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.
Tolerance: Confronting our own prejudices
In every characteristic we discuss we always end up with the thought that we as parents and role models must model the behavior that we would like to see in our children. But with tolerance we will begin with that concept. Our very first step is to examine our own prejudices and stereotyping beliefs. None of us have grown up without being affected by this.
Even if we are not aware of them, in some way our children see through all of that and can see these communicated attitudes. (usually quite unintentionally) To begin with don’t try to determine your own prejudice, examine what you saw as a child in your parents. What were some of your parents prejudices? Now when we have that list, examine yourself – Do any of these remain with you today?
Take time to reflect on how you may be projecting them to your children. Then take the steps of tempering them so that they do not become your children’s prejudice.
Building Tolerance in our children
Tolerance is our new word of the month and is a virtue that will help our children and ourselves to get along in the world. Tolerance can be taught. One author I read as I looked at this subject tells the story of being in the airport and seeing a large group of children with a t-shirt on that said, ” Children Are Not Born Racist.” How profound. We are not born intolerant, we learn it from the environment that we live in.
I grew up in a home where though there was not any overt intolerance that I remember, it was subtle in the way things were said and some feeling of superiority over certain races. This amazes me now, since I realize how poor we were, how little we had, yet there was this air of superiority due to skin color. There is a Native Indian saying, “Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” If we are going to influence our children in regard to tolerance we must practice what we preach and preach what we practice.
Over this month I will have some clear cut things we can do for ourselves and our children to learn and practice tolerance.
Gift Wrap Project
Last night we took a group of students and parents to the Sheraton Hotel to do gift wrapping with the Jr. League. For the second year in a row now we have wrapped gifts for the 234 foster children in our county so that they will have a holiday season that will bring some joy to their lives.
With 3 to 4 gifts contributed for each child by the citizens of AA County, it is quite a chore. But with all that we have learned on the mat in our martial arts training about focus and discipline we were able to complete all the wrapping in just one hour. Here are some photos from our evening.
Holiday Safety Tips
From today thru next Monday there will be new post on our Be Safe site on holiday safety tips. Be sure to check them out and feel free to send a link to your friends so everyone of us can enjoy a safe and happy holiday.