Herring, Roger D. (1992) Biracial Children: An Increasing Concern for Elementary and Middle School Counselors. Elementary School Guidance and Counseling.27, 123-130

As ethnic group interactions expands, the number of interracial marriages increases. Interracial children show unique characteristics in society. Because of this uniqueness, they may have some problems and social needs. This article shows a concise overview of the problems, a broad picture of the situation that interracial children face, and some suggestions for counseling intervention.     As McGoldrick mentions, interracial marriage could bring great stress to the couples in adjusting their cultural and social value (123). The negative stress will impact on their children in the formation of cultural and social identity. Oftentimes, interracial parents deal with this issue in one of these three ways, according to Ladner (123). One way may be that parents treat their biracial children as human beings by denying that the skin color is an issue. Another way is promoting the children's minority identity. The last way is to encourage the children to socialize as biracial.     The author mentions that Phinney and Rotheram have developed four unifying themes to understand children’s socialization (124). According to their themes, ethnicity plays an important role in child development. Therefore, unidentified ethnicity could be a problem for biracial children. There are some identified issues occurring in the development of self in biracial children. First of all, these children must integrate their dual identity. They must prepare for a consistent personal identity as they age. Finally, they must also deal with other problems, which one normally encounters in society as well. Through dealing with not only normal societal difficulties, but also ones related to being biracial they face obstacles in achieving a successful socialization. For example, many empirical studies show biracial children in school settings have a high incidence of academic and behavioral problems (125).     Biracial children may also experience five identity conflicts (125). The first conflict is about biracial identity. These children must answer such a question as "Who am I?" The second conflict is about social marginality. For this conflict they must answer the question "Where do I fit?" The third conflict is about sexuality, which emerges in tandem with the first and second conflicts. The question to be asked is "What is my sexual role?" Eventually these biracial children must choose a sexual partner. The fourth conflict is about separation from parents. The author mentions that emotional imbalance among the parents will affect the children so that they tend to be more dependent or more overtly rebellious to their parents earlier than adolescence. In this conflict, their question is "Who controls my life?" The last conflict is about career aspirations. This conflict comes from their ambivalence "toward achievement and upward mobility" (126). The basic question for this conflict is "Where am I heading?"     The author developed eight implications for counselors regarding biracialism. These are the following: 1) the development of their good working environment, 2) the awareness of the types of problems biracial children may have, 3) the notion that the most probable identity that the children have is with their minority culture, 4) the familiarity with the cultural customs of the children, 5) the allowance for the children to have a biracial identity, 6) the help needed to build the children's positive self-esteem, 7) the ability to help the children to realize any links between their negative behaviors and their uncertain identities, and 8) the notion that the entire family can be involved in counseling.

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