Stereotyped as uninvolved fathers and unmarriageable partners, Black men often shoulder much of the blame for family decline. Throughout his presidency, President Obama has repeatedly called on black men to take greater responsibility for their families and relationships. A new study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests that the difficulties that some black men have in forming strong and healthy adult relationships are linked to the high level of family adversity they experience in childhood.
Kristi Williams, co-author of the study explained, “A growing body of evidence indicates that stress experienced during the sensitive period of childhood has a range of negative consequences that reverberate throughout the life course. Because the family is such an important agent of socialization, high levels of family adversity and disorder may increase men’s vigilance for threat in their relationships and undermine their ability to trust others, resulting in the high levels of relationship conflict and strain we observe among black men.
The study, entitled “Race, Gender, and Chains of Disadvantage: Childhood Adversity, Social Relationships, and Health,” analyzed nationally representative longitudinal data on over 3,000 black and white U.S. adults aged 25 and older in 1986. Respondents were followed over a 15 year period and reported their experiences of childhood family adversity (including economic hardship, parental marital problems, divorce, or death, never knowing one’s father, and having anyone in the home who was violent or who had a mental health or serious drinking problem), as well as the quality of their adult relationships with their spouse or partner, children, and parents and their health.
Some key findings of the study:
(1) Compared to white men and with black and white women, black men report significantly more strain in their adult social relationships with their spouse or partner, children and parents. Relationship strain was measured with indicators that tapped relationship conflict, demands, criticism and a lack of satisfaction.
(2) The level of family adversity experienced by black men is 30% higher than that experienced by white men and this contributes to their higher levels of strain in their adult social relationships.
(3) Black men not only experience more family childhood adversity than white men but they are also more strongly affected by it. The association of childhood family adversity with relationship strain in adulthood is three times stronger for black adults than for white adults.
(4) Childhood adversity and its negative effect on adult relationship strain partly explain black men’s poorer health than white men.
Why are the adult relationships of black men more strongly affected by childhood adversity than those of white men? The study finds that, compared to white adults, both black men and women report higher levels of other forms of stress throughout life such as chronic financial strain (this excludes discrimination related stress, which the study did not measure). Emotional support is an important resource in coping with stress that occurs throughout the life course but gendered roles lead men to both seek and receive lower levels of emotional support from their relationships than women, a finding corroborated by this study. Kristi Williams explains, “In terms of their adult relationships, black men appear to be doubly disadvantaged by both their race and their gender. Disadvantages associated with race lead black men to experience more family stress in childhood and more chronic stress in adulthood while disadvantages associated with gender provide them with fewer emotionally supportive resources to help them cope with this strain.”
Consequences for race disparities in health. Race disparities in health are one of the most intractable forms of inequality and this study is the first to identify childhood adversity and its negative consequences for adult relationships as contributing factors in explaining why black men have worse health than white men throughout their lives. Childhood family adversity appears to set black men on a pathway to strained adult relationships. Across the life course, this takes a cumulative toll on their health, especially when combined with the high levels of other forms of chronic stress that they experience in adulthood.
What about women? The researchers found that although black women also experienced childhood family adversity, this did not lead to the high levels of adult relationship strain that black men experienced, a finding that they expected based on prior evidence that gender roles encourage women to provide and receive more emotional support throughout their lives. Kristi Williams explains, “Relationships can be sources of both strain and support and it is well-established that women receive more support from their adult relationships than men, a finding that our study corroborates. These emotionally sustaining ties likely protect black women from some of the adverse consequences of childhood family adversity.”
What are the implications of these findings? This research suggests that efforts to improve black men’s ability to form and maintain healthy and lasting adult relationships must take a long view and focus on minimizing stress that occurs early in the childhood family environment. The childhood family stressors measured in this study are strongly linked to poverty and disadvantage; Economic hardship, growing up without a father, parental marital problems, divorce, violence, mental health and alcohol abuse are all more common in disadvantaged communities and families.
Kristi Williams notes, “Our findings may be relevant in explaining why government-funded Healthy Marriage Initiatives, designed to improve the relationship outcomes of low-income parents, have seen so little success. Our findings suggest that these efforts may be too little, too late. Instead, it is important to intervene early to reduce the entrenched poverty that contributes to the high levels of childhood adversity that take such a toll on black men’s later adult relationships.” New school-based cognitive-behavioral interventions designed to help young children cope with trauma and stress have shown success in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression linked to experiences of violence. Extensions of these interventions that teach disadvantaged young children skills to cope with a broader array of family stressors may also be worthwhile.