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.
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.
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.