ABSTRACT
The role of the parent is to provide children with their physical and emotional needs, safety, and protection and to socialize them into the norms of the culture so that they are able to become independent, healthy, functioning adults who are able to navigate successfully through life. This chapter provides an overview of how the environmental context affects African American parenting. The goals for parents may be similar, how they parent is affected by the environmental context in which they are raising their children. Most families experience day-to-day stress or a major stressful event from time to time. Mundane extreme environmental stress (MEES) is typically characteristic of what displaced refugee families experience: extreme deprivation and exceptional stress and strain in their daily lives due to being in a foreign land. African American labor is not as essential as it was during enslavement, the Industrial Revolution, and the two world wars.
