Episode 9: Three Things to Know Before Talking to Your Toddlers & Preschoolers About Race & Racism
In this podcast episode, you’ll deepen your understanding of how toddlers and preschoolers are forming biases, stereotypes, and prejudices.
Episode Summary:
Together we’ll explore questions like why is it so hard for us, grownups, to talk to young children about race and racism, especially when we really, really want to? Is it too early to have this race talk with toddlers and preschoolers? How do these little humans learn about biases? And lastly Where do we start? I hope you’ll walk away with some concrete things to experiment with. More importantly, I hope you’ll walk away with even more curiosity, a deeper commitment to decolonized parenting, and greater compassion towards yourself.
What You’ll Learn From this Episode:
Nat’s personal experience with her preschool student’s remark about her Asian body.
Some worries parents have about talking to toddlers and preschoolers about race and racism.
Three reasons why it’s so hard for us (white and Black, Indigenous, Parents of color alike but with different reasons) to talk to our kids about race?
Accountability is understanding our struggles first instead of anxiously finding the “right” script of the “right” thing to say to our kids.
Our child’s developmental readiness to have a conversation about race.
What they’re learning about physical differences at 0-6 months.
What they’re learning about in-group preference at 6-9 months.
What they’re learning about implicit and explicit racial biases at 2-5 years old.
How they learn about race and racism based on the social learning theory.
How to start the conversation with safety and without overwhelming your child.
Resources Mentioned:
Talking to Your Kids About Race in Ways that They Get & You Don’t Sweat Course
Talking to Toddlers and Preschoolers About Race and Racism Q&A for Zero to Three
References:
Aboud, F. E. (2008). A social-cognitive developmental theory of prejudice. In S. M. Quintana & C. McKown (Eds.), Handbook of race, racism, and the developing child (p. 55–71). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children (NAEYC, No. 242) [Jan 01, 1989] Derman-Sparks, Louise and The A.B.C. Task Force
Dunham, Y., Baron, A. S., & Carey, S. (2011). Consequences of "minimal" group affiliations in children. Child development, 82(3), 793–811.
Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A., & Kuhl, P. (2001). The Scientist in the crib: What early learning tell us about the mind, New York, HarperCollins
Katz, P. A., & Kofkin, J. A. (1997). Race, gender, and young children. In S. S. Luthar, J. A. Burack, D. Cicchetti, & J. R. Weisz (Eds.), Developmental psychopathology: Perspectives on adjustment, risk, and disorder (p. 51–74). Cambridge University Press.
Liu, S., Xiao, W. S., Xiao, N. G., Quinn, P. C., Zhang, Y., Chen, H., Ge, L., Pascalis, O., & Lee, K. (2015). Development of visual preference for own- versus other-race faces in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 51(4), 500–511.
Naiqi G. Xiao, Rachel Wu, Paul C. Quinn, Shaoying Liu, Kristen S. Tummeltshammer, Natasha Z. Kirkham, Liezhong Ge, Olivier Pascalis, Kang Lee. Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own-Race Than Other-Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty. Child Development, 2017; DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12798
Rhodes, M., & Baron, A. (2019). The Development of Social Categorization. Annual review of developmental psychology, 1, 359–386.
Skinner, A. L., Meltzoff, A. N., & Olson, K. R. (2017). “Catching” Social Bias: Exposure to Biased Nonverbal Signals Creates Social Biases in Preschool Children. Psychological Science, 28(2), 216–224
Xiao, N. G., Quinn, P. C., Liu, S., Ge, L., Pascalis, O., & Lee, K. (2018). Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music. Developmental science, 21(2), 10.1111/desc.12537. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12537
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