Week 12 is devoted to revisiting unresolved feelings from childhood, giving fathers a chance to express the things they wanted to hear from and say to their fathers. Week 13 concludes the program with a graduation ceremony and provides opportunities to revise the fathering plan and continue friendships with other fathers in the group. The purpose of the project was to understand the many ways that parents prepare African American children to cope with race and what children learn about race related coping from their parents and other influential settings they experience, like school. In this first document, we are focusing on what children told us about their coping. In the next document we will present findings on parental strategies for rearing children to cope with race related issues.
Children use variety of coping strategies when dealing with problems they confront.
In this study, children were given a story task in which a difficult racial situation was faced in school. They were then asked what the child in the story should do about the problem. For example, in one story, the child goes to a school outside of her neighborhood where most ofthe children are White. Now the child's Black friends do not want to play with her because they think the child likes her white friends better. The child then chooses from a list of answers on what the child in the story should do.