Are Kids More Open To Cultural Differences Than We Think? What I Learned As An Elementary Teacher
It was the third day of first grade last fall, and I was wiping crumbs off a blue plastic lunch table when the new kid, Lina, pulled a concha out of her lunch bag. Flaky, dusted with pink sugar, it stood out next to the sea of goldfish crackers and pre-sliced apple slices that filled the other kids’ bags. I paused across the room, half-watching. A year earlier, a parent had sent me an email complaining about the “strong smell” of kimchi another student had brought for lunch, and I’d braced for awkward questions or quiet teasing.
What happened instead caught me off guard. Javi, a 6-year-old from down the street whose dad works as a local plumber, leaned across the table and pointed. “Is that a fuzzy cookie?” he asked. Lina nodded, and explained it was pan dulce, made by her abuela who’d moved with them from Oaxaca. Javi asked if he could have a bite. Within two minutes, five kids were clustered around Lina’s table, breaking off tiny pieces, passing it around, and arguing over whether the pink sugar tasted better than the white. By the time snack time ended, Javi was already begging me to ask Lina’s mom for the recipe so his mom could make it at home.
That moment got me thinking about the question I see pop up all the time in teacher groups and parent forums: are kids really more open to cultural differences than we think? After 12 years in the classroom, I’m starting to think the answer is yes, way more than most of us give them credit for.
A month after Lina joined our class, we held our annual family share fair. I always leave it open to families to bring whatever they want, no rules. As an experiment that year, I didn’t give families any suggestions, and let the kids pick what to bring. I’d expected parents to curate the safe, expected options—store-bought pasta for Italian families, shamrock cookies for Irish, the kind of thing that doesn’t draw much attention. Instead, the kids led the way. Ayan, whose family moved here from Somalia two years ago, brought his well-worn soccer ball printed with the Somali flag, and spent 20 minutes at recess teaching the other kids how his uncles play pickup games every weekend back in Mogadishu. Mia, who was adopted from South Korea as a baby and grew up here, brought a pack of the spicy ramyun her mom buys at the Korean market 20 minutes away, and let the other kids pass the wrapper around to look at the Hangul lettering. When a couple of parents pulled me aside after the fair saying they’d been worried their kid’s contribution would be awkward or boring, I realized the awkwardness was all in our heads, not the kids’.
We carry so much baggage as adults. We worry about saying the wrong thing, we’ve absorbed generations of stereotypes and awkward unspoken rules about talking about difference, and we project all that worry onto kids. We assume they’ll tease, or be confused, or be uncomfortable, so we plan big, forced lessons that feel stiff and unnatural, or we avoid talking about difference altogether. But kids don’t see difference the way we do. They notice the things that matter to them: food, toys, games, birthday traditions. A difference in what you eat for lunch isn’t a scary divide—it’s just a new thing to try.
I’m not saying it’s always perfect. Sometimes kids say awkward things. Once, a kid looked at Ayan’s mom’s hijab and asked why she wears a “towel” on her head. I started to step in, ready to explain, before Ayan just shrugged and said “it’s for our religion, and it matches my mom’s shoes when they go out to dinner. My mom loves matching.” The other kid just nodded and said “oh, my mom matches her purse to her shoes too. That makes sense.” That was the end of it. No drama, no big lesson, just kids talking like normal.
Over the years, I’ve put together a few small, simple things I tell parents and new teachers who ask how to handle this. First, don’t shush your kid when they ask a question about difference. A lot of parents panic when their kid points out that someone looks or eats different, and they shush them to avoid being rude. But kids are already noticing anyway. If you don’t answer their question simply, they learn that difference is something you don’t talk about, which makes it weird instead of normal. If your kid asks why someone speaks differently than you do, just say “their family learned another language first, that’s how they talk at home.” No big speech needed.
Second, don’t force awkward interactions. You don’t need to march your kid over to a new family and make them ask about their culture. Just let kids play. Most of the time, they’ll naturally ask the questions they care about, because they’re curious. My neighbor has a 7-year-old, and when a new Vietnamese family moved in next door, her kid just ended up helping their 8-year-old plant mango seeds in the backyard one Saturday. By the end of the afternoon, he knew that mangoes grow on trees in Vietnam, and he’d gotten a taste of their homemade mango sticky rice. No lesson plan required.
Third, if your kid says something awkward, don’t overreact. If your kid says “that lunch smells weird,” don’t yell at them or apologize so much that everyone in the room feels uncomfortable. Just say “that smells different to you because you haven’t tried it before, right? Would you like to ask if you can have a tiny bite?” More often than not, that turns an awkward moment into a normal interaction.
Last month, at parent-teacher conferences, Lina’s mom told me she’d been so nervous to move here. She thought kids would tease Lina for her accent, or think her food was weird. Instead, Lina comes home every day talking about 12 different friends, and every Friday a different kid brings something from their house to share with her. Last week Javi brought his grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. I told her I’d been nervous too, once. We spend so much time worrying about how kids will handle difference that we forget most of the time, the barrier isn’t the kids. It’s us, overthinking everything. It’s not all perfect, and there are still hard conversations we have to have, but more often than not, kids are way more ready than we are.
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