Age-Appropriate Anti-Racism Resources for 5 Year Olds: What Actually Works
Last month, my 5-year-old daughter came barreling out of preschool, backpack unzipped, half a fruit snack stuck to her cheek, and handed me a crumpled crayon drawing. It showed our whole family, all colored in the same medium brown, and Lila—her best friend from class—had her face scribbled out with black. I knelt down next to the minivan, wiped the fruit snack off her chin, and asked her what was going on. She shrugged and said, “Ms. Mia talked about skin colors today. All of us are brown, so Lila’s too. I messed up.”
I panicked a little, if I’m being honest. I’d known I wanted to approach this topic early, but I’d put off looking for resources because I had no idea where to start with a kid who still negotiates for five extra minutes of bedtime every single night. That night, after I got her to bed, I sat on the couch with my laptop and searched “anti-racism resources for 5 year olds,” like a lot of other parents probably do. What came up was overwhelming. There were long reading lists with $18 hardcovers I couldn’t get from our local library for three months, thinkpieces that talked about concepts I couldn’t parse into words a 5 year old would understand, and conflicting advice everywhere—some people said you should never point out skin color to little kids, others said you have to talk about it constantly. I closed my laptop after an hour more confused than I started.
The next day, I brought the drawing up with Ms. Mia, her preschool teacher, while we leaned against the playground fence waiting for the kids to finish chasing each other around the slide. She laughed a little, not in a mean way, and said she gets this question at least once a month from parents. 5 year olds don’t think abstractly, she reminded me. They don’t care about systems or complicated history yet. They notice differences the same way they notice one kid has blue eyes and another has brown, or one kid likes peanut butter and another is allergic. All my daughter did was try to fit what Ms. Mia said into what she already knew—she thought all skin had to be the same to be right, so she scribbled out Lila’s face when it didn’t match.
From there, I started testing the resources Ms. Mia recommended, plus what I could find that was actually accessible, low-cost, and fit a 5 year old’s 10-minute attention span. Most of what worked wasn’t the fancy, highly promoted stuff I saw all over Instagram.
First, the books that actually held her attention. The first one that clicked was The Skin You Live In. It’s short, rhyming, full of pictures of kids doing regular 5 year old stuff: climbing swings, chasing bubbles, eating popsicles. It just says different skin is normal, no big speeches, no confusing tangents. My daughter asks to read it before bed at least once a week, and she likes pointing out which skin color matches hers and which matches Lila’s. The other one I loved is Last Stop on Market Street—it’s not even explicitly about race, it’s about a boy riding the bus with his grandma, and it talks about noticing all the different kinds of people in the world, and how everyone has something good to offer. No heavy stuff, just a nice story. I tried one of the more “serious” books people recommended online, and she got bored halfway through and started drawing on the pages, so that went back to the library.
Anti-racism work for 5 year olds isn’t just books, though. They learn more from what they interact with every day than what you read to them. I noticed that every puzzle we had at home only had white people on it, and all our dress-up clothes only came in fair skin tones. So I went to Target’s dollar section and got a $3 puzzle of a diverse family hiking, and picked up a couple new $5 dress-up accessories that fit different skin tones, just small stuff. It didn’t cost much, and now when she puts the puzzle together she points out that the mom in the puzzle has the same skin as Lila.
What about when your kid points out someone’s skin color or difference loudly in public, which 5 year olds will always do? I used to shush her, because I was embarrassed, but I learned that sends the message that talking about difference is bad. Now I just say, “Yep, that’s right! Everyone’s skin is a little different, just like everyone’s hair is a different color. Pretty cool, right?” It’s short, it answers her question, and doesn’t make a big deal out of nothing. That’s way better than shushing, which just makes her more curious.
For screen time, which we all do a little of, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood has an episode called “Welcome to the Neighborhood” where a new kid from Syria joins the class, and it talks about being kind to new people, learning new words from each other. It’s 15 minutes, it’s on Netflix for free, and my daughter rewatches it all the time. It’s way more engaging than any fancy workbook I could have bought.
Last week, about two weeks after the first drawing incident, my daughter brought home a new drawing. It’s her and Lila holding ice cream cones. Lila’s skin is colored the right brown, my daughter’s is peach, both cones have rainbow sprinkles. She taped it to the fridge, and that’s that.
I still fumble. Last week, we were walking past a Sikh temple near our house, and she asked why the man walking out had a cloth on his head, and I gave her a short, simple answer, but I didn’t have a ready resource to pull out or anything. Some of the things I tried didn’t work—she didn’t care about the anti-racism matching game I bought, it just felt like homework to her. I still don’t have a perfect curriculum, and I’m not raising a perfect little activist or anything. She’s 5. All she needs right now is to learn that difference is okay, that everyone gets to play, that being kind matters more than getting everything right.
The biggest thing I learned looking for these resources is that you don’t need fancy expensive stuff to talk about anti-racism with a 5 year old. You just need stuff that meets them where they are: concrete, simple, about people and play, not big abstract ideas. It’s not about checking boxes. It’s just small, everyday things that add up. That’s all any of us can do right now.
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