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I'm Unique: Teaching Your Toddler to Value Differences

Valuing differences

I'm Unique: Teaching Your Toddler to Value Differences

You can begin to battle the influence of bias in our culture by teaching your toddler to value differences. One way to start is by encouraging your child to appreciate her own uniqueness.

Q-tip

You can introduce your child to the notion of differences by starting within your own family. Do different members of your family have different color hair (black, brown, blonde, red, grey, white)? Different texture of hair (curly, straight, thick, wispy)? Different color eyes (brown, blue, hazel)? Acknowledging and valuing the diverse physical traits within your family can help your child appreciate diversity outside the family, too.

How is your child special? She's two years old. She has a particular hair color, eye color, and skin color. Her ancestors have a specific cultural heritage. (Sharing stories of people—family members, historical figures, or contemporary role models—from your ethnic group of whom you feel proud can also build an appreciation of your child's cultural heritage.) Your toddler also has a distinctive name, which may reflect some family history or cultural background.

Defining the ways in which your child is unique or special is a great way to encourage her to value differences because toddlers love talking and learning about themselves. By talking in a positive way about your toddler's physical characteristics and cultural heritage, you will help her build a positive sense of self. And if she learns to value what makes her different from others, your toddler will be more open to the notion of appreciating the differences of others as well.

No Teasing or Insults

If you want to nip prejudice in the bud, don't let your child ever insult, tease, or reject another person because of race, gender, or ethnicity. Make it a family rule-one that you, of course, observe as well as your child—that you cannot tease, insult, or reject other people for who they are. Attacks on another person's identity simply cannot be allowed.

If you do hear your toddler tease or insult someone because of their gender or race (or if you hear another child teasing or insulting your toddler), step in immediately. Remaining silent will only give your child (or the other child) permission to repeat it and to go on hurting others. Just as you would if your toddler had physically hurt another child, comfort and reassure the injured child first. While doing so, make sure your child knows that you disapprove of what he did. You may choose to discipline such bias attacks just the way you would discipline violence or physical attacks.

At the same time, however, try to find out what underlies the insult. Chances are it didn't come out of the blue. If another problem, like having trouble sharing or difficulty taking turns, underlies the slur, then teach your child to address the problem directly, rather than attacking the person's race or gender. Help your toddler see that the other child's gender or skin color or ethnic background has nothing to do with the sharing problem. If fear of people who are different is an underlying factor, then you'll need to come up with some activities that will increase your child's opportunity to interact with other children who are racially or culturally different.

Talking about stereotypes

Seeking Out Difference

Start by trying to expose your child to a variety of influences in your community. Get to know people of different races, religions, and cultural backgrounds. Then let your toddler get to know their children. After all, you can't expect your child to make friends with people of different races and cultures if you don't do the same.

If you live in a largely homogenous community, you can expose your child to different races and cultures by stocking up on books, videos, dolls, toys, and posters or photos that show people of different races, genders, and physical abilities engaged in a variety of activities. A diversity of images of males and females, whites and blacks, and people of all races will broaden your child's appreciation of both similarities and differences without glossing over the subject.

Q-tip

Your local children's librarian can probably help you find a good selection of multicultural books (and perhaps videos, too).

You also can expose your child to people of different races and cultures by carefully choosing television programs that present characters with different backgrounds. Like all toddlers, your child will enjoy watching kids like her on TV. Unless you're white, however, this may be difficult on most shows—especially shows on commercial television. Though many children's television programs do offer either stereotypes or limited diversity, if you look, you will find several good programs (mostly on public television) that do present differences in a positive light. Shows like Sesame Street, Barney & Friends, and Reading Rainbow, for example, feature multicultural casts and features that will expose your child to many different cultures.

Playing with Gender Roles

You also can help build resistance to bias by encouraging your child to engage in activities that go beyond or go against traditional sex-role stereotyping. Sex-role stereotyping often begins with the purchase of toys for toddlers. When you buy a push toy to help steady your toddler's walking, do you automatically gravitate toward the shopping cart or vacuum if you have a girl or the truck or lawn mower if you have a boy? Why not try buying the reverse? Boys can enjoy shopping too; and girls can have fun mowing the lawn.

Similarly, both boys and girls can both take care of "babies" (dolls), "cook a meal" (with a toy kitchen), and "fix things" (with a toy tool box). Encourage your child to explore all the opportunities open to her or him. Remember that you're teaching the future mothers and fathers of the world. Don't you want your son as much as your daughter to grow up to be a nurturing parent? Likewise, as he or she grows older, won't you want your child to be independent enough to cook a meal for himself or fix a broken bicycle herself? You can nurture interest in these activities by deliberately rejecting gender stereotypes in choosing toys and play for your toddler or preschooler-and in the roles you play in your own home.