Welcome to Discussing Race With Young Children
“I’m excited that you’re gong to be able to practice with your family, with this guide, and it’ll create for you a hunger to practice and to do this work in the future.”
— Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson
“This guide accompanies us as we play, listen, and learn with our children. I am sure that in these conversations and guides, you will come up with even more questions — but you will also learn something new and feel supported. This is not easy work, but with help like this guide provides, it can be beautiful, fun, and rewarding.”
— Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith
Children notice race and talk about it, but race can be an uncomfortable topic for many parents and caregivers. Research shows that parents’ interest in this topic has grown exponentially in recent years — and that many parents and caregivers are still searching for the “right” way to introduce the topic and to answer young children’s questions to help prepare them to live in our big, diverse world.
This guide is a tool that parents, educators, and other caregivers can use to have age-appropriate conversations with children, from about two to six years old, about race and racism.
It was created in consultation with parents, educators, scientists, and experts in child development who specialize in how children learn about race and racism. It’s brought to you by trusted children’s media companies: Sparkler Learning and OK Play, in collaboration with Noggin. Individuals from multiple racial groups, including ethno-cultural and racially diverse leaders in the science of learning, identity, and child development, were involved in putting this guide together.
Importantly, this guide emerged as a clear need from our original research at Nickelodeon Consumer Insights, Noggin, and OK Play. We interviewed and analyzed conversations with more than 50 parent-child pairs of different races and geographies. These interviews both demonstrated the need for a guide like this and informed what we chose to include in it.
At the heart of this guide are short, child-friendly picture activities to help spark conversations, plus question prompts to support grown-ups. It also provides practical tips for addressing questions and situations that might occur in everyday life.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is for parents, caregivers, and educators to use with young children from all ethnic and racial backgrounds. It is important for every family to talk about race because people from all backgrounds have experiences, thoughts, and comments related to race. As we created the guide, we made a conscious effort to make it as inclusive of as many families as possible.
No special training or preparation is required to use this guide! Our hope is that any grown-up caring for a young child can use it to spark useful dialogue and learning.
We recognize that there are many components of identity besides race, including, but not limited to, socioeconomic status, ability status, immigration status, body size, gender, sexuality, and cultural, religious, and ethnic identities along with some forms of identity that are hard to put into words. For all of us, our many identities interact with each other to shape who we are and how we uniquely experience the world.
While this guide is focused on promoting conversations about race and racism, we believe that discussions about people’s intersecting identities are important and necessary. We worked with experts to incorporate some of these identities into the guide and the types of questions and activities we included can also extend to learning about and celebrating all kinds of differences and identities.
We hope that this guide will spark meaningful conversation and learning, but it’s not going to answer every (inevitable!) question. We recognize that there is more work to be done — by all of us — to help children, grown-ups, and all people in this area.
We always appreciate hearing from people and welcome your feedback. If you have a question or situation you want to share — perhaps a time when your child observed something or asked a question and you weren’t sure how to respond — please send us an email for a chance of being featured on our website or answered by an expert. You can reach us at: support@playsparkler.org.
