Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5 Year Olds: What Actually Works
Last month, I was perched on a splintered wooden bench at the neighborhood playground, my 5-year-old daughter Mia had been chasing a girl named Zara around the twisty slide for 20 minutes. I was picking at a half-eaten Goldfish cracker that had fallen into my lap, waiting for the ice cream truck to make its way down the street, when Mia came barrelling over, tugging my sleeve hard enough to jostle my lukewarm iced coffee. “Mom,” she said, leaning in like she was sharing a top-secret spy secret, “why is Zara’s hair braided with beads? Why doesn’t her hair look like mine?”
I froze. My sock was already full of sand from an earlier rogue trip to the sandbox, my brain went completely blank. I knew brushing the question off or just mumbling “everyone is different” wasn’t enough. I also knew I couldn’t launch into a discussion of hair discrimination or systemic bias with a kid who still asks me to tie her shoes every single morning, even though she can do it herself. That night, after Mia fell asleep clutching her stuffed rabbit, I sat down on the couch and typed “anti-racism resources for 5 year old” into Google, and that’s where the overwhelm started.
I got pages and pages of lists. Most of them were either packed with chapter books for older elementary kids, dense articles meant for school administrators, or resources that covered topics a 5 year old has no frame of reference for. I ordered three books off the first list that sounded promising. The first one was full of dense text about how racism hurts communities, and Mia got bored halfway through the first page and begged me to switch to her favorite Elephant & Piggie book. The second one was a generic “celebrate our differences” book that was so vague it basically just said “we’re all friends!” and didn’t explain why talking about those differences matters in the first place. I almost gave up, figured I’d just wing it and answer questions as they came, but I kept digging, and over the past month I tested a dozen different resources, and found a handful that actually fit where a 5 year old is developmentally.
The first one that stuck is The Skin You Live In by Michael Tyler. It’s a short picture book with silly, bouncy rhymes that compares different skin tones to things Mia already knows—honey, peaches, cocoa, whipped cream. The first night I read it, Mia hopped out of bed right after we finished, dragged me next door to borrow a cup of sugar from our neighbor Mrs. Lee, and held her pale arm right up next to Mrs. Lee’s brown arm and said, “You’re the color of butterscotch! I’m the color of peanut butter!” It wasn’t awkward, it was just honest. The book doesn’t get into heavy, traumatic stuff, it just normalizes noticing that people look different—something 5 year olds are already doing anyway. Pretending we don’t see difference doesn’t do them any favors.
Another winner is Hair Love by Matthew A. Cherry. It’s a sweet, quiet story about a Black dad learning to style his daughter’s braided hair for a school event. Mia is currently obsessed with all things hair—she spends 10 minutes every morning twisting mine into messy ponytails—so she sat through the whole thing, pointed at every different braid style on the pages, and asked to look at the pictures again after breakfast the next day. It’s just a story about a dad loving his kid, nothing more. But centering a normal, loving Black family as just… a normal family, that’s exactly the kind of anti-racism little kids need.
For free, quick content that fits into dead time, I love Sesame Street’s Coming Together collection of 5-minute clips. One afternoon when I was waiting for pasta to boil and needed 5 minutes to stir and check the timer, I pulled one up on my phone. It talked simply about how sometimes people leave other kids out just because of how they look, and Mia turned to me halfway through and said, “That’s not fair. I’d let them play with me.” That’s exactly the point, right? 5 year olds get unfairness. They don’t need anything more complicated than that right now.
What I learned through all this searching is that most of us overcomify it. We think we need to teach everything all at once, but 5 year olds think in concrete terms, not abstract ideas. They can’t wrap their heads across systemic inequality, but they can understand being kind, and calling out unfairness when they see it. So good resources for this age don’t need to be packed with lessons or heavy history. They just need to do two small things: normalize noticing difference, and teach that treating people unfairly because of how they look is wrong.
I also stopped trying to carve out a special “anti-racism lesson time” every week. That never works anyway—my kid loses interest the second anything feels like a chore. Instead, I just weave these resources into our normal routine: one picture book a week before bed, a 5-minute clip while we wait for dinner, picking books with main characters of different backgrounds when we go to the library. When Mia asks a blunt question about someone who looks different than her, I don’t shush her or rush past it to avoid awkwardness. I just answer simply. Last week at the grocery store, she asked loud why a man’s head was wrapped. I just said, “That’s a special covering called a turban, some people wear it for their religion, it’s a really important part of who he is.” That’s it. No big speech, just a simple answer. That’s enough right now.
It’s not perfect. Last week, she called a new kid’s curly hair “silly” before I could say anything, and I had to pull her aside and remind her that it’s okay to notice, but it’s not okay to make someone feel bad. I still don’t have all the answers. When she gets older, we’ll dive into the harder stuff, the history, the unfair systems that still shape people’s lives. Right now, though, the resources that work are the ones that meet her where she is—simple, story-driven, focused on the small, basic things she can understand. I’m still tweaking what we do, still digging through the library shelves for new stories, still fumbling through questions when they pop up out of nowhere. It’s a work in progress, and that’s okay.
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