Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5 Year Olds: What Actually Works
Last month, I was pushing my 5-year-old daughter Lila on the swing at our neighborhood park, when she stopped mid-giggle mid-pump, dug her heels into the wood chips, and pointed at a Black grandmother pushing her grandson on the slide a few feet away. “Mom,” she said, loud enough that I’m pretty sure the woman heard, “why is her skin brown like chocolate and mine is peachy?” I froze. I’d thought about having conversations about race eventually, but I hadn’t planned for it over playground swing exhaust fumes, when I was still half thinking about the laundry I needed to fold when we got home. I mumbled something about how people just have different colored skin, and it’s all good, and that was that. But after we got home, I closed out the grocery app and started searching for anti-racism resources for 5 year olds, because I knew my off-the-cuff answer wasn’t enough.
What I found online surprised me. Most big lists either had resources that were way too heavy—explaining historical oppression and systemic inequity in terms that no 5 year old can wrap their head around—or they were so vague they were useless. All those “we are all one big family” board books that don’t actually name difference, let alone talk about why treating people fairly matters. One book I ordered based on a popular recommendation turned out to be full of text that talked about redlining, and I just stared at it on the couch, thinking, what am I supposed to do with this? Lila can barely sit through a 10-page picture book about unicorns.
After a week of scrolling and testing duds, I found a small curated list from the site EmbraceRace that sorted resources by age group, so I wasn’t scrolling through content meant for middle schoolers. I started testing things out slowly, and I’ve learned that what works for 5 year olds isn’t big formal lessons—it’s small, concrete, everyday stuff that meets them where they are.
First, the books that work are short, focused on everyday difference, not big history. The first one that stuck at our house is The Skin You Live In by Michael Tyler. It rhymes, it compares skin tones to crayons and ice cream and other things a 5 year old actually knows, and it ends with playing together, which is all Lila cares about anyway. After we read it the first time, she pointed to her best friend Mia, who’s biracial, and said “Mia has caramel skin! That’s my favorite flavor.” That led to a conversation about how Mia’s mom makes cheese arepas for after school snacks, and we make toast, and both are really good. That’s it, that was the whole lesson, and that’s enough for 5. Another one that gets a lot of re-reads is Lovely by Jess Hong, which shows all kinds of different people with different bodies, skin, hair, and lives, and doesn’t try to make a big dramatic point—just says difference is nice.
I used to think we shouldn’t point out difference to little kids, that it would make them see race, but that’s the mistake I made before. 5 year olds already notice difference. They notice when someone’s hair is curlier than theirs, or when someone speaks a different language than the one we speak at home. If we act like we don’t see it, they get the idea that difference is something weird or bad to talk about. So the good resources don’t ignore difference—they name it in a calm, matter-of-fact way.
Beyond books, there are small, cheap changes you can make to your everyday stuff that are just as useful as any fancy curriculum. After Lila mentioned a few weeks back that she didn’t have any brown crayons to draw Javi’s mom (Javi is her classmate who’s Latinx), I ordered a $4 pack of multi-cultural skin tone crayons and stickers off Amazon, and we added them to our art bin. That’s it. It’s not a big lesson, but when she draws pictures of her class now, everyone’s skin matches what it actually looks like. We also swapped out our old dress-up bin, which only had a plastic blonde wig, for a couple of secondhand wigs with different textures and colors, and a few diverse dolls I picked up at a garage sale for a dollar each. Lila just sees them as toys, but they give her a chance to play with different looks instead of only ever playing with characters that look just like her.
I also really like the short Sesame Street clips on YouTube that talk about race and difference. They’re 2 to 3 minutes long, which fits a 5 year old’s attention span, and they use characters kids already know. There’s one about hair that Lila asks to re-watch every few weeks, because it talks about all different kinds of curly and straight hair, and how you can love your own hair even if it’s different from someone else’s.
I still don’t have it all figured out. Last week, Lila asked why the man at the gas station wore a turban, and I gave her a quick simple answer, but I didn’t have a resource pulled up to expand on it, and I forgot to follow up later. Some days I worry I’m doing it wrong, that I’m not teaching her enough, or that I’m teaching her the wrong thing. But what I’ve learned looking for resources for a 5 year old is that you don’t need to cover everything at once. 5 year olds don’t need a deep dive into systemic racism. They just need to learn that difference is okay to talk about, that everyone deserves to be included, and that no one should be left out of a game or a snack because of how they look.
The best resource I’ve found isn’t even a book or a video—it’s leaning into the random questions that pop up every day, instead of shushing them or brushing them off. I still look for new small things to add; right now we’re testing out a free weekly storytime for little kids at the local library that features books by BIPOC authors, and that’s been nice. But I don’t stress if I don’t do a big planned activity every week. This is a long game, and right now, for a 5 year old, small steps are enough.
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