Our kids are growing up in a global society where they will have to feel comfortable with people of other races and religions. I really recommend the book Hate Hurts: How Children Learn and Unlearn Prejudice and the resources I listed in my blog Resources for Talking about Skin Color.
The Public Broadcasting Service website offers the following suggestions from experts who contributed to PBS shows:
Be aware of how and when children’s attitudes are formed. Children develop attitudes and identity through their experiences with their bodies and their social environments. Very young children perceive differences in skin color but often do not grasp that it is a permanent characteristic . They may believe, for example, that their skin color will change when they grow up, or that a peer can change his or her skin color by washing or by painting.
The authors cite a 1988 study with the following rather scary assertion: racial attitudes are largely formed by the age of nine years. After that age, a child’s attitude is unlikely to change unless they have a life-changing experience. Therefore, it is important to be aware of attitudes we are passing on to our children.
First, try to have a diverse environment for your children. Even if you live in a non-diverse area, you should have dolls, art materials, posters, books, and toys that represent different races in leadership positions, show disabled people doing ordinary jobs, depict various families (multiracial, single-parent, and grandparent-headed, for example)and show women and men in non-gender-stereotyped roles.
Students should find families, ethnicities and communities like their own represented in their environment, and they should also see people different from them in some way. Multiple “skin tone” crayons and diverse dolls not only help minority children feel good about a doll like them, they can make all children feel good about differences. I would suggest putting a doll that is “different” from a majority of the children present in an especially inviting outfit to entice children to play with it.
You can also provide dramatic play props representing different cultures. Play food is available that represents Mexican, Jewish, Italian and Asian food staples. Some teachers’ catalogs carry dress-up outfits typical of other countries. (Try to make these representative of what some adults in your community or in a children’s story might wear. Don’t make them seem as exotic as Halloween costumes.)
Speaking of exotic: it is important to show not just the novel and the (to us) especially unusual facets of a culture. In addition, show people of different ethnicities in ordinary clothing and work environments in your community. (I call this “avoiding the thatched-hut syndrome”. Many countries still have thatched huts, but most of them also have cities, businesspeople and professionals. Your aim is not to spotlight a “country of the week” but to showcase the diversity present in this country.)
A diverse environment also includes the people the child sees in daily life.Visit stores owned by different ethnic groups and choose professional role models (doctor, dentist, counselor, teacher) of different ethnicities. I’ve written about our hiring a caregiver from Korea and how I learned to never underestimate the power of a role model.