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Someone in my the Yahoo group from my adoption agency, shared this NewsWeek article with us this morning. A good article in my opinon. I have always thought that trying to teach your children to be “color blind” is not a realisitic thing to do. To further put myself our for flaming, I also think that many parents try and teach the color-blind thing as an easy way out for discussing race in the family. For example: Your child comes to you and says, “There is a new boy in our class with brown skin.” A colorblind teaching parent would say,”We are all alike, skin color doesn’t matter.” and that would be all. This teaches a child that skin color is not to be talked about. I don’t think this is the most effective parenting.
While I enjoyed reading this article, reading the comments made my heart ache. There is so much hate in the world and with the annomnimty of the internet, people are very open with this hate. I always read the comments of these types of articles because it reminds me of what is going on in reality. The fact is that my kids are growing up in a world that does not see them all as equal. I can wish that we could stay in our little family bubble of love (chaos too!) or we can talk about our differences and our ancestory’s.
In teaching our children our heritage (Irish, Russian, German, Chinese, Brazilian, Ethiopian, and many more) we are instilling a pride of our ansestors. This means teaching the great accomplishments and the moments we are not so proud of. If we teach the great and the not so great of our own ancestors, it will point out to our kids that all people have moments of wonder and moments of fear.
I guess what I am trying to convey here is that our kids learn by watching us, listening to us and modeling us. If we treat race as a taboo subject we are not doing anyone any favors. If we talk about race, differences and similarities our kids are better prepared for life.
What did you think of this NewsWeek article? What did you think of the comment section?
