A guide for understanding positive Black parenting
Requisite parenting provides a useful benchmark for parents to self-assess their practices, and likewise for professionals who work with Black children and parents to help the families better articulate how they support their children.
Promote Black parent-child partnership
1. the child should perceive the parent as acting in their best interest and be open to accept the authority of the parent
2. parents should be open to seeing their children’s lifeworld as being both similar to theirs in terms of structural racism and/or poverty, and being distinct and unique to the children in ways that transcend the parents’ experiences
3. professionals and policy makers should embody and project respect for Black parents.
Professionals, policy makers, and the media can draw on RP to produce necessary counter discourses that highlight the high emotional and practical labour of Black parenting.
Use different lenses for assessing and supporting Black parenting and child welfare.
When working with Black families, professionals should be alert to how racism complicates Black parenting. This means professionals cannot depend on current universalised parenting theories and styles, as those are based on Eurocentric knowledges and experiences that do not properly take the impact of racism into account.