Progressive Wednesday

Monday Morning Motherhood: The Shadow We Must Shake

My mother spent her teenage and college years (also known as the 1960s) in South Carolina during the civil rights movement. She lived there when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and she witnessed social intolerance that most of us today can't imagine: separate drinking fountains and restaurants, blatant slurs thrown at people on the street, and city-wide arguments over integrating schools and busing.

While now typically more subtle, intolerance based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, family structure, and nationality stills comes in far too many forms. Despite advances in the past couple of decades, intolerance is still there like a shadow we can’t shake. We need to do more. So how do we start? As parents, we start with our children. They're the ones who will live in the legacy we leave them. They deserve to live and raise their kids in a peaceful place.

Teaching children tolerance, while seemingly difficult, is actually fairly easy. There are many ways to broaden your children's view of the world, and they're really not that difficult.

1. Expand your child's group of friends. By visiting a playground or joining a play group with a more diverse group of children, you can expand their definition of “normal.” Your child can become friends with people of different races, religions, nationalities, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
2. Integrate diversity into your home. Read your kids books with characters of different backgrounds, other religions, familial structures, and races. Listen to music from other cultures. Introduce games, dolls, and toys that are culturally diverse. Bring to your dinner table foods from different cultures.
3. Talk to your children. Words have infinite power to change. Don't tell your children that “We're all the same.– We're not. Explain that people are different, and that not only is that okay, it's good. All cultures, races, and religions are different, and they all have a positive impact on society. Keep an open dialogue with your kids, and answer any questions they have about diversity or tolerance.
4. Teach them. Teach your children to be proud of their background, to be proud of who they are. At the same time though, show them that putting down people of a different background, in order to show pride in your own background, is unacceptable. Pride in your culture doesn't lessen the importance of other cultures.
5. Model the behavior you want them to follow. This is the Big Kahuna. Our children depend on us to not only tell them what behavior is appropriate, but to actually portray it. “Do as I say, not as I do– just doesn't cut it. We're their role models. How we treat others, and our tolerance of all types of people, is what they see, and in turn, is what they practice. Action is the first step to a more progressive and tolerant society.

Intolerance is, simply put, unacceptable. By using the simple steps above, maybe we can make a world of “shiny happy people holding hands.– Well, okay, that REM tune probably won’t quite become incarnate. But hopefully we can help our children eventually live in a world where, more often than not, acceptance, and not narrow-mindedness, is the rule.