Teaching Kids About Diversity

It depends on the child's age. Young children, ages 5 and under, generally learn about others through themselves. With this age group, it's all about feelings and empathy—how they feel and how others feel. They learn principles like fairness by experiencing fairness and unfairness themselves and then learning that others have feelings, too. For these children, sameness of the human experience matters.

With older children who are beginning to understand that skin can be different colors, that being a boy is somehow different from being a girl, that Santa visits some children and not others, it's important to talk about differences. Children know that differences exist and that differences matter. Once children begin expressing such sentiments, it's important to begin talking about how we are all different and that it's OK to be different from one another. Diversity is a positive, not a negative.