Five Ways to Reduce Racial Bias in Your Children

[DesertRat]

How do we combat racial prejudice? New research reveals how parents influence the formation of bias in children.

Children notice difference across racial lines. Even from a very young age, babies scan a face differently if it belongs to someone of a different race, suggesting that racial bias may be hardwired.

But noticing difference is not the same as having negative or positive beliefs around difference. Those types of judgments develop over time and are influenced by many things, including the social climate children grow up in and the experiences they have that confirm or disprove their biases.

This is where parenting comes in. Though it’s clear that parents are not solely responsible for biasing their kids one way or the other, science suggests that they do play a role—and an important one. In fact, their influence may extend well beyond a child’s early years and into adolescence.

Though how this works is not totally clear, recent research has shown that the process starts early and involves both explicit (deliberate) and implicit (unconscious) messages that parents send to their children. This is the good news: Parents can be a positive force in combating prejudice in their children. But the “bad news” is that kids can easily pick up prejudice from society at large unless parents do something about it.

Here are some of the ways that parents can help reduce negative bias in their children:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/five_ways_to_reduce_racial_bias_in_your_children/success