© 2020 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved
White parents need to talk with their children about race, but mistaken beliefs often get in the way. Here's what parents need to know to become better agents of change.
For years, researchers have documented the phenomenon: Many white parents avoid talking with their children about race. Why?
One explanation -- voiced by the parents themselves -- is that they want their children to grow up "color blind."
They don't want their children to think in terms of racial categorization. If I talk about race with my child, wouldn't I be undermining this goal? Wouldn't I be setting my child up for a race-bound mentality?
Parents may also believe that their children are too young to talk about race.
Or they might think that various alternatives are good enough. What if I simply teach your child to treat everyone with fairness? Or expose my child to lots of ethnic diversity?
And of course parents avoid talking about race because of their own discomfort.
They might even worry that they'll make things worse. If am tense and anxious, won't I end up sending the wrong message to my kids?
These ideas might seem intuitive, but they're actually wrong.
So let's take a closer look. What common mistakes are parents making? And what does the research reveal about the most effective ways to teach kids about race and racial injustice? Here's an evidence-based guide.
1. "My child isn't old enough yet."
You might think that a toddler or preschooler isn't mature enough to handle a discussion about race. But this isn't likely. If your child is old enough to talk, your child is almost certainly old enough to start talking about race.
To see what I mean, consider what babies know about the social world.
As I explain in elsewhere, babies learn to read faces from an early age. They notice when we're upset, and they react with concern. When they are old enough to move around independently, they use their motor skills to offer help or comfort to people in trouble.
In addition, babies show signs of having a sense of fairness. By the end of their first year, they have learned to expect that adults will distribute resources in a fair and equal way.
And experiments tell us that babies have certain social preferences -- preferences that we might characterize as "moral."
For instance, when babies see an individual under attack, they appear to side with the victim. They also show a preference for individuals who intervene to help victims. Given the choice between approaching a passive bystander and someone who has offered help to a third party, babies approach the helpers.
(Learn more from my article, "Moral sense: Babies prefer underdogs and go-gooders")
How do babies develop these attitudes? They learn by interacting with us, and by observing acts of kindness and fairness.
But let's be clear. Young children don't live in a fairy tale world of sweetness and light. They also see bad behavior, and they learn from that as well.
Take the expectation about the fair distribution of resources. That's what researchers have observed among babies who lack background information about the potential recipients.
When researchers supplied this information -- showing toddlers that one potential recipient was dominant over another -- the children changed their expectations. Knowing about about dominance relationships made the toddlers anticipate inequity and favoritism. They now expected an authority figure to give the dominant individual more than his fair share (Enright et al 2017).
You can read the details in this Parenting Science article. But the takeaway here is that basic morality -- kindness, fairness, opposition to injustice -- isn't a subject that's too advanced for your child to handle. On the contrary, it's one of the subjects your child knows the most about.
Young children are especially interested in how human beings interact with each other. They are little anthropologists trying to learn how we behave. So when we talk to them about treating others fairly -- and how we ought to respond to injustice -- we aren't pushing a grown-up agenda on them. We're speaking directly to concerns they already have.
2. What if I teach my kids the general principles of fairness and egalitarianism? Without bringing attention to race and racial labels? Isn't it best if I raise my child to be "color-blind"?
This seems to be a very common approach. White parents avoid using race labels, like "black" or "white." They deliberately steer away from talk about race itself, in the hope that it will help prevent children from developing racial biases.
Does it work?
Not really. In the few cases where researchers have studied child outcomes, they've noted a telling pattern: The white, school-aged children with the lowest levels of racial bias weren't the ones whose parents have taken a "color blind" approach.
On the contrary, the kids with the lowest levels of racial bias were the ones whose parents were "color conscious" (Katz 2003; Vittrup and Holden 2011).
Color conscious parents acknowledge and address the existence of racial categories. They acknowledge and address the existence of racism. And they do this with their kids -- tackling the subject explicitly in family discussions.
3. But if I start talking about race -- and using race labels -- won't that put ideas in my child's head? Isn't it better if my child never learns about racial categories to begin with?
I can see the reasoning. It's a kind of utopian science fiction, or "Garden of Eden" theory. If we never tell kids about race, they won't learn to do bad things in the name of race. The future world they create will be humanitarian and harmonious.
One big problem with this theory? It presupposes that kids won't become aware of race unless we talk to them about it. And that's been disproven.
For example, do parents talk to their 3-month-old babies about racial categories? Do they train their 3-month-old babies to sort faces by race?
No. Yet babies can do it.
In experiments, 3-month-old infants show a basic ability to sort female faces into at least two categories: "my own race" and "not my own race." Babies prefer female faces of their own race, probably because these faces more closely resemble their mothers (Them at al 2015; Liu et al 2011).
And when researchers have tested 8-month-olds, babies show a bias in facial recognition. They have little trouble distinguishing individuals of their own race. But when it comes to members of another race, they struggle. They have difficulty telling individuals apart (Anzures et al 2012).
Why so hard? It's probably because babies haven't yet encountered many faces. From day to day, they mostly seeing members of their own family, individuals who often look quite similar to each other.
So it's like face recognition software. To improve facial recognition abilities, your baby needs a more diverse range of examples to study. When researchers have actively trained babies by showing them daily examples of other-race faces, the infants become more proficient (Anzures et al 2012).
But the point here is that babies notice differences that map onto our culturally-defined racial categories. And young children notice other markers of "in-groups" and "out-groups," like differences in language and clothing.
By the time children are preschool-aged, they know a lot about the way that society divides people up, and this happens whether or not we've had family discussions about it.
Even more importantly, young children are exposed to racial biases and value judgements -- simply by living in our culture. Which takes us to our next point.
4. Why should I have to worry about my child absorbing racial biases and attitudes? I don't endorse racism myself. Where's it going to come from?
Once again, there's a problem with the underlying premise.
Studies confirm everybody is affected by bias -- even people who are consciously opposed to racism.
As Beverly Daniel Tatum has put it, racial stereotypes surround us like smog.
We're exposed to them in books, movies, television, and the internet. Biases can be observed on our streets, and in our classrooms. We absorb these biases, whether we like it or not. Even if we don't realize it.
The biases don't have to define us. Not unless we go through life acting on our impulses. The biases operate on auto-pilot. They influence behavior by affecting our intuitions, our immediate, knee-jerk reactions.
So if we're open to discovering these biases -- if we question, analyze, and reflect -- we can counteract them.
That's why the "color blind" approach doesn't work. That's why the "Garden of Eden" approach fails. Ignoring race doesn't make racial problems go away. It allows them to persist.
It makes us less likely to notice racial biases -- in ourselves, and in others. It makes us less likely to notice biases in the way society itself is structured.
And children are not immune. On the contrary. By the age of 3, 4, or 5, kids have already been affected by the racial "smog."
For instance, in a recent study, American preschoolers were shown photographs of other children, and their responses were recorded.
The preschoolers responded positively to all the young faces they saw. But some faces got more love than others. Kids responded most positively to white female faces, and least positively to black male faces.
Importantly, this pattern held for white and non-white children alike, and it was observed in kids regardless of how much prior exposure they'd had to ethnic diversity (Perszyk et al 2019).
The same race-invariant response was observed when researchers presented 5-year-old girls with the opportunity to "invite" fictitious characters to a party. Girls preferred the invite white characters, whether or not they were white themselves (Kurtz-Costes et al 2011).
5. What about interracial friendships? If my child has friends from different backgrounds, won't that prevent my child from developing racial biases?
Cross-race friendships are rewarding on many levels, and they do appear to reduce prejudice (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006).
But they don't, by themselves, prevent kids from downloading the racial biases that are embedded in our culture.
Interracial friendships don't necessarily make children aware of the history of racism, or the ongoing forms of institutionalized racism that reinforce inequality.
So we still need to tackle racism head-on. We still need to talk about it. White kids need to know that it isn't an even playing field. They are accorded certain privileges in society just by virtue of being white. Privileges that their non-white friends are denied.
6. I'm going to be tense, though. Won't that undermine the message when I talk to my kids about racism?
A new, yet-to-be-published study has addressed this question, and there is some truth in this.
White parents were asked to watch brief, animated videos with their 9-year-old kids -- cartoons that showed everyday, racially-biased incidents. Afterwards, the parents were instructed to talk about these incidents with their children, and it made parents feel uncomfortable.
The researchers also measured children's implicit racial biases before and after the experience, and the tense emotions of parents did have an effect. Children with especially tense parents didn't improve as much as children with more laid-back parents.
But here's the thing. Even the really tense parents didn't make kids become more biased. Kids either made less progress, or no progress. But they didn't go backwards (Perry et al 2020).
And that ought to encourage you, even if you're sure you're going to be tense. It doesn't look like you'll cause any harm. And -- after you've broken the ice -- you will be able to work on becoming less uptight in the future.
How do you take the first step?
Tips for talking to your kids about race and racism
1. Learn and keep on learning.
To become better parents -- and better citizens -- we need to listen to people who have experienced racism and injustice. And we all need to confront the raw statistics and facts.
For example, in the United States, black people are disproportionately stopped by the police. Victims of fatal force -- who were unarmed, male, and non-suicidal -- are 13 times more likely to be black than white (Schimmack and Carlsson 2020).
Other racial disparities abound, across all aspects of life. For instance, black people are less likely than white people to get the medical treatment they need. Black women are three times as likely as white women to die of childbirth complications. Their babies are more likely to die, too (Vilda et al 2019).
These disparities persist even after researchers control for socioeconomic factors. Yet make no mistake, the economic issues are crucial. A long history of racism in America -- along with current biases in the way our institutions are structured -- have us with a profound racial wealth gap.
On average, black households have only 10% of the wealth that white households do. As researchers at Duke University point out, the reason has little to do with individual choices made by black people, and everything to do with the past:
"Literally, it takes wealth to make wealth, while blacks largely have been excluded from intergenerational access to capital and finance" (Darity, Jr., et al 2018).
You can read their report here.
2. Check out this excellent article, "Talking to kids about race," by Heather Greenwood Davis.
The author interviews a variety of experts, and presents specific examples for discussing race with both preschoolers and older kids.
For instance, what should you do if hear your child make a value judgement based on race?
Expert Maggie Beneke advises that you respond with "open, non-judgemental questions to understand why your child might be making that assumption."
Get the conversation started by asking "Why do you think that?" Then explain what stereotypes are, and "work with your child to think about examples that show how these stereotypes aren’t actually true."
Read more here.
3. Review techniques for fostering empathy and socio-emotional skills.
See these Parenting Science articles for help:
References: Common mistakes that white parents make about race
Anzures G, Wheeler A, Quinn PC, Pascalis O, Slater AM, Heron-Delaney M, Tanaka JW, Lee K. J 2012. Brief daily exposures to Asian females reverses perceptual narrowing for Asian faces in Caucasian infants. Exp Child Psychol. 112(4):484-95.
Katz PA 2003. Racists or tolerant multiculturalists? How do they begin? Am Psychol. 58(11):897-909.
Kurtz-Costes B, Defreitas SC, Halle TG, Kinlaw CR. 2011. Gender and racial favouritism in black and white preschool girls. Br J Dev Psychol. 2011 Jun;29(Pt 2):270-87.
Liu S, Quinn PC, Wheeler A, Xiao N, Ge L, Lee K. 2011. Similarity and difference in the processing of same- and other-race faces as revealed by eye tracking in 4- to 9-month-olds. J Exp Child Psychol. 2011 Jan;108(1):180-9.
Pahlke E, Bigler RS, Suizzo MA. Relations between colorblind socialization and children's racial bias: evidence from European American mothers and their preschool children. Child Dev. 2012 Jul-Aug;83(4):1164-79.
Perry S, Skinner AL, Abaied JL, Waters S. 2020. Preprint. Exploring how Parent-Child Conversations about Race influence Children's Implicit Biases. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/3xdg8
Vittrup B. 2018. Color blind or color conscious? White American mothers’ approaches to racial socialization. Journal of Family Issues 39: 668–692.
Vittrup B and Holden GW. 2011. Exploring the impact of educational television and parent-child discussions on children’s racial attitudes. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 11: 82–104.
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Content last modified 6/2020
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