By LaTasha Reece

A particular kind of love lives in Black families. It looked like my Grandma taking us kids because our parents needed a minute, my favorite auntie feeding everybody whether they said they were hungry or not, and my best friend who tells me, “Bring the girls, it’ll be fun!” Long before researchers, philosophers, and psychologists began to explore its merit, Black communities understood compassion.

We have survived, raised children, built families, and created community through our willingness to care for one another. But here is a question I have been thinking about as a mother and someone who studies traumatic stress and compassion: Who is extending compassion to Black parents? 

Compassion is sometimes used interchangeably with empathy, but they are not quite the same. Empathy allows us to experience or understand another person’s emotions, while compassion recognizes suffering and includes a desire to help alleviate it. In parenting language, empathy might sound like, “Sweetheart, I know this is hard.”

Compassion goes a step further and adds, “And I’m going to help you through it.” To be effective compassion conduits, we need the emotional and cognitive capacity to notice distress and respond in a helpful way. Anybody who has tried to compassionately respond to a child melting down while also running late for a meeting knows that compassion capacity can be limited. 

This is where the idea of the flows of compassion becomes especially meaningful for Black parents. According to researcher and professor Paul Gilbert, compassion does not only flow outward toward other people. It also flows inward through self-compassion, toward us when we allow ourselves to receive compassion from others and outward when we are compassionate to others. I believe those first two flows matter tremendously for the third. When parents can respond to their own struggles with compassion and receive genuine care from others, we may have greater capacity to extend compassion to our children. 

Compassion becomes particularly important when we consider chronic stress and trauma. And I want to be very clear here: trauma is not intrinsic to Blackness. Stress is not part of our DNA, and “the struggle” is not the ticket price of admission for being Black. Black parents, however, may be navigating environments and systems that were rarely designed with our families at the center.

Distress can come from our individual histories, including how we were parented and what we learned about emotions, discipline, vulnerability, and strength. It can come through interpersonal experiences of bias, discrimination at work or in school, or the exhausting task of deciding when and how to prepare our children for the reality of racism. 

Those burdens are measurable. In the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, 43% of Black adults identified discrimination as a significant source of stress, compared with 19% of White adults. Research involving African American mothers of young children found that 57% reported experiencing at least one incident of racial discrimination, and greater exposure to discrimination was associated with increased parenting stress.

Another study following Black parents and their children found that parents’ experiences of racial discrimination were associated with later parent-child conflict, which in turn was associated with poorer mental health outcomes for adolescents. That does not mean Black parents are lacking or failing; rather, it shows that the experiences of Black people have an impact on their parenting. 

Many of us also inherited messages about strength that make perfect sense when we understand where they came from. “You have to be twice as good.” “Don’t let them see you cry.” “You need to be strong.” Those messages were love wearing protective armor, and parents and grandparents were preparing children for environments they knew might not treat them gently.

We can honor the wisdom and protection in those lessons while also asking whether every survival strategy needs to travel with us into the next generation. Strength can include softness, and preparing our children for the world can coexist with creating homes where nobody has to earn the right to be comforted, including parents. 

Now, before somebody drops in the comments to tell me compassionate parenting means letting children run the household while we gently whisper about feelings, let me save everybody some time. Compassion is not permission to ignore boundaries; it is an invitation to couple empathy with action. Children need boundaries, expectations, correction, accountability, and structure.

Compassion changes how we meet distress in those hard moments, and it asks us to remain regulated, explore what is happening beneath behavior, and take the appropriate actions to reduce distress while holding firm to the boundary. It also recognizes that parents cannot consistently offer calm, connected responses while everyone expects them to function on fumes. So perhaps supporting Black children starts with expanding how we support Black parents. Let’s consider some action steps: 

• Families can normalize asking for help and actually accepting it. 
• Communities can create spaces where Black parents do not have to perform strength to deserve support. 
• Schools, healthcare systems, workplaces, and policymakers can examine whether their practices reduce stress for Black families or simply require those families to become increasingly skilled at surviving. 
• As parents, we can practice speaking to ourselves with some of the same compassion and patience we work so hard to give our children. 

Black communities already know how to care. Compassion is in the food we bring, the children we help raise, the elders we check on, the prayers we offer, the rides we give, and the way Grandma always makes sure everyone leaves the family cookout with three plates wrapped in foil. The opportunity before us is to make sure that compassion can flow in every direction, including toward our children, toward one another, and toward ourselves. When Black parents are allowed to receive compassion, practice it within themselves, and parent from a place where they are supported, we are not simply raising resilient children. We are helping Black families increase their capacity for connection and compassion so they can thrive.