Cutural diversity and Children

We all want  our children to grow up in a world free from bias and discrimination, to reach for their dreams and feel that whatever they want to accomplish in life is possible.

We want them to feel loved and included and never to experience the pain of rejection or exclusion.

But the reality is that we do live in a world in which racism and other forms of bias continue to affect us. Discrimination hurts and leaves scars that can last a lifetime, affecting goals, ambitions, life choices, and feelings of self-worth.

I have said before that in our house we are trying to bring up our munchkins in a way that they can be comfortable in who they are.

 That despite their dietary differences to other children due to allergies and intolerance's, they too can be proud, have fun, be loved, experience the joy of a birthday party, dream, attend a playgroup, get grubby....and many more things so important to childhood

and all the while living a life with allergies.

Our children are beginning to understand how they are different to other children around them and have accepted their differences of food choices and what we have to do to stay safe.

I not only want to teach my children about the importance of food allergies/ intolerance's and how it affects our family and other people.

 I also want them to have an awareness of different cultures in order to prepare them to meet the challenges and reap the benefits of the increasingly diverse world they live in .

I want to raise my children to celebrate and value diversity and to be proud of themselves and their family traditions. We can teach children to respect and value people regardless of the color of their skin, their physical abilities, or the language they speak.

I have started to introduce my munchkins to different cultures by surrounding them in positive things from a variety of cultures, placing these things in our home environment to be read, played with, listened to, loved, watched, respected and spoken about in our day to day lives.

Below is a photo of some of these things that we gathered up for a photo :) looking back at this photo, I forgot sooo many things but you get the drift.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that I have a baby obsessed little girl, yet amongst all her dolls and babies , even the male and female golly wogs my children have.....we don't have any life like looking  dark skinned baby dolls!!!

In my opinion every little girl needs to have a doll with dark skin and dolls of different cultures.

Think about it for a minute, when we as parents go down the toy isles in the shops we see so many blonde hair blue eyed dolls, brown hair, brown eyes, western cultures, rarely a realistic red head doll with freckles.

It's often very hard to find a doll with that lovely chocolate brown skin, a doll with slanty eyes from Asia, a doll with a physical disability, a aboriginal doll, ...unless you search endlessly, travel or go to a specialty shop..

what does this tell you???

When you think of Disney movies often the heroine's of the story line are princesses or beautiful girl/women with clear pale skin, long blonde/brown hair and lovely clothes.......

Thankfully they are producing and selling a lovely Baby Tiana in the Disney selection of Princess babies thanks to the recent movie......so off I went down to my nearest K-mart and brought her.

Although she was in the shop amongst five other Disney Baby Princesses, all with white skin, two with blonde hair, one with black, one with brown and one with Orange hair.

I had to move aside the other dolls and search through quite a few before I found a brown Baby Tiana right at the back of the shelf.....mmm I wonder if that was a coincidence!

I'm only hoping that more people go searching for the baby that is different to their child instead of selecting one with the same hair colour and skin to match the child.

I'm not saying it's wrong to have a white doll if you want one but simply to give your child the opportunity to incorporate other cultures into their play.

I f you don't know where to start when trying to introduce different cultures to little ones, here are some easy ways:

• get picture books from the library from other country's to explore animals, people and places from different cultures.
• Introduce your child to different types of musical instruments and talk about where they come from (ie. bongo drums, maraca's, tin whistle etc)
• When selecting music for your child to listen to think about cultural music (amongst our music we have music from Finland, Africa, India, American Indian, Irish and so on)
• Have fun at the appropriate age to introduce the concept of food from other cultures (this is easy the diverse foods we can buy in Australia because of our mixed cultures)
• If you have family or friends traveling to another country, give them some money and/or ask them to bring you back a traditional object/toy.
• Take the opportunity to explore other cultures celebrations with your children through craft, games and food (e.g. valentines day, Chinese new year, St. Patricks day...)
• Have fun Scrap booking about country's and their cultures.
• Select children's books that show a positive cultural message.    ("Ten Little Fingers, Ten little Toes "by Mem Fox is a good one for little ones) There are many more when you go looking.
• Sing songs and finger rhymes in other languages
• Introduce your children to the concept of sign language, it's use and have fun learning some words.

These are all simple things you can implement in your family life to give your children an open mind when it comes to different cultures and help them to reap the benefits to a wide world of culture and diversity. To learn, to enjoy, understand and respect how other people live and look.