Teaching and Celebrating Diversity

The past few weeks have been a time for reflection. As a parent I have given a lot of thought about how I can do my best to raise my daughter to celebrate diversity and understand the perspective of others. She is just 2, but the more I have looked into this, the more I’ve found that it really is never too early to start teaching these very important lessons to our kids. Staying silent or avoiding to talk about diversity might not only mean not sending any message, but could mean sending the wrong message to her. Research has shown that children as young as three months old can racially categorize people (Kelly et al., 2005). By age 3, children can express explicit forms of racial bias (Aboud, 2008). Here are some wonderful ways we can teach our children some important lessons through play and book reading. Books for Better Understanding