Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5-Year-Olds: What Worked For Our Family
Last month I was perched on a sticky playground bench, sipping a lukewarm iced coffee I’d grabbed on the way, watching my 5-year-old Lila chase her friends around the slide. She came barrelling over mid-game, scraped knee peeking out of her shorts, and skidded to a stop right in front of me. “Mommy,” she said, loud enough that the grandma sitting two benches over glanced over, “why does Mia have brown skin and mine is pink?”
I froze. I’d known this question was coming, but I’d put off looking for anything to help me answer it, assuming she was too little for all that. All the anti-racism resources I’d seen shared on parent groups were for middle schoolers or teens, or they were heavy, talking about things that Lila couldn’t possibly wrap her head around. I mumbled something about different people having different colors, like how some people have curly hair and some have straight, and sent her back to play. But that night I sat down on the couch after she went to bed and started searching, determined to find stuff that fit where she is right now.
I went through a lot of duds first. I ordered one picture book that was marketed as “anti-racism for toddlers” but opened with a page about people being hurt and excluded because of their skin color. When I read it to Lila a few days later, she frowned and asked, “Who hurts Mia? Will someone hurt me?” I ended up skipping half the book and putting it in the donation pile before she got more upset. Another one I checked out from the library just kept repeating “we are all the same” on every page. Lila closed it halfway through and asked for her Elephant and Piggie book. She was right, too – we aren’t all the same, and she’d already noticed that. Ignoring the difference she’d already pointed out felt wrong, not helpful.
After a week of digging and asking other moms of little kids, I found a handful of things that actually fit, and I learned something I didn’t expect: anti-racism for 5-year-olds doesn’t need to be big or heavy. It just needs to meet them where they are, which is concrete, connected to their daily lives, and focused on naming differences instead of pretending they don’t exist.
The first book that stuck was The Skin You Live In. It’s short, the illustrations are bright, and it compares skin tones to things 5-year-olds actually know – different shades of cookies, coffee, and cream. Lila wanted to spend 20 minutes after I finished reading holding her arm up next to each page, matching her own pale pink to the pages, then running to get a photo of her dad (who’s Latinx) to match his tan to the caramel page. “Zion’s skin is just like the chocolate chip cookie one!” she yelled, and that was that. She didn’t get upset, she didn’t have a million scary questions, she just connected the book to her best friend at preschool. That’s exactly what I wanted.
Another one that’s become a bedtime favorite is Princess Hair, which is all about little Black girls and all the different hairstyles they wear – braids, afros, ponytails, twists. Lila loves pointing out which styles she thinks are the fanciest, and it’s just a fun book about kids being kids, no heavy moralizing. We also swapped out the random kids’ music we listen to in the car for the All One Tribe kids’ album. The songs are catchy, silly, and just talk about different kids, different names, different families, no big lectures. Lila sings “Every family’s different, every family’s good” off-key the whole way to preschool, and that’s the lesson sticking, way more than any speech I could give.
It’s not all books and music, either. I started looking for low-effort resources that fit into our regular routine. The show Lila already watches, Ada Twist, Scientist, has an episode where the crew goes to Rosie Revere’s grandma’s house and makes fufu together for a family dinner. It doesn’t make a big deal out of it – it’s just a grandma from Nigeria making her favorite food with her grandkid. Lila asked what fufu was, we looked up a 1-minute clip of people making it on YouTube, and that was that. I also started just picking up puzzle and play sets at the store that have different skin tones, instead of the all-white ones that are still the default most places. It’s a small change, but it means when Lila plays family with her dolls, everyone doesn’t look the same.
One thing that surprised me was how many people online act like you need to spend hundreds of dollars on special curated boxes or do 2-hour a week lesson plans to teach this stuff to little kids. That’s totally unnecessary for a 5-year-old who can barely sit through 10 minutes of a story at a time. All you really need at this age is small, consistent stuff that normalizes difference instead of shying away from it. I even started just pointing out small things in our daily walk – “Look, that dad has dreadlocks, that’s a cool hairstyle” or “See that sign in the grocery store? That’s written in Spanish and English, lots of people speak different languages at home.” Those little comments take 2 seconds, and they’re way more effective than any fancy resource I bought.
Last week, we were waiting in line at the grocery store, and Lila saw a woman wearing a bright purple head wrap standing in front of us. Instead of staring and pointing like she would have a couple of months ago, she waved and said, “I like your purple wrap. It’s my favorite color too.” After the woman left, she turned to me and said, “Her wrap is like the one in the book we read, right?” That’s the whole point, isn’t it? At 5, anti-racism isn’t about understanding systemic inequality or memorizing historical facts. It’s about seeing differences, naming them nicely, and treating everyone like a person you share a playground with.
I still don’t have it all figured out. I know in a year or two Lila will ask harder questions, and I’ll have to find new resources that fit her then. Some days I worry I’m doing it wrong, that I’m not doing enough. But right now, these small, simple things are working. We’re not trying to fix everything all at once. We’re just starting where she is, one picture book at a time.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5-Year-Olds: What Worked For Our Family