Talking to Children About Race, Gender, and Social Issues: Review and Recommendations

Abstract

Children notice group conflict and societal injustices. Educators and caregivers sometimes shield children from challenging social issues because they think that children cannot understand complex topics or because they think learning the information will be harmful. By avoiding such conversations, educators and caregivers are ignoring societal structures that privilege some groups over others. Children are aware of current events, social issues, and differences between people. They come to their own conclusions about the observed differences and differential treatment but without the tools to challenge biases and inequities. This brief reviews research on children’s developmental capacity to understand discrimination, with a focus on early-to-middle childhood and topics related to race, gender, and immigration status. Implications for policy and practice appear alongside recommendations, with a particular focus on the benefits to having these challenging conversations in schools.

Overheard and understood: A systematic review of children’s learning from overhearing.

“…With results of this review suggesting that overheard social information can influence children’s behaviors, children’s learning from overheard social messages may influence not only their beliefs about different groups of people but their interactions with them, potentially impacting their decisions about social inclusion. A separate line of developmental research has focused on how parents speak to their children about sensitive social topics (see Hilliard et al, 2021 for review). This research reveals that parents should not only be concerned about how they speak directly to their children, but how they speak to other people when children are present.…”