#12: Encouraging curiosity and celebrating uniqueness - how we teach diversity with Maya
Today I share with you a special talk I had with Maya, a mom of 2 girls and an anti-bias education consultant. Our topic for the interview was fostering diversity but as always it led us to discuss the parent child relationship as a whole. Maya has been in early childhood education for a long time and she has a lot of tools in her toolkit. We talked about our own unconscious parenting patterns in triggering situations and the right way to apologize to our kids when we react in a disrespectful way. We reflected on why it’s important to encourage our children to ask questions and be the ones that are always ready to answer or at least help them find the answer.
Connect with Maya:
IG: ohmayagee
Fearlessly Divine Podcast
Books Maya recommends:
We're different, we're the same (Sesame Street)
A first Conversation About Consent by Megan Madison
MORE FROM BILLY:
Grab my FREE Guide - Parent-Child Communication Guide : 10 Secrets to Stronger Bonds
Support the show with a one time donation. Visit my ko-fi page
Follow me on Instagram @ your_childs_full_potential to stay updated about upcoming episodes and behind-the-scenes content.
Like my page on Facebook
Subscribe to the show on Youtube
Visit the website unlockyourchildsfullpotential.com to explore additional resources related to this episode.
I got so much out of this conversation. I hope you did too. Here are the takeaways:
1. None of the books, none of the years of school and all the hours of training, nothing is really going to prepare you for parenting until you actually become a parent.
2. In moments of stress, when triggered, we revert back to the ways we were parented by our parents and oftentimes that's not how we want to parent, but it's just somewhere so deeply ingrained in us that it comes out. In those trigger stressful moments, train yourself to ask these two questions: “What is my child learning right now from this interaction?, and “What do I want them to learn from this interaction?
3. Encourage curiosity in children. If you shut down their curiosity, they learn that they shouldn't be asking those questions or they learn to find their answers somewhere else instead of you. We definitely want to encourage our children to come to us, their trusted adults with their curious questions. And even if we can't always answer them, by admitting that we, as adults, don't know something, we're modelling that we are not perfect and perfection is not expected of them either. There’s also the opportunity to model how we find out the information we need.
4. The message of diversity that we want to get across to our children is that even though we're all different we're also the same. The important thing is being able to give kids appropriate language. It's not bad to call somebody what they are, whether that's representing them ethnically, racially, or any other way, as long as we're doing it in a respectful manner. When we're teaching children proper terms, then it helps to prevent them from using offensive terms in the future.
5. Books are a great tool in teaching diversity. You can expose your children to differences through the literature that they have. There's probably no way that we could account for every single difference and every single circumstance. There's so many nuances in the human experience. But it's important to have a character that's representative of your child. And then you also want to include a more diverse experience so that when your child encounters somebody at school or in public who is different from them, they can recall back a character from a book that might be similar to the person that they encounter.
Listen On
