Encourage your child and provide opportunities for your child to have contact and get to know individuals of different races, religions, cultures, genders, abilities, and beliefs. This may be in school, after school, or even in programs like summer camps. As you display an openness to a range of diversity, your child can imitate your respect for differences.
woman on fire….
I did a search for inspirational stories one time on ESPN to look for great athletes with amazing stories. I found many. Some were truly inspirational, others were great but were of overcoming obstacles created by themselves, or situation around themselves (alcoholism, drug addiction, etc.) One day I saw this amazing video of this woman on tv. I won’t tell you what she deals with (you can watch for yourself) but what I saw and what she does to deal with it is truly inspirational.
Everyone has problems. Many of those problems are manageable for the majority of us. Often it is within our power to change our behavior or change the things in our life that are causing us pain. But there are others. There are others who have chronic pain. Pain, that while manageable to an extent, will never go away. Imagine waking up in the morning and the first feeling you have, the first thought that goes into your head is that of pain. Kate Conklin in one of these people. What she deals with is not her fault. It is not a result of any activity she participated in or some tragedy that befell upon her one day. She has no one to blame. What she has, has no explanation as to why she has to suffer every waking moment. She lost almost everything in her life, and more importantly, almost lost her will to live.
In spite of all of this, she perseveres, quite possibly more then any of us will ever understand. She continues to participate in the very activities that further increase her chronic pain. She does this because it is what she loves and she refuses to sit idly and let her condition dictate her life. She is a true master. Please watch her story.
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?videoId=3569726
Tolerance: Provide positive images of all groups
We want to expose our children to positive images – in toys, music, literature, videos, public officials and role models, and examples from TV and the newspapers that represent a wide variety of ethnic groups. The more they see that you embrace diversity, the more likely it is that they will follow that example.
We do not have to necessarily have to call out look here is a nice ?????? person that did something good. It is the exposure to a variety without calling attention to the stereotype that does the job. Our own comfort with complementing others of all races, religious, ethnic backgrounds will rub off on our children.
Never quit!
This is a must see video! It will inspire you in that whatever your circumstances, in whatever the goal you are trying to reach you must not quit, if you are going to accomplish your goal.
Tolerance: No discriminatory comments in your presence
At some point in your parenting you are going to hear your child say some things that are going to shock you. Most likely they will be repeating what they heard someone else say. It may be a stereotyping of Asians, African Americans, blondes, football players, the elderly, police officers, or something as simple as “those guys are a bunch of fags”.
When you are present and a comment or joke is made along those lines as a parent who wants to teach tolerance, we must speak up immediately and let them know that we find it disrespectful and biased. Our children need to see that we are not comfortable with talk like that and we will not permit it to happen.
If we start this early in the child’s life they should begin to imitate this response among their peers, setting them up as an example of a tolerant person.
Tolerance: Commit to raise a tolerant child
Planning our parenting is so important. If we just let it happen, thinking that we will deal with this later, or believing that our kids already know this or that, we will end up with results other than what we would have chosen. If we want our children to be tolerant – then we must plan our efforts to teach respect and appreciation for diversity, and adopt a conviction to raise our child that way.
Children only need to know our expectations and they will live up to them. I will discuss this in a later post in more detail, but for the time lets just say we must do the following to attain this goal:
- Celebrate differences early on
- Expose your child to diversity
- Give simple, straightforward answers to questions about differences.
- Help your child look for similarities.
If you do these four things your child will begin to embrace your principles.