Please join the College of Arts and Sciences for the final installment of our 2025-2026 Full Professor Lecture Series!

"Unlocking the Potential of White Parents as Agents of Social Change" by Professor and Chair of Psychological Sciences Jamie L. Abaied

This talk will demonstrate, across multiple samples collected over ten years, the ways that white parents of white children in the United States show resistance to social change and racial justice, instead teaching their children to be either skeptical of or silent about racism. The talk will also explore how this pattern persists even when white parents are confronted with undeniable current events (such as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020) or provided with explicit guidance toward color- and power-conscious narratives through a structured discussion task. However, we will also explore some glimmers of hope within this data, demonstrating that white parents are, in fact, capable of subverting the status quo and becoming agents of change in the fight for racial justice.

Jamie L. Abaied (she/they) is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychological Science at the University of Vermont and has been a faculty member since 2010. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on parent socialization, including ways that parents communicate messages to their children about race, sexuality, and coping with stress. Her research has been published in journals such as Annual Reviews of Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Journal of Family Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Psychological Inquiry. She is a former editor in chief of Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology.