Anti-Racism Resources for 5 Year Olds: What Actually Works for Preschoolers
Last month, I was pushing my 5-year-old Lila on the neighborhood playground swing, waiting for our after-story-time vanilla cone, when she went completely still mid-pump. She was leaning toward the little girl swinging next to her, a Black kid with braids strung with pink glitter beads, and asked, loud enough for the whole playground to hear, “Why is your skin brown and mine is peach?”
I froze. I fumbled out something about different people having different colors that’s all okay, and then we left to get ice cream, and I spent the whole walk home replaying it. I’d known I wanted to talk to Lila about racism eventually, but I’d assumed I had a few more years to find the right words and the right resources. That day, I realized I was wrong: 5-year-olds notice difference, and they’re already asking questions. So I started digging for anti-racism resources that actually fit a 5-year-old’s brain, not a middle schooler’s or an adult’s.
I went down the typical Google rabbit hole first. A lot of what I found fell into two unhelpful buckets: either resources that were way too heavy, talking about systemic injustice and segregation in terms that a 5-year-old who still can’t remember to put her shoes on the right feet would never parse, or resources that insisted “we’re all the same on the inside” which felt like a lie to Lila. She can see that her skin is a different color than her best friend Javi’s, that my hair is straight and her daycare teacher’s is curly. Pretending those differences don’t exist just taught her that differences are something we don’t talk about, which is the opposite of what I wanted.
The first resource that actually clicked was a picture book called The Skin You Live In. It’s short, it rhymes, and every page shows different kids with different skin tones doing the same 5-year-old stuff: playing tag, eating popsicles, swinging on swings. When I read it to Lila, she stopped on almost every page to point out who the shade matched. “That’s Javi!” “That’s Mrs. Carter from art class!” “That’s the lady who bags our groceries!” She didn’t get bored, she didn’t ask to switch to her favorite Elephant and Piggie book halfway through. It just named what she already notices, and said that all of it is good.
After that, I tried a free skin color mixing activity I found on a preschool teacher’s Instagram. I grabbed red, yellow, brown, and white tempera paint from our craft bin, printed out a simple sheet of hand outlines, and we sat at the kitchen table after lunch to mix shades to match our own hands and the hands of people we love. Lila spent 45 minutes mixing – that’s an eternity for a 5-year-old’s attention span – and named every new shade after someone. “This is Grandma’s hand, this is Javi’s baby brother’s hand, this is Mia’s hand.” By the end, she had a whole sheet of different colored hands taped to our fridge, and she’d figured out the point all on her own: every person is a little different, and that’s fun.
I tried a few duds along the way, of course. Someone recommended a feature-length animated movie about civil rights, and Lila was asking for snacks 15 minutes in and never asked about it again. Another book I picked up focused entirely on how people were mean to Black people 100 years ago, and it left Lila confused and sad, asking if all brown people get yelled at. That’s when I figured out the biggest rule for anti-racism resources for 5-year-olds: center joy, not trauma. At this age, they don’t need to absorb all the heavy weight of history. They just need to see kids that look different from them having birthday parties, going to the zoo, playing soccer, just like they do. They just need to learn that asking polite questions is okay, and that everyone deserves to be treated kindly.
One of our favorite finds right now is the 7-minute short film Hair Love. It’s just a sweet story of a dad trying to style his daughter’s curly hair for the first time, and it ends with a happy family hug. Lila rewatches it once a week, and she always points out how pretty Zuri’s hair is, just like her friend Mia’s. It doesn’t yell a message at you, it just shows a Black family being a regular family, and that’s enough for right now. Another book we reach for often is Juna’s Jar, a simple story about a Korean-American girl who explores with her empty kimchi jar after her dad moves away for work. It doesn’t talk about race at all, it just shows a kid doing kid things, which helps normalize different backgrounds in a way that feels natural, not forced.
Last week, a new little boy joined Lila’s daycare class. His family is from Somalia, his mom wears a patterned hijab, and his name is longer than the names Lila is used to. Lila came home that afternoon and told me she’d asked his mom what her head covering was called, and that she told her it was a hijab, and Lila told her the blue pattern was really pretty. That’s the win I care about right now. That’s what anti-racism looks like for a 5-year-old: it’s being curious, it’s being kind, it’s not pretending you don’t see difference.
I still don’t have it all figured out. Last week, Lila reached out to touch a stranger’s curly hair at the grocery store, and I had to gently pull her back and remind her that we ask before touching someone’s body, even if it’s just to say you like it. Some days I fumble my words when she asks a hard question, like when she asked why some kids don’t want to play with kids who look different. I just say “that’s not okay, and we always play with everyone, no matter what they look like” and that’s enough for her right now. The resources we use now will be too simple in a couple of years, and I’ll have to find new ones. But right now, the books and activities we’ve found fit where Lila is developmentally: they give her the words to talk about what she already notices, without overwhelming her. We’re just taking it one question at a time.
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