“You were right, mommy. Boris said what you said he would. The best person in History? Jesus. The worst person in history? Stalin. Just the day before my 9 year old son asked who I thought had the biggest impact on history—both good and bad. I said I thought it might depend on your experience…
It’s day five of Spring break, and my 8 year old is challenging my intercultural (aka intergenerational) communications competence. While we have disagreed on a plethora of other things this week (I love my child, I love my child) we both agreed yesterday that “how can I claim to be a great arbitrator,…
Your 7 year old child who is white hesitates to shake someone’s hand who is African-American. Your first grader tells another student she’s “a lesbian with her sister.” You were there. You weren’t there. You are the most open, anti-racist, multicultural person you know. Where did your child get this from? I’ve seen stories about…
Dillon, bless his little heart, at only 8 years old had to get a root canal last week. He had broken his tooth while playing last March, and unfortunately it had gotten infected. But that’s not the real story. My husband was in the room with him as the Dentist got started. “Would you like…
Just like a website has the public face and then the ‘behind the scenes techinical side,’ so for Intercultural Parenting there is the social side of raising a child with intercultural awareness and sensitivity, and then there’s Intercultural Parenting–two parents of different cultures parenting together…or more like side-by-side…or is it one after the other? I…
I was reading a bedtime story to my 8 year old son Dillon and his 8 year old cousin Noah last night. It was a benign story, geared to a younger audience, but the boys had asked me to read it as a simple ploy to stay up later. We got to the page where…
He doesn’t seem to hear me when I tell him to pick up his socks, but on the bigger issues… My child asked another if she was Korean or Chinese, because, as he said “I didn’t want to assume.” He asked if you could tell someone’s race from their bones. (Specifically, would people be racist if…
I’ve talked a lot about the importance of teaching children language they can use to call out injustice and fight racism when they see it, and I always wonder if my son Dylan,* now 7 synthesizes what I say, when I talk about valuing people for who they are, as opposed to what they look…
I know, I know, many an ‘anti-racist’ will say that simply enjoying the foods and traditions of another culture as a ‘tourist’ does nothing to combat racism. But, honestly, I disagree. I’m raising a 7 year old, and for now I’m not going to go into in-depth history to explain why there is racism and…
