EP 10: Top 4 Questions Parents Ask Me About Talking to Kids About Race & Racism

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. 

If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.

[EPISODE]

Welcome to the tenth episode of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

This episode is part two of the Talking to Your Kids About Race in Ways that They Get & You Don’t Sweat series. If you haven’t listened to the previous episode, there’re lots of nuggets to digest there, especially about some of the things you might want to know before talking to your little one about race and racism.

In this episode, I’m sharing with you the top 4 questions I've gotten from parents like you over the years about having "the race talk" with toddlers and preschoolers. The questions that I’m going to explore and unpack with you in this episode are:

What do I say if I don’t want to quote unquote “traumatize” them?

How do I even start the conversation if they don’t ask me about race and racism?

What do I say if my child said something racist or oppressive?  

And the final question…

What do I say when I actually don’t know the answer? Or when I don’t have the time and energy even though I’m really committed to anti-oppression parenting?

The responses to these four questions have been tried and tested by the parents and families I’ve had the honor of working with over the years. I have so much gratitude for their collective wisdom.

And I’m intentional about calling them my responses instead of answers because these responses are simply invitations for you to get curious about your own action and experiment. They are not THEE answers.

Alright, let’s go to question number one.

1.       What do I say to my child if I don’t want to “traumatize” them?

First of all, the fact that you're asking this question tells me how much you care about your child and that you want to protect them from hurt and harm. That’s a great place to start. And the way to protect them from getting overwhelmed by the world’s oppressive and violent reality while still having this conversation is to have it in trauma-sensitive and developmentally informed ways.

That means some understanding of child development during toddler and preschool years can go a long way. One way that it looks like in practice is that you stick to concrete details (or the what and what happened) instead of abstract reasons (or the why).

In other words, be the Pope! Not, the Holy Father. Olivia Pope…from Scandal. Olivia is THEE boss. She has no time to fuzz around with minor details and nuances. She goes straight to the point, delivers results, and says “Consider it handled.” Oh, I love the show. 

If you’d like to Olivia Pope this race talk, consider this format: “First X happened then Y happened because Z.”

For example, your child might ask you why his friends told him he couldn’t play with them because his skin looked dirty. After gathering some information and calming the urge to call those friends’ parents on the phone, you might try the “First X happened then Y happened because Z.”

It might go like this: “First Josh and Tom said you couldn’t play with them on the swings. Then they said your skin looked dirty. I’m guessing that Josh and Tom noticed that your skin color was different and they thought that your darker skin meant you’re different from them or not as good as them. When people treat you differently because of the color of your skin, it’s called racism.”

If you notice that your child is still engaged in the conversation with you and they’re still curious, you might want to expand on what you just shared.

You might use a framework I called the 4S’s of conversation building blocks to custom build a conversation that fits with your child’s development and understanding. The 4S’s are Self, Safety, Sense Making, and Solution. 

Briefly, “Self” means checking in with your bandwidth, energy level, and boundaries to see how much you can be present during this conversation. Do you need to pick another time or can you do it now? Safety means ensuring that your child feels safe using your words and body language. Sense Making means explaining things in ways your child can understand while calling racism for what it is, racism. And Solution means coming up with an action plan that your child can safely use when a situation comes up again in the future.

Here’s an example of how the 4 S’s fit together…

“The First X, then Y because Z” is essentially the third S which is Sense Making, because you named that act of social exclusion based on skin color for what it is, which is racism. So, Sense Making, check! You might continue the conversation if your other “S” which is Self is still feeling energized and generative. Then, you might use another “S” which is Safety by saying, “It’s so heartbreaking that you couldn’t play with your friends because of racism…because in fact your darker skin doesn’t make you less special than Josh or Tom. You’re safe with me now and I love you. Your skin is not dirty just like mine isn’t. You know who else has the same skin tone? Your grandma and your great grandma too!” Then, you might wrap up the conversation with the final “S”, Solution. It might go something like, “Next time your friends do this again, you can tell them that your skin color is darker because you have more melanin than they do.” if you'd like more inspiration, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum has a beautiful Ted Talk where she explained melanin to her three-year-old son. I’ll put the information in the show notes for you.

When a conversation has these 4 S’s, it’s likely that you’re guiding the conversation in ways that don’t go over your child’s head. By keeping the conversation brief and focused on concrete details, your toddlers and preschoolers can flex their emerging cognitive development and make sense of this large concept of race and racism in a bite-sized way.

Also you’ll see that the emphasis is on reassuring your child that they’re safe and loved, without sugarcoating or bypassing the reality of racism and other prejudices.

For more information on the 4 S’s of Conversation Building Blocks and how you can use them to talk to your kids in ways that they get and you don’t sweat, please visit comebacktocare.com/racetalk.

It is also important to remember that you’re not going to address every nuance of systemic racism and oppression in one conversation. I hope not. Your conversations are all about planting seeds and watering those seeds every day. No need to address all the things, all the time, right now.

I hope that both the brief overview of the 4S’s of Conversation building Blocks and the “First X then Y because Z” give you a concrete yet flexible framework to play with while you’re building your own version of the race talk.

I’ll be sending all of my Olivia Pope energy your way.

Okay, question number two…    

2.       How do I even start the conversation if my child doesn’t ask me about race and racism?

I think sometimes we need to start the conversation ourselves. It’s okay to prompt the question and poke it a bit. When there’s no teachable moment, make one.  

However, instead of making one from scratch, I've seen many parents pull themes from TV shows, books, or pretend play to enrich the conversation.

One theme that our toddlers and preschoolers often understand quite easily is fairness. Whenever I give one student 3 cookies and the other one five, I immediately get stink eyes from these cuties and “it’s not fair” usually follows. So, yup, our little ones know what fair and unfair feels like.

Let’s go back to the example in the first question. If your child was excluded from play because of their skin color and they don’t initiate a conversation about it, perhaps you might want to poke and pull theme using the theme of fairness. It might go something like this, “Do you remember when you didn’t want your sister to play basketball with you and your friends and you said it was because she was a girl? Do you remember how sad that made her feel? I wonder if you felt something similar when Josh and Tom didn’t let you play with them because of your skin color.” Then you might pause and see where to go next. You might bring the 4 S’s back in with Self, Safety, or Solution. If there’s a window to use the other S, Sense Making, you might explain that “it’s so unfair when people don’t let you do or have something because of what you look like. When it’s about your skin color, we call that racism. What do you think about that?”

In addition to fairness, other themes that you might have fun with and that your little one can relate to might be pride, especially in their abilities to help out or do something to get praise from the adults. If you remember the student I told you about in the previous episode who said that my eyes were ugly… I was able to tell her that my parents and grandparents had the same eye shape and I feel so proud to share this eye shape with them. And that piece of information about pride got my student so curious about Thailand, the food we eat, the language we speak and so on.

Another theme would be about feelings and ways to help someone feel better after they were hurt. I think this one is so special. I still remember in my classroom years ago when one student was crying and their friend came over and gave them a hug. And I said “oh how kind of you to help Kanhaiya out.” Then, 12 other 4, 5-year-olds swarmed in and gave Kanhaiya a hug too. Isn’t that sweet?

And I bet you might have tried a few of these ideas out already when you point out in books or TV shows what each character was feeling and doing. It’s okay to name racism and make it explicit. Perhaps you ask your child if they’ve seen their friends who are racialized differently get treated differently. Or, if it were them, how would that make them feel? These are some of the ways to get the conversation about race going and nurture that emerging empathy in your little one too.

So that’s poking and pulling themes.

But I must also say that when I started out as a new teacher and a new therapist way back when and especially having just moved to the US, I was a mess. I didn’t know what to say. I often froze and then just ignored the conversations. And I don’t mean to be cheesy but with practice…lots of practice, I got so much better. And when I say practice in my case, it was in front of my bathroom mirror practicing my elevator pitches about Indigenous Americans’ history, Rosa Parks, and so on and feeling like Issa Rae from Insecure. This bathroom mirror rehearsal was where all of my readings on social justice and my political analyses came in very handy.

The more difficult part was and still is…is when I look into the eyes of the Black, Indigenous, and children of color that I work with and love with my whole heart. I tell them how loving and lovable they are every day. Then, I have to tell them that the world might see them differently because of their skin colors, medical conditions, and disabilities or different abilities. So for me it’s nice to have those elevator pitches in the back of my mind to fall back on so that when I have this race talk with my students, I can speak from my heart.

And that’s our work of being a decolonized and embodied parent, right? We speak what we know in our brain from our heart.  

I think awkwardness and imperfection are so much better than inaction.

Question number three…

3.       What do I say if my child said something racist or oppressive?  

I get this question almost every week. Parents often tell me that their toddlers and preschoolers are so amazing at picking the worst time to ask a person in a wheelchair what happened to them, or ask a femme presenting person with short hair if they were a man or woman. Does that resonate with you?

There’s a great reason for this. Toddlers and preschoolers love noticing and describing different physical traits that they see in themselves and other people. This curiosity happens around the same time that they might like exploring or talking about their body parts, including penis and vagina too.

This curiosity is developmentally on point. However, when that happens, we often get flustered and embarrassed. Then, we might automatically shut the conversation and this curiosity down by saying things like “it’s not polite to say that. Go say sorry now.” You get the idea. When that happens over and over again, our little ones learn that it might be best not to talk about gender, disability, race and so on. Then, what do we have? Colorblindness.

Instead of shutting the conversation down, my most favorite thing to say is “Hmm, what else?” Really? Only girls can play pretend cooking in the kitchen? Hmm who else cooks? Let’s look at different examples of chefs and find people from all genders.

 “Hmm, what else?” is simple and works like a charm.

 Final question… 

4.       Okay, but what do I say when I actually don’t know the answer? Or when I don’t have the time and energy even though I’m really committed to anti-oppression parenting?

I know how hard you’re working. Anti-oppression or decolonized parenting involves honoring real survival needs and embracing messy imperfections too.

Instead of aiming to have a smooth conversation about race with all the right historical facts, why don’t we release that pressure of perfection and aim for honesty.

Saying “I don’t actually know the answer to your question. Can we look it up together?” or “I’m so tired from work and I need a minute to zone out. Let’s talk about this after dinner because it’s important to me too.” Is absolutely okay.

You’re modeling boundary setting and teaching your little one to not say yes to everything. I’m still working on these two skills too as a grown up. And you can start teaching this important lesson now by leading with your example.

That means you can be honest about how you’re feeling as well without trying to hide your rage, grief, and frustration. Perhaps say, “I’m so sad about people hurting each other because their skin color’s different. I need to cry or breathe or go for a walk. Would you like to do that with me?” (but only if it feels right in your heart and gut).

My point is your honest emotions can be a teachable moment that we call co-regulation. By showing your child how you cope with your emotions, you’re also supporting their social and emotional development.

Alright, these are all the top four questions and responses. I hope they spark even more curiosity and commitment in your heart to disrupt white supremacy, one conversation at a time. Your action is the solution we need, even though and especially when it’s imperfect. Just practice. Even better, practice collectively with other families who share your decolonized parenting values.

If you’re curious about having a flexible but concrete way to make this race talk sound like YOU while not overwhelming your child and want to learn more about the 4S’s of Conversation Building Blocks, I invite you to join the “Talking to kids about race in ways they get and you don’t sweat” workshop. You’ll have lifetime access to the pre-recorded videos, audios, transcripts, and three beautiful workbook PDFs too. Please visit comebacktocare.com/racetalk for more information. Comebacktocare.com/racetalk.

I can’t believe that next episode is our final episode for Season 1. Wow, what a dream to create this space, this playground for us to re-imagine parenting to be deeply decolonized and intentionally intergenerational together. I’m so, so, so grateful for you. If you have any topics you’re curious about for the next season or want to share some love and feedback, I’m one email away at nat at comebacktocare dot com.

As always, in solidarity and sass. Until next time, please take care.