It’s not surprising, really: As a baby she saw a boy with brown skin in a Baby Einstein video and made the sign for bear
27th April 2009
Lucy is in her bed, playing with a Groovy Girl I bought for a great price at Once Upon a Child Santa brought her for Christmas.
“Mumma, this girl is dirty. We need to give her a bath.”
“Uh, Honey, she’s not dirty. That’s the colour of her skin. She has dark brown skin.”
“But why, Mum-Mum?”
“Well, not everyone has the same colour skin as us.”
“But why?”
“Because they don’t. It depends on where you live, where you came from, who your Mummy & Daddy are, and more.”
“But why?”
“Look! A Blue Jay outside!”
We don’t have much diversity up here in the Boonies. Different skin colours are unfortunately only represented in rather stereotypical ways: Nannies, convenience and ethnic restaurant store owners (I use plural, but we sadly only have one not-so-good Chinese food place), a cab driver. Lucy will of course be raised to embrace every type of person through acceptance, empathy and kindness, but it’s hard at her age when all she sees is a sea of white people.
We’re covering the non-traditional family file with some great books (and real life), but have yet to really tackle the diversity issue. And I’m not really sure if it has to be A Thing To Tackle, anyways, does it?
Thoughts?
Possibly related posts:
We were lucky enough to have it a one question, one answer conversation. All people are different seemed to satisfy. We used our family for an example……different hair/eye color etc…
Now if we could just get her to stop yelling “Is she/he fat mama?” over and over when we are in public……
Being a Mom to a two year old who is half black, I often think about how we will explain to him why his Daddy is black but he is lighter than his friend’s at school maybe who also have black Dads. Because he is mixed, he will never have dark skin, or be as dark as his Dad who isn’t dark even himself…so anyways, my thoughts are that really I don’t think it’s something that needs to be pointed out. For us, I intend on maybe getting some books on mixed families so Ayven understands because he is IN one, but as for Lucy (whose Dad isn’t black right? lol) I think it should just be explained when she’s curious, that doll is a perfect example. If she sees a child who is black and wonders, then I would explain that the child is black because so is their Mom and Dad, so on and so forth. But no, I don’t think it has to be something that needs to be pointed out specifically. But because you guys live in the boonies, maybe it would be nice to have a couple books for her age that look into different cultures. Just so that she doesn’t have some sort of culture shock when you guys go for a walk in downtown Toronto lol.
We haven’t had too much of an issue with Eric. Hamilton is a pretty diverse place. But I’ll never forget the day we were at a walk in clinic and Eric kept asking quite loudly what the “brown guy” was doing… So I explained that “the guy in the white jacket” was the doctor.
We live in a pretty undiverse town as well, so we’ve had to try to explain differences to Eirinn, only because she has asked. We simply explained that everyone looks different in different ways. Sometimes it’s our skin colour that is different, sometimes it’s our hair, our eyes, our size. She has asked about people with darker skin and about a person with dwarfism. We told her that people have all different shades of brown skin and that people come in all different shapes and sizes.
As another Mom from the boonies I can relate. We went to an excellent children’s short film series at the local this past winter which was full of multicultualism.. it was superb! It may seem strange but when we are somewhere with a greater sense of cultures I try to point things out so we can talk about it.
On a side note… what do you mean a so so Chinese Food restaurant? I think there are 2 in town… the one we order from is REALLY good.. we must compare notes.
I just re read my post… when I said point things out I didn’t mean literally point.. oh my. The kids do that plenty enough.. sigh.