New research on Black girlhood expands developmental science

In the summer of 2023, 10 Black teen girls gathered at the RiseBoro Community Partnership in Brooklyn to build a first-of-its-kind catalog of the various microaggressions Black girls face because of colorism. Gina Sissoko, PhD—now a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Public Health—put the girls in an unfamiliar role: the driver’s seat. They detailed the ways colorism, a preference for lighter skin tone, operated in their lives and how to measure it. They then developed a plan to research the topic and fanned out across their community to survey more than 100 other Black girls.

From those data, the girls mapped how colorism permeates Black girlhood across seven domains, from family and school to social media—findings the girls then published in a booklet they designed themselves. The result, dubbed the BlackGIRL Project, reflects a growing movement among researchers to engage Black girls as partners in studying their own experiences—collaborators in the science rather than its subjects. As Sissoko put it, this shift acknowledges Black girls as “the main theorists of their lives.”

The BlackGIRL Project is one of more than 100 submissions to a forthcoming special issue on Black girlhood that will appear in Developmental Psychology in late 2026. Lead editor Rona Carter, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, said the issue aims to reframe “developmental science so that Black girls are not treated as deviations from a norm but as essential to understanding how development unfolds in real-world settings.”

“So much of what we know about development has been built upon assumptions that don’t fully account for Black girls’ lived experiences, social realities, or the ways they make meaning of their self-concepts,” Carter said. “When we build on theory that could explain Black girls’ experiences, we often could end up with maybe stronger, more nuanced theories that improve development of science more broadly.”

Seanna Leath, PhD, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who studies how culture and context influence positive outcomes for Black youth, notes the change in focus. “It signals that Black girlhood is not a niche topic or a specialized subarea. It’s worthy of serious developmental inquiry.”

Previously, when the field has focused on Black girls, it has often been to document what is going awry in terms of the risks they face, educational or social gaps, or behaviors framed as problems. One recent systematic review found just 48 articles focused on Black girls across four major adolescent research journals between 2010 and 2020, many concentrating on what was going wrong for them (Agger, C. A., et al., Journal of Adolescent Research, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2024opens in new window). Black girls were also often folded into broad categories like “Black women and girls” or “Black youth,” or used as a comparison group against their White peers or Black boys—flattening the wide spectrum of their experiences.

Over time, a growing number of scholars have pushed the field to look deeper, building on the foundation of Margaret Beale Spencer, PhD, whose phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory gave the field new tools for understanding how race, ethnicity, and gender shape children’s development (Development and Psychopathology, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1997opens in new window).

In the tradition of developmental science (which has always been interdisciplinary), contemporary researchers on Black girlhood intentionally combine insights from multiple fields—including psychology, education, philosophy, history, and Black and feminist studies—and look at how race and gender shape experiences together, not separately (Halliday, A. S., The Black Girlhood Studies Collection, Women’s Press, 2019opens in new window). And they ask different questions: How do Black girls make sense of their experiences, build friendships, navigate school, and find joy? What does it look like when a Black girl thrives—and what has the field missed by not asking sooner?

Sissoko’s work with Black girls shows how focusing on research participants’ strengths can produce insight even when the topic is painful. It maps the quiet, insidious ways colorism runs through Black girls’ lives—and one of its most striking findings is how often the harm comes from within their own community. Colorist jokes, slights, and insults often come from family members and friends, and Black boys were frequently identified as the main perpetrators. The hurt ripples outward, too: Lighter-skinned girls described watching colorism directed toward darker-skinned friends and feeling helpless to stop it—a phenomenon Sissoko calls “vicarious colorism.”

In one finding from the BlackGIRL Project that Sissoko called “earth-shattering,” 83% of the girls surveyed said darker-skinned girls are less likely to be believed when they report abuse. The findings point to a cruel paradox—the same skin that marks Black girls as vulnerable renders them less credible when they experience abuse. Sissoko’s experience with the BlackGIRL Project has shaped her core beliefs about how science should work: “Unless we are actually asking the people most impacted and most marginalized, we will never make the advances in science that we need.”

If Sissoko’s work shows how Black girls are misjudged by their skin tone, Carter’s research reveals how they are misjudged by their bodies—specifically, how early those bodies begin to change, and how the people around them react. Carter, a developmental psychologist, studies the impact of pubertal development on Black girls, who typically enter puberty earlier than their White, Latine, and Asian peers (Child Development, Vol. 90, No. 2, 2019opens in new window). As a result, research shows that Black girls experience adultification bias, in which they are often viewed as older and more sexualized than their White peers (Epstein, R., et al., Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood, SSRN, 2017opens in new window).

Research shows that once a Black girl enters puberty, she is typically treated more harshly—even though she is still a child cognitively and emotionally (Brissett, D., Pediatrics, Vol. 155, No. 6, 2025opens in new window). “Puberty matters not because it’s happening earlier biologically, but because of how adults and peers respond to those changes,” said Carter.

To help support girls at this transitional age, Carter developed Double Digits, a community-based program for girls in grades 3, 4, and 5 in Ann Arbor schools. The program brings Black girls together to learn about and discuss menstruation, body and skin changes, and the stereotypes and expectations they may encounter during puberty. Throughout the program, participants work to develop a positive body image, explore their identities, build healthy coping skills, and strengthen their understanding of healthy relationships.

In an activity called Reflect, Respect, and Celebrate, girls anonymously share their thoughts about their bodies and trace where those ideas came from, for example, social media, classmates, or even adults. At the end of the lesson, each girl receives a key chain that says “Message Detective.” The goal is to encourage them to question those external messages and show them they get to define their beauty and body image on their own terms.

Carter also created a technique she calls Pause and Reframe to help parents, teachers, and other caring adults counteract their own adultification bias. Adults are asked to pause their immediate emotional response to a girl’s behavior and consider whether they are reacting to her physical maturity rather than her actual developmental stage, then to reframe by choosing an interpretation grounded in her true emotional and cognitive age. A gesture like eye-rolling, Carter noted, may not be defiance or disrespect but a sign of “emotion regulation,” or a girl “trying to negotiate her autonomy.”

The Black Girl Thriving Framework, developed collaboratively by Leath, Misha Ailsworth, PhD, Marketa Burnett, PhD, Lauren Mims, PhD, and a team of graduate student scholars, provides a model for understanding what it looks like when Black girls are given the opportunity to flourish.

The framework emerged from a critical synthesis of more than 100 studies on Black girlhood. “Thriving means more than doing well despite oppression,” said Leath. “Our framework begins with the idea that thriving is multidimensional. It encompasses identity, joy, belonging, agency, self-definition, healthy relationships, and access to affirming environments, and so our framework is multidimensional. We view thriving not as an individual trait but as a relational, cultural, political, and ecological process.”

The framework builds on decades of resilience research by expanding the conversation from how Black girls survive and adapt to adversity to what it means for them to truly thrive. Leath offered the example of a Black girl earning good grades despite navigating a school environment where she feels unsupported, overlooked, or treated unfairly. She may be demonstrating resilience, but whether she is thriving depends on deeper questions: Do her teachers recognize and support her talents? Does she see people like herself in what she is learning? Does she have friends with whom she can have fun, feel safe, and be herself?

Thriving is not a destination but an ongoing “becoming” shaped by the different environments in a girl’s life, according to Leath. The research team also seeks to broaden scholarship beyond a focus on only two kinds of Black girls—the exceptional and the at-risk. Returning to the earlier example, a Black girl earning good grades should not automatically be assumed to be thriving. “We have high-achieving Black girls,” Leath said, “and regular Black girls who earn C’s [who] also bring something beautiful and gifted to the table.” The model makes room for all of them. “[Thriving] should not become a new narrow standard that only some Black girls can meet,” Leath said.

Alexandria Onuoha, PhD, an assistant professor of human development and family science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, studies what thriving actually looks like in real life. Her photovoice project is participatory research piloted for Black middle school girls in Boston to document their lived experiences through photography. Onuoha gave each participant a camera and asked them to take photos capturing what joy meant to them.

Several themes emerged—artistic expression, beauty and adornment, sisterhood and solidarity, spirituality—captured in images as ordinary as a girl taking a mirror selfie or making art to “have a moment of stillness.” Onuoha views these everyday acts as part of a long tradition of resistance to misogynoir—the unique combination of racism and sexism directed at Black women and girls (Bailey, M., & Trudy, Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2018opens in new window). Taking these photos focused on joy helps girls cultivate that emotion as a strength in response to this societal negativity. Onuoha maps the girls’ photos of joy onto Black antifascist traditions of resistance. “I see their actions as quiet resistance. It may not be protesting,” she said, “but what Black girls are doing is self-preservation.”

Ailsworth, a developmental community psychologist and assistant professor at Cornell University, believes that adequately studying Black girls demands more nontraditional methods. She encourages scholars to consider qualitative and participatory research, which can surface the nuances of developmental processes that large-scale quantitative studies can miss. Ailsworth’s research grows out of her work with the Black Girl Magic Crew, a Nashville, Tennessee–based after-school program she codesigned with Black adolescent girls and ran with educator Taqiyyah Elliott from 2018 to 2025. Approximately 85 girls participated in the program during that period, and Ailsworth’s research suggests that the Black Girl Magic Crew served as a site of psychological safety (Inniss-Thompson, M. N., et al., Journal of Black Psychology¸ Vol. 50, No. 3, 2024opens in new window).

Ailsworth used the photovoice research method to explore how Black girls understand their own emotional wellness. Working with groups of 4 to 15 individuals, she invited the girls to photograph what being mentally well meant to them. What she received—images of the girls doing favorite activities—was far richer than what she might have gleaned from a survey or a questionnaire with a checklist of symptoms.

Ailsworth realized her data were enriched by her sustained relationship with the girls, in contrast to “a drive-by experience of research.” What the girls wanted, she found, was “a space where they could be respected and celebrated and develop friendships and talk about topics they couldn’t talk about in other spaces.” The field, she added, has much to learn about how Black girls create such spaces for themselves and the best ways to research them. “We have an opportunity to shift our expectations of what is considered to be rigorous. My hope is that we’ll move from these positivistic approaches to ones driven by epistemic justice that honor a variety of ways of knowing and see them as contributing to a bigger picture,” Ailsworth said.

Another project seeking to remedy the lack of rich research on Black girls is Teen Talk, Educate, Experience (Teen TEE), a 10-week curriculum program for Black girls in grades 6 through 8 that runs in two middle schools, one located on Chicago’s North Side and the other on the South Side. Teen TEE was launched in 2019 by Leoandra Onnie Rogers, PhD, an associate professor of comparative human development at the University of Chicago, and Gloria Dotson-Lewis, MSW, of the nonprofit Distinctively Me.

In Teen TEE, groups of 8 to 12 girls discuss how they navigate their lives. Topics include beauty standards; code-switching; relationships with peers, parents, and teachers; and the “isms” that shape their day to day: colorism, adultification bias, and misogynoir. As a capstone, each girl creates an “identity map”—a poster-board collage of the people, places, and cultural assets (such as favorite music or hairstyles) that represent her evolving sense of self.

More than 100 students have come through the program, with nearly all participants reporting that the experience feels designed especially for them as Black girls. Amanda-Joy Wright, a doctoral researcher and lead facilitator for the program, noted that often the most significant learning in Teen TEE emerges from peer-to-peer interactions that develop within the context of adult instruction and support. For example, when participants discussed how hard it was to name their emotions or to feel heard by adults, they began to comfort one another, and they reported at the end of the program how these micro moments with peers were the most impactful for them.

Rogers hopes the field continues to move away from positioning Black girls on the margins of developmental science. “We’ve built an entire science without Black girls,” Rogers said. “We don’t need to take the existing science and do it on Black girls. We need to learn from Black girls in meaningful ways to rebuild developmental science.”

“I choose joy”: Exploring Black familial joy as a strengths-based coping asset in the United States
Mims, L. C., et al., Journal of Family Psychology, 2026

“They’re always gonna notice my natural hair”: Identity, intersectionality and resistance among Black girls
Rogers, L. O., et al., Qualitative Psychology, 2022

Linking structural and psychological adultification: Role inferences underlie adultifying beliefs about Black girls
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Fix your crown, queen: Evaluating the effects of a culturally enriched social-emotional learning intervention for Black girls
Scott, M. N., & Collins, T. A., School Psychology, 2025