This Parenting Deal? Difficult.

Yesterday, Anneke was telling me about pairing up with kids from the new kindergarten class for their weekly hike. I asked if she had made any new friends in the other class, and she said she recognized a boy from her preschool class last year.

Anneke: “The boy with brown skin.”
Me: “What’s his name?”
Anneke: “I don’t know, but he has brown skin.”
Me: (blink)
Anneke: “S___ (one of her favorite kindergarten girls) almost has brown skin.”
Me: “I think brown skin is really pretty.”

Oh my God. The pressure. I mean, seriously.

First of all, she’s always been in very diverse classes. It’s one of the things I look for in a school. I want my kids to have friends that reflect the diversity of people and families in the world. When they see someone who doesn’t look like them or come from a family like theirs, I want them to see an opportunity to make a friend. I want them to live in a world where this is the norm.

But they don’t.

How am I supposed to reconcile these things? How do I make them aware of screwed-up realities, so that they can be vigilant about their own biases, without seeming like I’m condoning them?

Heavy shit.

We have conversations like this, conversations that take all of eight seconds, and I immediately question myself. I wonder if I planted the right seeds. Like, why in the world did I have to draw the connection between skin color and physical beauty? Didn’t I just reinforce the stereotyping I meant to counter? And am I deluding myself even thinking it’s possible to say the right thing, when I’m a product of this same screwed-up world?

I don’t know. But I keep trying. It’s one of the things I love about parenting these children.

I’m constantly reexamining my own assumptions and trying to unpack the pieces that make things so complicated. I want them to see the grays and understand the complexities, but I have to help them build these understandings themselves, over time.

I just want to plant the right seeds.

Tagged as: Anneke, Kids, Parenting, School