It can be easy to avoid a conversation because it feels too awkward — but it's important not to.
“Children are making sense of the world from the time they start looking around,” James told HuffPost Canada. “They try to understand what everything means, and so they give meaning to things... so, no time is too early.”
A lot of the toys made for kids between the ages of three and five involve grouping things by shape or colour. They start looking for patterns, solving puzzles, filling in the blanks. And that kind of thinking can easily extend to race, said Erin Winkler, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who specializes in racial socialization.Having age-appropriate conversations about race with young kids can help instill anti-racist ideas.
“If children don’t get answers about, for example, why they see a disproportional number of white people in this neighbourhood and Black people in this neighbourhood, they might think, ‘There’s a rule no one’s talking about,’” Winkler explainedIn other words, kids are picking up on the messages they’re seeing around them about racial difference and about what people in positions of authority look like, even if they don’t have an explanation as to why that is.
In the early 1990s, James conducted research at Toronto childcare centres. Toddlers were offered a white or a Black doll, and asked to pick their favourite. Nearly all of the children, including the Black children, chose the white doll. The findings were virtually identical to a similar test
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