African-American preschoolers whose parents say they don’t believe racism is a problem are more likely to be depressed or anxious, a new study indicates.

Racism is a reality,” lead author Dr. Margaret O’Brien Caughy said. “It does have impact on very young children. And we have to acknowledge that,” she noted.

Caughy said that there are many reasons why young children may become anxious if their parents deny the existence of racism.

For one thing, parents who experience racism but don’t acknowledge it may be anxious or depressed themselves, and pass that onto their children, she noted.

Otherwise, young children may witness signs of racism around them, and become upset when their parents’ opinions don’t match their experience.

“If (children) see in their day-to-day lives that racism is real, but their parents don’t acknowledge it, could that create anxiety?” Caughy asked.

Traditionally, people who report they have experienced racism are more likely to have problems with their physical or mental health. In order to investigate whether denying instances of discrimination hurts health even more, Caughy and her team interviewed 200 African-American families with children aged 3 or 4.

Caughy, who is based at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Dallas, along with her colleagues, asked parents how often they experienced racism and how they coped with it, then measured children’s behavior.

Approximately 7 percent of parents denied that racism was a problem for their friends and family, the authors report in the American Journal of Public Health.

In an interview with Reuters Health, Caughy explained that parents who said they didn’t think racism was a problem for African-Americans in general were more likely to have young children with problems such as anxiety or depression.

She noted that parents who denied that they had experienced racism personally were no more likely to have children with these problems, and denying racism in general did not increase kids’ risk of so-called “externalizing” behavior problems, such as aggression or acting out.

Although the team did not measure whether or not people had actually experienced racism, research suggests that 90 percent of African-Americans who say they are not discriminated against indeed are, according to objective measurements.

Parents who responded to racism by confronting the people involved or taking some kind of action were less likely to report that their children had behavior problems.

The findings suggest that parents should try to talk to children about racism, on a level they can understand, Caughy said. “Acknowledging it, that it’s real ... and then trying to help children develop realistic coping skills” appears to do the most good, she noted.

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, December 2004