Promoting Healthy Families and Communities for Boys and Young Men of Color

Nan Marie Astone, Susan J. Popkin, Heather Sandstrom, and Lisa Dubay February 2015 Boys and young men of color are at risk for poor health and developmental outcomes beginning at birth and persisting through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. As a result of household poverty and residence in segregated neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, they are disproportionately bombarded by environmental threats—often without the benefits of supportive systems of prevention, protection, and care. This exposure to chronic stress undermines cognitive, social-emotional, and regulatory human development as well as the immune system. The parents of boys and young men of color are similarly affected,1 which affects boys directly in utero and interferes with their parents’ abilities to promote their health and development and to protect them from harm as they mature. There are no simple or inexpensive solutions to these challenges. But investing in promising strategies now will have long-term benefits for both the boys and young men themselves and for society as a whole. The types of strategies it will take include  improving the social and economic resources that are available to boys and young men of color in the households and communities where they live, thus enabling their parents to use those resources in culturally specific ways to promote their health and well-being and to protect them from harm;  eliminating major stressors in the communities where boys and young men of color live;  preventing, identifying, and treating the consequences of trauma and chronic stress; and  focusing solutions in all three of these areas on both boys themselves and their parents. These solutions should be enacted through systemic and institutional reforms, community change, and family-level and individual-level interventions. RACE, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER Promoting Healthy Families and Communities for Boys and Young Men of Color Systemic and institutional reforms include policies to buttress household economic stability, most importantly through the expansion of job opportunities. They also include expanding housing, child care, and health care subsidies and facilitating the involvement of noncustodial parents in all aspects of their children’s lives, including their financial support. Community change solutions include making sure that boys and their parents have access to community resources such as high-quality child care, libraries, and health clinics to the same extent as other families. Options include facilitating mobility to places where these resources are plentiful or enhancing the resources in the places boys and their parents currently live. Multisector efforts to foster positive developmental settings for children across the full range of environments where children spend ti me are one promising strategy for community change. Family- and individual-level interventions should focus on boys and young men of every age from before birth to early adulthood. These interventions should include programs to improve birth out-comes, home visiting for parents of infants and toddlers, comprehensive early education, elementary school–based interventions, mentoring for young adolescents, and comprehensive reproductive health care (including preconception care). By targeting the entire life course (from before birth to old age), these interventions will not only serve boys of color when they are children and adolescents, but will also serve their parents and young men of color in their roles as parents of the next generation. The Problem Levels of racial and ethnic segregation in the United States remain stubbornly high 50 years after the Civil Rights movement. Given the high poverty rates for people of color, racial and ethnic segregation means that they are much more likely to grow up and reside in profoundly different—and much more challenging—social and physical environments than their white counterparts (LaVeist 2005; LaVeist et al. 2007). As discussed in the accompanying paper on environmental contexts of boys and young men of color, this means that poor children of color are in “double jeopardy” from both household poverty and community risk (Acevedo-Garcia et al. 2008). These communities include severely distressed central-city neighborhoods, chronically poor rural areas, and Native American reservations. The latter have some of the highest rates of poverty and distress in the nation. The extreme level of racial segregation affects all people of color, however, not just the poor. Even the most affluent African American communities, like Maryland’s Prince George’s County, lack the services and amenities that comparable white communities enjoy (Turner, Popkin, and Rawlings 2009). Urban Institute data show that extreme levels of segregation also characterize schools in the United States.2 In distressed segregated communities, residents are exposed to risks from the physical environment, such as lead in citi