Purdue HDFS researcher uncovers parents’ sway toward ‘familiar’ influences children’s choice of friends 

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu 

Laura Elenbaas (center) poses for a photo with her Social Development Lab team.(Photo provided)

From their earliest years all the way through high school, children and teenagers develop a variety of friends as they grow. Laura Elenbaas, assistant professor in the Purdue University Department of Human Development and Family Science, is interested in the way children and teenagers approach inclusion and exclusion and the implicit and explicit factors that play into who they choose to associate themselves with. 

“Kids are surprisingly attuned to disparities in resources, power and status between groups in society,” Elenbaas said. “They pick up on who gets more respect, who is in more positions in leadership and how resources like money flow within and between groups. You could say I study the best and the worst of human nature and where it comes from.” 

Laura Elenbaas(Photo provided)

In her recent study, “’Honestly, They Are Just Like Us’: U.S. Parents Choose Middle-Class Gender and Racial Ingroup Peers for Their Children,” Elenbaas dove deeper into the origins of children’s actions by looking at how parents’ attitudes influence them when it comes to inclusion and exclusion. This stems from previous work Elenbaas has done in which children cited their parents as a reason to hesitate about including a person or demographic. 

“For years, we’ve been observing in our studies kids and teenagers telling us, ‘I’d like to invite this newcomer in my class over to my house,’ or ‘I’d like to spend some time with this group, but I’m not so sure how my parents would feel about that — I worry that it might make them uncomfortable,’” Elenbaas said. “We looked into the social psychology research and noticed this big disconnect between longstanding lines of research on parenting and well-established research on stereotypes and prejudice in adults. There was something missing in the middle about how parents’ attitudes might be conveyed implicitly or explicitly to their kids.” 

In the study, Elenbaas and her research team looked at U.S. parents of children ages 8-16 who identified as either Black or white and either lower, middle or higher in socioeconomic status. They asked them to rate on a scale how comfortable they would be with their child spending time with a variety of combinations of the different demographic elements. After that, they asked parents to choose just one group that they felt most comfortable with and explain why. 

The results showed that 40% of parents across diverse groups were picking the group that was the same gender and race as their child and that was middle class — no matter what their socioeconomic status. Their reasons ranged from the group they chose seemed the nicest to their group had the most in common with their child. The scale ratings showed a little more openness in parents’ attitudes regarding who their child spent time with, but Elenbaas noted there was clearly some bias at play.  

“This suggests that parents are selective,” Elenbaas said. “They are open to the possibility of diversity for the composition of their kids’ peer groups, but if it’s a situation where opportunities are limited, they’re going to steer toward the familiar and what they know. In the end, it seems like those kids in those prior studies might have been on to something.” 

Currently, Elenbaas is working on a project funded by the Clifford B. Kinley Trust and the College of Health and Human Sciences to understand more about reducing children’s prejudice and stereotypes when it comes to immigrants from around the world. Because the Midwest is diversifying with more immigrants making their homes in the region, Elenbaas is looking at how secondhand exposure to different cultures through stories of American children interacting with immigrant peers plays in changing children’s attitudes about groups. This approach allows for children who may live in less-diverse neighborhoods or attend less-diverse schools to get exposure to other populations. 

“We know that direct contact with somebody from a different social group who you might have originally thought you had very little in common with or had different interests from is a fabulous way to reduce prejudice and stereotypes,” Elenbaas said. “It gives kids the chance to disprove any stereotypes they may have already picked up on, find common ground and form friendships.” 

Ultimately, Elenbaas hopes this work will offer a way to facilitate opportunities for parents to be able to share their views on diversity and help better gauge their children’s understanding of inclusion and exclusion. 

“Not all parents have their own views fully articulated on diversity for their kids,” Elenbaas said. “If we can use a simple story as a launching-off point, it might support parents who want to be able to prepare their kids for that experience in their education and future work life but aren’t 100% sure on where their kids are at developmentally with these questions.” 

Elenbaas’ work has offered a variety of significant findings for developmental psychologists, parents and others. One of her most notable findings is how early — often before finishing elementary school — children pick up on demographic correlations in society, such as certain groups being more likely to hold leadership positions or earn more money. This adds a dimension when thinking about how children develop intergroup and cross-group attitudes and opportunities for further research in the field. 

“Kids are swimming in the same society — they are the newest members to society,” Elenbaas said. “They are really trying to figure out their place in their communities, and part of that is understanding inequalities and hierarchies, where they might fit, and correspondingly, whether they’re okay with that or not.”