most focused on an adolescent’s biological parents (mother and father) and perhaps grandparents in addition to full- and half-siblings. But to characterize environmental exposures, understanding with whom the adolescent lives (and as joint custody arrangements are increasingly common, with whom the adolescent lives when) as well as who takes care of the adolescent may be important to understand and disentangle.

Other approaches to defining family suggested by Pearce and colleagues (2018) use new analytic methods. These approaches may define families as a social network with links among members based on family functions or relationships. Alternately, mixture modeling approaches may categorize families in much more complex typologies than traditional methods, allowing for greater diversity in defining what is family. Regardless of the approach, defining the boundary of what is family will remain an important challenge in future research.

Social media has also redrawn the boundaries of family, allowing unprecedented access of those far away and near at hand to the moments of our daily lives. Shared family calendars allow for extended families (or co-parents residing in different households) to easily share information on family plans and activities (Plaisant, Clamage, Hutchinson, Bederson, & Druin, 2006), social networking sites afford easy access to updates, pictures, and knowledge about extended family life (Fife, LaCava, & Nelson, 2013), video chats (e.g. Skype) allow for visual and emotional connection (King-O’Riain, 2015), and family group chats on various platforms (e.g. group WhatsApp, group SMS texting) allow for constant connection and facilitate extended family bonding even across oceans (Kamal, Noor, & Baharin, 2014). Whereas historically we might have assumed that “caretaking families” would live near the adolescent, increasingly technology allows for parents to immediately meet some of a child’s needs remotely. For example, parents separated from their children due to work demands (e.g. military deployment) report using technology to organize synchronous and asynchronous communication and to maintain a constant presence in the child’s life (Yarosh & Abowd, 2011). The nature of family connections has evolved with alternate methods of communication, and research must consider the often remote nature of family connections.

Beyond Proxies and Stereotypes

Over 10 years ago, Janet Helms and her colleagues (Helms, Jernigan, & Mascher, 2005) boldly cautioned scholars to avoid racial variables as proxies for mechanisms that could be directly measured. As they note, “...the use of racial categories as if they are precise measures of some genuine psychological theoretical construct accords scientific legitimacy to what are essentially racial stereotypes that psychologists share with the larger society and the professional environments in which the psychologists function” (p. 28). Despite her strong appeal, this practice continues today and extends beyond race/ethnicity. Some reasons for the use of demographic markers for family and social process mechanisms have practical value (notably, they are often easier to measure). But directly identifying key mechanisms that underlie differences among social groups in links between family and youth outcomes has great promise for increasing cultural understanding (one aspect of diversity socialization) and developing effective interventions. As called for by McBride Murry and Lippold (2018), greater use of within-group methods will aid in this effort, increasing our understanding of how families within social groups differ from one another.

Other approaches may also help disentangle family or social mechanisms from social group membership. For example, directly measuring factors that may explain why youth from single parent families face greater risk for negative outcomes than their peers from two-parent families (e.g., residential and financial instability; McBride Murry & Lippold, 2018) may break down stigma around other factors that may unfairly be implicated in discussion sections to explain such differences. Identifying important mediators and moderators of this risk may further challenge the reach of such stereotypes, showing perhaps that with supportive co-parenting youth across diverse family structures show more similar outcomes, that youth whose parents are more accepting and supportive when they disclose an LGBTQ identity have higher rates of adjustment and well-being, and that stable extended families that provide emergency resources can protect youth living in poverty from negative outcomes associated with instability. However, the identification of such important mechanisms and moderators requires the development of well-articulated theories and of measures that move beyond demographic indicators of social group membership.

Technology and the Shifting Landscape of Parenting

As Stein et al. (this issue) note, the internet and social media present a new context in which adolescents operate, and which parents seek to understand. The internet offers unprecedented opportunity for youth to explore and “try on” different identities, with particular benefits for marginalized youth who feel constrained in their offline identity expression but also considerable risk for adolescents who are overly engaged in social comparison (Wängqvist & Frisén, 2016). As children enter adolescence, parents know less about what their children are doing online and many express concern about potential negative ramifications (Lauricella et al., 2016). Parents need evidence-based recommendations about how to monitor, limit, and scaffold online interactions to minimize risk and maximize potential educational and psychosocial benefits.

Youth are not the only family members online, and increasingly parents are using technology as a resource in the task of parenting (Haslam, Tee, & Baker, 2017). As noted by Mills-Koonce and colleagues (this issue), parents play a key role in the adjustment of LGBT adolescents, and emerging research suggests parents leverage technology in navigating youth LGBTQ identity. For example, parents of transgender youth report that they turned early on to the internet as a resource for exploring and gaining knowledge about gender identity and for seeking support (Evans et al., 2017). The internet is one of the first resources parents look to for guidance around parenting, and thus it is important that developmental science is working to disseminate findings on effective parenting strategies beyond an academic audience.

Furthermore, digital communication technologies allow for parenting to occur not just face to face, but also online and via phone. Adolescents report frequent phone contact with their parents for a variety of purposes, including coordination, monitoring, and social support (Hertlein, 2012; Platt, Bourdeaux, & DiTunnariello, 2014; Weisskirch, 2011). This ease of connection is especially valuable when families are physically separated; mobile communications technologies greatly facilitate connections between transnational families, and even allow for remote transmission of cultural knowledge around the norms, beliefs, and values of one’s culture of origin (Ferguson, Costigan, Clarke, & Ge, 2016; Kamal et al., 2014). The role of technology as a tool in parenting is as of yet understudied, and an important avenue for future research.

Learn from a Changing World

Although most research pertaining to the parenting of adolescents (and adolescent development more broadly) comes from studies of North American and European families, about 90% of the world’s youth live in low- and middle-income countries (Dahl et al., 2018). Although the nature of cultural conflict and harmony may differ across the world, the notion of intercultural maturity as an increasingly important developmental competency gained in adolescence likely does not. Both within- and between-culture analyses can shed light on factors that make us similar and those that make us different. Transdisciplinary models that draw on not only psychology but also economics, sociology, anthropology, public health, and medicine may provide new windows into understanding factors that shape how parents and adolescent together engage in diversity socialization practices.

Adolescents will lead the way

Despite being a time of heavy focus on fitting in, fear of social rejection, and seeking social prestige (Dahl et al., 2018), adolescents may be more malleable in their explicit acceptance of diversity than are children (though for racial attitudes this may be more true for explicit than implicit biases, Baron & Banaji, 2006; Rutland, Cameron, Milne, & Mcgeorge, 2005). This irony is exemplified by the comedy troupe Second City who perform a six-person sketch set at a middle school girls’ sleep over. Spoofing the inevitable moment of gossip and secret swapping, one member of the party suggests talking about boys, prompting another to step aside and reveal to the audience and then the slumber party that she is gay. She is welcomed back with a nonchalant, no-big-deal, acceptance from all. The same for a second partygoer who reveals being transgender, two who reveal that they are in fact adult men, and one who divulges that he (in the ludicrous fashion of sketch comedy) is a German Sheppard. But when one party goer reveals his deepest secret – he didn’t really like the hit musical Hamilton – rejection ensues.

Although the themes of acceptance and rejection, in-groups and out-groups, and identity and affiliation have long graced the pages of Developmental Science articles, adolescents of today (and their families) face frontpage news where these issues are, once again, writ large within a country where, like never before, population heterogeneity has become a norm. Adolescents are no doubt key to reconciling our social differences in the future. As leading scholars note in a recent Nature issue on Adolescence (Dahl et al., 2018), “we are currently witnessing pronounced and historically unprecedented changes in the demography and lifestyle of adolescents” (p. 442). Indeed, adolescents are not only witnessing this change, they are a significant part of this change. In 2015, over 1.2 billion adolescents (aged 10–19) populated the world, about 16% of the global population. As reported by Lansford and colleagues (2018), parenting in adolescence is perhaps more evocative or a reaction to youth behavior than a force controlling that behavior. In fact, parent diversity socialization may involve parents gaining intercultural maturity through the experiences of their adolescents as much as the other way around. And the parents that adolescents will be tomorrow are being shaped by the youth that they are today (Patton et al., 2018). Given their importance in this time of change, asking adolescents about how they experience the diversity around them and how they, together with their parents, might best navigate an increasingly multicultural world may be the most critical step forward to a better tomorrow.