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.