EP 9: Three Things to Know Before Talking to Your Toddlers & Preschoolers 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 ninth episode of the Come Back to Care Podcast.

This episode is part one of the Talking to Your Kids About Race in Ways that They Get & You Don’t Sweat series.

In this episode, you’ll deepen your understanding of how toddlers and preschoolers are forming biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. 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? Hint hint, it’s not.  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.

You might notice that we’re not diving headfirst into quote unquote how to talk to our kids about race just yet. That’s because knowing what to say is only one piece of the puzzle. I often find that many of us get stuck around HOW to have this kind of conversation, especially in ways that won’t be overwhelming to our children. That’s why in this episode, I want to lay out a few ingredients that you might want to have handy before sitting your preschooler down and having this juicy and important talk. Doing this prep work ahead of time will help make the conversation go as smoothly as it can…you know in ways that your child gets and you don’t sweat.  

I’m very passionate about this topic and I’ve thought about it since 2011…when a beautifully spunky 4 year-old said to me, “Ms. Nat, your eyes are ugly.”

I remember that moment clear as day. I had just moved to the US from Thailand, and I was fresh off the boat like a delicious tilapia. At the time I had no clue how to respond. But judging from my co-teacher’s facial expression after she heard what my 4-year-old student said and from this student’s mom…whose face was blushing a deep red? I knew that there was  a lot to unpack here.

So let’s begin our unpacking with some of the worries I’ve heard from parents.

I’m honoring the pressure you may feel to talk to your child about racism flawlessly. The thought “I should know how to do this” might cross your mind.

I’m honoring the fear you may have at the thought of answering your child’s 439 follow-up questions about race and racism that you might not have time and energy for. 

I’m also honoring the push and pull between not wanting to burst your child’s bubble and wanting to be realistic about the violent injustices of the world to protect them.

I get it. It would be much easier not to take action and have this conversation about racism. But the cost of this inaction is so expensive. This conversation, just like everything else about parenting, is messy yet oh so rich with possibilities for healing and growth.

And who is a better person to talk to children about all the -isms. As a parent, you work with uncertainty and trial and error all the time. This race talk is another opportunity for you to bring all of your grit and tenacity and compassion to make your parenting a radical act of liberation, one conversation at a time.

You're already teaching your child to be kind, honest, and compassionate. Now you can make that teaching specific to race, disability, gender, and so on too.

So why is it so hard to have the race talk? I’m sure you’ve been to a few Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion trainings over the course of the pandemic, training that might have increased your awareness of race and racism. Why is it still so hard?

I think we know collectively that awareness doesn’t automatically translate into action. Having a script of what to say doesn’t automatically guarantee that the conversation will go well 100% of the time.  

I believe that awareness is a great start. But what makes action stick is agility: agility that comes from you practicing and making mistakes over and over again. Over time, with enough practice and support, you’ll have the agility you need to step in and out of the shame and fear that paralyze you. So you can step through that discomfort into action.

In my experiences in clinical work with parents and in community organizing, I usually see three factors that get the way of us translating awareness into action and doing so with agility. These three factors are our brain, our ego, and our culture.

Before I elaborate though, I’d love to invite you to take a few seconds to think of your own experiences…what makes this conversation about race with your child difficult for you…while I’m taking a sip of water.  

Thank you for taking a moment to do some self-reflection.

I have a story for you. Would you like to picture this scenario with me? A little content warning that this story includes a call out on social media. It's about a well-meaning ally, let's call her Sara and say that she uses she/her pronouns. Sara accidentally reposted something on social media and did not give credit to the original content creator who’s a person of color. The online community was quick to call her out saying things like Impact over intent, be better, do better, you're so privileged and ignorant, how could you do this? It sent Sara into deep shame...the kind where she attacked her own sense of self-worth with shameful self-attacking comments like “See, I'm no good” and she deleted her social media. The online community continued the callout by saying “See? there's no accountability.”  

As I'm telling this story, I feel so much tension in my chest and there's heat at the back of my neck. How was that story landing for you?

Could Sara do better and be better in that moment of intense stress and shame? Not really. Or at least not biologically from a brain development point of view.

When we are overwhelmed by stress and shame, we can't think clearly or quote unquote do better because we're in the fight-flight-freeze-people-please mode. We're operating from the reptilian part of the brain or what Dan Siegel calls, the downstairs brain. The part of the brain that signals to us danger, danger...to keep us alive and help us survive. When the downstairs brain is online, we lose access to the smart part of the brain called the Neocortex. Or what Dan Siegel calls the upstairs brain. And this upstairs brain is where we quote and quote think, be, and do better.

Sara was operating from her downstairs brain and was in her fight-flight-freeze-people-please mode. She fled the Internet and shut down her social media. Her brain and biology didn't grant her access to the part of her brain that plans, makes decisions, and uses better judgment.

Of course, I’m not saying we give Sara a free pass. I’m hoping to paint a picture of how important it is to replace punishment with compassionate accountability. When Sara is more emotionally calm and her upstairs brain comes online again, she’s likely to be in much better headspace to do better and be better.

Along with our brain biology, another thing that makes this hard is our mind, a.k.a. our ego. In that deep shame, not thinking clearly, many of us might get stuck between this false binary of Am I nice? or Am I a racist? Well, we're all racists anyway when we don't actively take action to disrupt white supremacy.

Plus our intersecting identities are too rich to be reduced down into this narrow box of nice vs. racist. We have our class, gender, sexuality, ability, spirituality, age, education, and the list goes on. They wouldn't even fit in the binary in the first place.

Instead of asking yourself "Am I a nice person? or Am I racist?", perhaps a more wholesome question would be: how am I showing up with all of my identities and my privilege, position, and power?

Now I’d like to invite you to zoom out a bit to look at our historical, cultural, social, and political context…because we don't live in a bubble, we can't just look at our brain and our mind and call it a day.

Many of us are conditioned to use colorblindness as a coping strategy. If your parents came of age during the Civil Rights era, they might have internalized the false idea that we quote unquote “solved” this problem back then and now we don’t need to “see race”.

I hope that understanding this context helps us hold ourselves in compassion and tenderness when we examine our tendency to intellectualize everything and avoid conflict, at the expense of taking action. Because when we hold ourselves in compassion, we’re not stuck in shame and we can move through our discomfort into action.

Many of us are also byproducts of 400 years of trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze, people please, and shut down. Many of us were and still are targeted by oppression. We might know what to say to teach our kids to be safe and avoid police brutality. But because of this deep collective and intergenerational pain, the wound might still be so raw. So when we talk to our kids about race and racism, it’s SO hard to do it without feeling like we’re tearing open a wound. We might get overwhelmed by fear and pain and legitimate rage. But to our toddlers and preschoolers, this legitimate rage might be beyond their understanding at the moment.

For many white families, shame and guilt might keep that legacy of colorblindness alive even when you set a firm anti-oppression intention as a parent. For many Black, Indigenous, and families of color, we don’t have the privilege of not having this race talk because we need to protect our children. Yet, it’s incredibly taxing to have this race talk while our intergenerational open wound is bleeding.  

You see, we’re trying to address something that’s 400 years old that comes with the fight-flight-freeze-people-please-shut-down protection plan that’s 500 million years old (according to Polyvagal theory).

I personally believe that it doesn’t matter what kind of race talk scripts and bullet points you have. A crucial part of holding ourselves accountable is to put our struggles in this context so that we understand our inaction and stuckness with deeper compassion.

Now that you understand your personal roadblocks and our collective struggles, let’s look at our toddlers’ and preschoolers’ roadblocks. Welp, they have none because they are learning and have been learning about themselves, others, and the world.

Is it too early to have this talk?

If you've been wondering, is my child really, really ready for this race talk like developmentally, spiritually, mentally, physically? Let’s explore your child’s developmental readiness together. I’ve compiled six behaviors that most children show when they’re learning about social rules and expectations.

I invite you to take a mental note of how many of these behaviors you notice in your child. As you’re listening to each behavior, please think of what your child communicates with words, sounds, and behaviors. To be inclusive all of types of different abilities, we consider both verbal and nonverbal cues and everything in between, yes? Okay, here we go.

Number one, your child communicates verbally or non-verbally that they understand their physical traits. They might communicate, “I have curly hair,” “I have blue eyes.”

Number two, they describe their actions. For example, they might communicate, I jumped super high or I can roll my wheelchair really fast.

Number three, they describe their traditional gender binary. I am a boy. She is a girl.

Number four, they use personal pronouns: I, me, my, and mine. Like, “my turn”, “my cookie.”

Number five, they use self-conscious emotions and express embarrassment and pride.

Number six, last one, they recognize themselves in a mirror or in a photo. And they may indicate that understanding or recognition by communicating “ hey, that's me!”

All right, how many of these six items resonate with your tiny curious learner? If the answer is one or all six, the answer to your question, “is my child ready for this race talk?” is a resounding yes!

Because these behaviors show that your child's sense of self is emerging. And that means they have been learning about themselves and other people and their theory of mind is also emerging. That simply means that your child is beginning to understand that their goals, thoughts, and feelings are different and separate from your goals, thoughts, and feelings. They also have empathy. All of these behaviors are showing that your tiny human has all the skills they need to receive cultural messages and attitudes about themselves and other people.

What that means for us is that we need to go in and disrupt the biases and the stereotypes and the prejudice that are forming. So the real question is: are YOU ready to have this talk?

Here’s the thing, from birth to six months, our babies can see differences in skin color but how they see race or have attitudes towards different skin colors is up to you.

During the first six months of life, you already know how much and how quickly your tiny nugget is absorbing information and learning about the world. For them to be efficient and learn well, tiny babies often put people in categories: who’s familiar, who’s different, who’s safe, and who’s a threat. These social categories help them predict and understand people's behaviors. Isn’t that neat?

At six to nine months, babies have a really strong preference for people who look and sound like them. One study shows that six-to-nine-month-old babies look to adults of the same race for guidance, and they don’t really look at adults from different race for guidance. So the study shows these babies have a bias or preference of people who look the same as them.

Another study shows that Chinese, Canadian, British, French, and American babies look longer at faces of the same race when the researchers pair these faces with happy music. You know I’m about to say next right? The opposite also happened. These babies also look longer at faces of different races when these faces were paired with sad music. Hello biases! What's interesting is that the babies in the study who were younger than six months did not show this kind of preference or bias. Interesting. Right?

I’m sharing this developmental information with you to say that by nine months our babies can see skin color and physical differences. They can put people into social categories, such as who’s safe and who’s familiar. They also have an in-group preference where they prefer people who look and sound like them.

And these developmental skills are common developmental skills that most babies across cultures go through. But they become a little challenging when our precious nuggets use in-group preference and social categories to exclude and discriminate against people who look different from them down the line…around ages 2 to 5.

If you hang around preschoolers long enough, I think you might know what I mean. Racial prejudices are present at ages four and five and we can see it in name calling. We also see social exclusion where preschoolers and toddlers begin to use race to choose playmates.

Remember the in-group preference we discussed with six- to nine-month-old babies? For preschoolers the in-group preference now has a belief attached to it. They believe that people who identify to be the same as them are much more intelligent and much kinder even when the category of the group is superficial like t-shirt colors.

I know I’m referencing many studies in this episode. You’ll find all the citations in the show notes when you visit comebacktocare.com/podcast.

I hope this gives you a fuller developmental picture of how toddlers and preschoolers learn biases, stereotypes, and prejudices during these early years, despite your social justice values and parenting intentions. When you don't actively interrupt and disconfirm them, these prejudices, these explicit and implicit biases keep getting solidified and they become much harder to change later on.

Explicit racial biases and prejudices form around age five. And when our little ones grow up and they begin to learn more about the nuances of different people from different racial groups, their thoughts about those groups might change. They might value fairness. They might value liberation, but what doesn't change so easily is the implicit biases. They tend to stay the same. And by age 10, children and adults tend to share the same implicit racial biases.

Still with me? Now I want to go deeper into how exactly children learn to have biases.

How exactly is my child learning biases?

Based on social learning theory, racism, at the end of the day, is a value just like compassion, kindness, being family oriented, being community oriented, assertiveness, you name it.

Children learn values because of these three components: modeling, reinforcement, and association.

Here’s how these three pieces work together. You might want to pass down the value of kindness to your toddler. You model kindness with your behaviors by being kind to the neighbors, people at the park, and so on. And if you’re centered and anchored, you model how you’re kind to yourself when you make mistakes too…most of the time. You’re modeling kindness with your behaviors. You might even teach a saying to your curious toddler with some sentence like “it’s better to be kind than to be right.” There you go, you’re modeling this value of kindness with words.

Then, your toddler tries out these kind behaviors like helping you sort the laundry or handing you a kitchen towel. You give them a big hug and say, “thank you so much for helping. You’re so sweet.” That’s reinforcement. Over multiple experiments, your toddler begins to associate helping out and being kind as something desirable. That’s association.

The opposite is also true when it comes to an oppressive value like racism. The three components still take place. For example, perhaps your child hears in the news that immigrants steal jobs and immigrants are bad. They are beginning to form these two boxes or associations: immigrants equal bad or immigrants equal stealing jobs. Perhaps they go to school and there's one classmate, who's an immigrant. And that classmate got teased and everybody laughed. That was another opportunity for these two boxes or associations to get reinforced that immigrants are bad.

So it's up to you to go in and de-tangle these associations and build new ones. And it's simply by saying, “Hmm, well, some immigrants do take some jobs, but what else? What else do immigrants contribute? Perhaps immigrants can work with us. Some of them have really amazing jobs that they love. And some immigrants take some jobs that most of us don't want. And immigrants can also be kind and compassionate.” So instead of having just two boxes that say immigrants are bad, you're going in with your conversations and start building other boxes or associations to expand your child's associations. And that is how we interrupt that formation of biases.

Where to start?

Phew! We did it! Are you feeling excited to roll up your sleeves and talk to your child about race and racism? In the next episode, I’ll be back with top five questions parents ask me most frequently about how to talk to kids about race in ways that they get and you don’t sweat.

But I can’t leave you hanging either. You might be wondering “Nat, where do I start?” Well, you already have… with the self-reflection and self-compassion work in this episode. You laid the groundwork.

When you want to begin the talk with your toddler or preschooler, I’d say don’t just start somewhere. Start with Safety and go slowly. If your child brings up the subject, starting with safety tells them that they’re safe and loved and you are safe too. Remember, we can build safety so that the upstairs brain or the neocortex come back online? Same idea applies here, too. You might say to your toddler “Wow, how scary was that to see people yelled at one another like that. You’re safe with me right here, right now. Once we get home, we can talk about what we saw, if you want to.” And once you and your toddler finally have the talk. It will probably be a quick chat rather than a full-on lecture about the history of Civil Rights movement. You can watch for sudden changes in behaviors after the conversation like Extra clinginess, Meltdowns, Withdrawal, and Changes in sleeping, eating, bowel movements. Your child might be communicating through their behaviors that they’re working hard to make sense of the information you just shared. It’s completely okay and encouraged to validate their fear and reassure them that they’re safe with you at home, for example.

So there you go, to meet our toddlers and preschoolers where they’re at developmentally you start with safety and keep coming back to safety.

I’ve put together a framework called the 4S’s of Conversation Building Blocks for you to build a conversation about race with your toddler or preschooler. This way you have a flexible but concrete way to make this race talk sound like YOU while not overwhelming your child. That’s why it’s not a rigid script for you to say. When you invest in yourself and this 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 wait to dive deeper on this topic in the next episode. I appreciate your curiosity and your action towards liberation, one conversation at a  time.

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