Leading with racial equity: promoting Black family resilience in early childhood

ABSTRACT It has been 47 years since Billingsley and Giovannoni penned a pointed analysis of child welfare’s failure of Black children the United States. This conceptual paper asserts that this failure will continue unless we take seriously the role that structural inequality plays in Black families’ lives. It updates Billingsley and Giovannoni’s paper by shifting the focus from children to families, grounding Black family well-being in a developmental model and constructing a racial equity approach to family resilience. The paper begins by establishing an empirical justification for focusing on Black families. This review of data on Black families further reveals early childhood to be a particular priority for intervention. The emerging model centers on Black families’ ability to navigate and negotiate for their needs. The model components are malleable factors that work together to form a “supportive state” and resilient pathway. Implications for the model’s compatibility with clinical family resilience models, two-generation approaches, and family-centered policymaking are discussed.