On 9 June 2026, ACAMH’s Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Special Interest Group will hold its next webinar, Intergenerational Consequences of Racism. This is FREE to paying ACAMH members, and just £5 for others.
We caught up with the presenter – Dr. Yasmin Ahmadzadeh, a Research Fellow at King’s College London whose work focuses on how mental health runs in families – about her research, and her hopes for the event.
How did come to this research topic, the intergenerational consequences of racism?
My background is in mental health and families, and I work with really large datasets, trying to disentangle the genetic and environmental influences on family mental health. The problem is that most of those datasets comprise people who would be identified as white European, so we’re missing the experiences of the global majority.
In the research I’ll be discussing at this meeting, I worked with a team of young people who all had lived experience of racism impacting their family. We used focus groups to bring together parents and teenagers to discuss their experiences, and designed a study to look at whether children experience any downstream consequences of the racism their parents experienced.
How did you study address this issue?
First, it’s important to be clear what we’re not doing. This isn’t about biological explanations or epigenetics – meaning how experiences in one generation might biologically change the next.
Instead, we focus on cultural and relationship effects across generations: how your parents were with you; how you are with your parents; how that’s shaped your approach to the world. When parents have themselves been brought up experiencing racism, what do they go on to tell their children? How do you raise children in a world where you expect them to experience racism? And how does the child perceive that, and how does it shift their self-perception and their perception of the world?
There are so many layers, from the big systems embedded in society – structural racism and institutional racism – all the way down to internalised racism, which is the way that someone thinks about themselves. We heard people describe all of those different levels in relation to their own everyday experiences.
And what did you find – and did it differ from what you expected?
We went in with quite a linear model: parents experience racism, and that has an impact on their children. As often happens, what we actually found when we talked to people is that it’s a much more complicated, cyclical picture. People couldn’t differentiate the racism that parents were experiencing from what children were experiencing, because they were both experiencing it differently and also in overlapping ways, at the same time.
We also found that the experiences in both generations were impacting in both directions – parents felt really affected by the racism their children were experiencing, and children also felt affected by the racism their parents were experiencing. We’d not necessarily been aware of the extent to which it went both ways.
Schools came up particularly strongly in your research – why?
We were focused on mental health, so you might expect mental health services to have been the main focus. But parents were really concerned about how young their children were when they started experiencing racism at school, and the lack of systematic policy and approach to dealing with it – and feeling mistrustful of teachers when they didn’t deal with these issues in a way that felt right for them.
We also heard about experiences of racism that happen in many other aspects of life – not just schools but hospitals, shops, community spaces, in the street. And people in the focus groups were often quite shocked to hear someone of a different identity to them describing really similar experiences to their own.
What would you like professionals working with children and families to take away from your research?
I think for people who maybe haven’t thought about the layers in which racism operates, and the multitude of ways it touches people’s lives, this research can provide an insight into the mundane, everyday battle of it – and how you can feel so worn down by it. That gets forgotten about in conversations about anti-racism: these are just everyday people trying to live their lives, being impacted by something that everyone could try to understand, and everyone could try to stop.
A clear call from participants was for spaces where people can share experiences, talk about how to make things better, and feel safe in doing so – but also for raising awareness across groups about the scope of the problem, and the need for training and change.
Another thing that really struck us: we were challenged by some of our participants, who asked – why aren’t you talking to white people about this? Because it’s not just our problem, it’s a shared problem. The way in which you raise children who are not at risk of experiencing racism is also important, because that feeds into how racism is perpetuated in society.
Find more content on inequalities and discrimination, and on a range of other topics, on ACAMH Learn, our completely free, online learning resource.