Social Cognitive Skills in African American Youth: Parental Cognitive Restructuring and Youth Support Seeking

Abstract

Navigating challenging peer experiences is typical during early adolescence, and youths’ social cognitions—social appraisals and social self-efficacy—about such challenges have implications for their subsequent peer interactions. Parents can play a role in shaping youth social cognitive skills by socializing youth on how to think about challenging peer situations (i.e., cognitive restructuring advice), and the extent to which youth seek parental advice could affect the parent socialization–youth outcome link. Thus, this study aimed to examine parents’ cognitive restructuring advice in response to peer challenges (thinking about the situation in non-threatening ways) and the association with youths’ social appraisals and self-efficacy about 1 year later. Youth support seeking was tested as a moderator of this association. Aims were tested with a community sample of predominantly rural low-income African American (AA) families, which included 90 AA adolescents and their parents at T1; 87 families returned at T2. We found that parents’ cognitive restructuring suggestions ranged from none or vague cognitive restructuring advice to elaborated cognitive restructuring advice; on average, parents reported vague advice. Results from hierarchical regression analyses revealed that main effects of T1 parents’ cognitive restructuring advice and T1 youth-reported support seeking did not emerge for either T2 youth-reported social appraisals or self-efficacy. However, youth support seeking emerged as a moderator, such that more elaborated parental cognitive restructuring advice was linked with youths’ more positive social appraisals, whereas vague to no cognitive restructuring advice was associated with less positive social appraisals but only among youth who reported higher support seeking.