Intergenerational Dialogues: South Asian Parents' Approaches to Discussing Race, Culture, and Racism with Their Children in Canada

Selecting strategies for navigating intercultural spaces is an ongoing challenge facing migrants and racialized groups in diverse societies such as Canada. A particular challenge for parents is deciding how to socialize their children about the possibility of facing racism or stigmatization and about how to engage with both their cultural roots and other groups in their society. Conversations surrounding race, culture, and racism are often difficult for parents to have with their children, and current parental ethnic-racial socialisation research demonstrates a diversity of ways that parents may or may not approach these subjects. Contributing to this area of research, this project explores how South Asian parents in Canada engage with their children on the topics of race, culture, and racism. In particular, three questions are examined:

1. How do parents engage with their children about their own race or culture?
2. How do parents engage with their children about other races or cultures?
3. How do parents engage with their children about racism that their own or other races/cultures may face?

These questions are explored through semi-structured interviews (n=27) and a Likert-scale survey adapted from a study by Hughes & Chen (1997) (n=164). Preliminary results of the survey have shown that messages of cultural socialisation are used more than messages of preparation against bias or promotion of mistrust. Moreover, grounded theory analysis of the interviews suggests four themes:

1. A parental focus on culture instead of race
2. Parents conveying explicit anti-racist messaging to their children
3. Parents believing that multiculturalism is a protective factor against racial or cultural discrimination
4. Racism being a difficult topic to discuss

As a whole, this research aims to understand how South Asian Canadians are navigating parenting in regard to interculturality, while additionally hoping to give guiding examples to present and future parents.