Parents consistently underestimate their children's prejudices

Prejudice begins in childhood, and parents have a crucial role to play in mitigating its development. The present study examined the accuracy of parents' estimates of their children's prejudices. Specifically, this study investigated whether accuracy varied across (1) diverse parents and (2) diverse forms of prejudice (race, class, weight, disability, sexual orientation), and explored (3) why parents underestimated children's prejudices. A diverse sample of 130 parent-child dyads from across the United States (children ages 6.0-9.9 years, 59F/71 M/0NB, 54 White/71 of color, and their parents) participated between October 2023 and May 2025. Parents predicted their children's selections on a Playmate Preference Task and then children completed the task. Results indicated that parents severely underestimated their children's prejudices overall (Cohen's d = .83). Underestimates were consistent across diverse parents (across political views, educational backgrounds, income brackets, and anti-prejudice motivations) and across several forms of prejudice (class, weight, and disability). Exploratory analyses indicated that parents predicted above-chance rates of prejudice overall (i.e., did not hold "tabula rasa" beliefs), raising the possibility that parents may hold other intuitive misconceptions about the processes driving prejudice development. Parents' potentially inflated sense of the degree to which ingroup membership or intergroup contact can buffer against prejudice development is discussed.