There’s no shortage of reasons to point out how different people are from each other. We could start with gender, go through skin color, religion, nationality, the names we carry, hair color, height, weight, eye color… the list never ends.
What if, for a change, we started looking for the traits that make us similar to someone instead, and let that be the basis for connecting with each other?
As most of us know from our own experience, children can be incredibly cruel. That said, I don’t think children are inherently bad or mean — I think they’re very much mirrors of their parents, and of the environment they grow up in.
Which means WE are the ones fully responsible for how our children behave!
We can’t, and shouldn’t, ever just wave it off with “well, they’re just kids.” Those kids are people, and they’ll grow up carrying the values they’re absorbing right now — and they’ll treat other people based on exactly those values.
We often lose sight of problems until they knock on our own door. We’re fine with “our kid teasing a chubby kid,” but we’re not fine when someone won’t play with our kid because of the language they speak at home. Double standards don’t help anyone.
So we have to teach our children that they shouldn’t discriminate against anyone, just as they shouldn’t have to tolerate discrimination from anyone either.
Sofia has been playing very actively with Barbies for about a year now, and we figured that might be the least painful way for her to learn (especially during the pandemic, when she didn’t have much contact with other people) that every kind of difference is not just acceptable, but genuinely worth having.
So she has an enviable collection of dolls (small and large) of every “race” — we have a Native American, an African, an Arab, a white doll, a shorter-statured Latina vet, we have a girl in a wheelchair… I’m especially proud of Sofia here, because she picked that last one out herself (I’ll admit the rest were my own pure educational indoctrination), and it’s the one she plays with most right now. As for the rest, we’re still missing an Asian doll, currently waiting on an Amazon list for her turn to move into our house.
Children’s games are innocent — right up until the moment they aren’t.
Nobody’s perfect, and neither is my family. And no matter how hard we try to pass certain values on to our children implicitly, those same children don’t live in a vacuum.
After a “situation” from daycare, which Sofia mentioned to me in passing, I felt like I’d personally failed.
Here’s the thing: Sofia is close friends with two girls, both born here in Germany, one of Moroccan background. In their group there’s also a girl a year older than Sofka, whose dad is African (I’m not sure exactly which country, since I don’t know the man personally), and the little girl has dark skin. (The information above isn’t meant to highlight where anyone comes from — just to give the whole story a clear context. The point is: everyone is different.) So anyway, at one point I casually asked Sofia if she plays with that third girl too, and she told me no, because she’s not the same as them (meaning herself and her best friends, who are light-skinned).
Hearing those words come out of MY child’s mouth left me deeply shaken. Because I never could have imagined that Sofia — even under whatever influence from her surroundings or other children — could end up thinking that she could discriminate against someone simply because that someone is, say, different in skin color. It’s not the child’s fault. It’s ours.
Because nothing is a given, and it’s clear that a lot of things have to be said out loud and clearly for them to actually become the norm. Otherwise, this is exactly the kind of “slip-up” you end up with.
After that “incident,” I talked with Sofka often about the problem of discriminating against people who are different from us in any way. Besides the dolls I mentioned, I bought her books on the topic, and I also addressed the issue directly every time she was surprised that someone on the street was “like this, or like that.”
She’s still little, that’s true — she’s still learning and getting to know the world around her, that’s true too. But this is also the best possible opportunity to correct the mistakes that we ourselves surely made throughout our lives, out of ignorance or carelessness (for one reason or another). Because I would hate for Sofia to grow up to be a nationalist, a racist, a homophobe…
What matters more to me, personally, is what kind of person she’ll be toward other people, not whether she’ll be successful in any particular field.
Being the reasonable kid she is, she quickly understood and accepted the mistake she’d made, and started actively working to correct it. She even started correcting others herself.
No, she still doesn’t play with the girl I mentioned. But there are other reasons for that now, ones that have nothing to do with how she looks. The two of them simply don’t have enough shared interests to be close on a more intimate level. Which is completely fine, because on the other hand, it’s also not okay to prefer someone purely based on their skin color — that’s discrimination too (and no, there’s no such thing as “positive discrimination”).
So how do I know the problem’s actually been nipped in the bud? Because Sofia now actively plays with two boys, one of Indian background and the other of Italian background (both dark-skinned). So I could finally breathe easy. Because the lesson was learned. Which, again, doesn’t mean we should stop talking about this and similar topics — because, as with everything else, it’s always better to prevent than to cure.
What matters is what kind of person someone is, not what they’re called or what they look like, where they come from, what color their skin is, whether they eat pork or nothing of animal origin at all.
So, my dear parents, for the sake of our children, let’s set our differences aside and stop closing our eyes to the small problems our children run into — because today’s small problems can turn into serious problems once those children grow into adults.
Warmly,
S-Mama
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