Celebrating Differences: How to teach our kids to celebrate differences

Help us in the fight to teach our children that different is good. Find any opportunity you can to teach our children to love diversity, to love everyone no matter how they look like, what color they are, what their class or status is. Use the word beautiful as much as you can.

There are many ways we can teach kids how to love “different”:

• Many books that you already read to your children could probably serve as an opportunity, but also read books to your kids that might teach them about a certain syndrome for example, this can also just educate our children in general because they would be learning something new, now you can find so many things on the internet
• Youtube can be a great resource for finding educational videos (use screen time to its fullest by allowing it to be an educational opportunity)
• There are so many movies that can have so much meaning if we just look for the opportunity, and use these opportunities to help our children celebrate differences
• Telling your kids stories about how people have overcome diversity/challenges and how they have triumphed/succeeded is a great idea because as we know children like stories
• Nature can sometimes present the right opportunities to bring the term difference to the conversation in a positive way
• Emerge our children to many different cultures and social situations, through play dates, by experiencing different foods, by stepping outside our comfort zone and attending events where our children are exposed to differences.
• The more and the younger we introduce our children to be around a diversity of children, the more different will be their norm.

What happens when we don’t teach our kids about differences? We open doors to breaking hearts. Bullying is more likely to happen, and discrimination exists. The sad part is that we are becoming numb and blind to what is funny and whether or not it can be hurtful. Social media, entertainment and our culture teach us and finds humor in putting someone down, in someone getting hurt, and in discrimination without us realizing it. It is 100% real.