How I Found Anti-Racism Resources That Actually Work for My 5-Year-Old
One afternoon, my daughter and I were kneeling in the produce aisle, picking out bell peppers. She pointed at a woman walking past us—a Black woman with beautiful braids—and said, in that loudly innocent way five-year-olds have, “Why is her skin brown?” I felt my own skin heat up. I mumbled something about melanin and tried to redirect her to the peppers. The woman smiled, not unkindly, and said, “It’s okay. It’s a good question.” I was grateful, but also embarrassed. That night, I lay awake wondering if I’d handled it right, and more importantly, what I was supposed to do next.
I’m not a teacher or an expert. I’m just a mom who suddenly realized that “not talking about race” wasn’t the same as “being anti-racist.” My daughter was clearly noticing differences. She wasn’t shy about it. If I didn’t give her the language to talk about race in a thoughtful way, she’d pick up whatever fragments she heard from the world—and some of those fragments were going to be wrong.
The first thing I did was panic-buy books. A lot of books. I ordered picture books about civil rights heroes, skin color, and diversity. When they arrived, I sorted through them on the living room floor. Some were great. Others were clearly written for older kids, with long sentences and abstract concepts that made my daughter’s eyes glaze over. One book about Martin Luther King Jr. used the word “segregation” about fifteen times, and every time she asked, “What does that mean?” which derailed the whole story.
I realized the challenge wasn’t just finding material—it was finding material that matched her developmental level. A five-year-old doesn’t understand systemic oppression. She understands fairness. She understands that some people are treated differently, and that feels bad to her. So the resources that worked best weren’t the ones that explained racism in grand historical terms. They were the ones that gave her simple, honest answers to the questions she was already asking.
One of the first things that clicked was a picture book called The Colors of Us, written by Karen Katz. It’s about a little girl who looks at all the people in her neighborhood and describes their skin colors in playful, delicious terms—chocolate, honey, cinnamon, peanut butter. My daughter loved it. We read it three times in a row. Then she looked at her own arm and said, “Mine is like a waffle.” I didn’t correct her. She was mapping her identity onto what she understood, and that felt like a small win.
But books alone weren’t enough. I found that the real resources were the conversations that the books opened up. After reading The Colors of Us, I started saying things like, “Yes, people have different skin colors, and that’s one of the many ways we’re all different. But we’re also all people.” That sounds simple, but it was hard for me to say without feeling like I was reciting a script. Over time, it got easier.
I also learned to stop waiting for my daughter to ask. She wasn’t going to raise her hand and say, “Mom, can we discuss racial equity?” So I started working small, everyday moments into our routine. When we watched a cartoon with a diverse cast, I’d mention it. “Look, that character has a family like ours, and that one has a different kind of family. Isn’t it cool that we get to see so many kinds of people?” It felt forced at first, but it became normal.
The hardest part was finding resources that addressed racism directly, not just diversity. There’s a big difference between showing a child a book with characters of many races and giving them a framework for recognizing when someone is treated unfairly because of their race. For a five-year-old, the framework has to be concrete. One thing that worked was a simple conversation about fairness. I told my daughter: “There are some grown-ups who make mean rules about who can play together based on skin color. That’s called racism, and it’s not fair. We are people who think that’s wrong.”
That was a heavy thing to say to a little kid. But she took it in stride. She said, “That’s silly.” And I said, “It is silly. That’s why we need to be brave and kind and speak up when we see it.” She nodded, and then asked if she could have a snack. That’s how it works with five-year-olds—you say something huge, they digest it, and then they move on. The parenting advice I’d read about “continuing the conversation” made it sound so polished. In reality, it’s messy and interrupted by requests for apple slices.
Another resource that surprised me was music. My daughter’s preschool teacher recommended a playlist of children’s songs that included lullabies and rhymes from different cultures. We started listening to it in the car. My daughter loved a South African call-and-response song and a Spanish lullaby. Singing in another language made her curious about where people live and how they talk. That felt like a small but important layer—she was starting to see that the world is big and varied, and that she belongs to just one piece of it.
I also had to reckon with my own discomfort. A lot of the anti-racism resources I found online assumed a level of ideological vocabulary that just didn’t fit a five-year-old. Articles talked about “dismantling white supremacy culture” and “interrupting bias” in ways that made me feel like I needed a college course just to parent effectively. I had to step back and remind myself that at this age, my job isn’t to give my daughter a comprehensive political education. It’s to give her a foundation of fairness and empathy. The big-picture stuff can come later, layer by layer.
One practical thing that helped was creating a small shelf of books in her room that she could reach without my help. I put four or five titles there—books about different families, different skin colors, different traditions. She doesn’t read them all the time, but they’re part of her normal landscape. She’ll pull one out during quiet time and “read” it to her stuffed animals. That’s a way of making anti-racism part of her everyday world without turning it into a special event or a lecture.
I also learned to be honest about my own questions. My daughter asked me once why we had a friend whose mom came from Vietnam but whose dad was from Ireland. I didn’t have a perfect answer. I said, “People are born in lots of places, and they move and meet each other and make families. That’s a nice thing.” She said, “Can I go to Vietnam someday?” I said, “Maybe. We’d need a map.” She lost interest, but she had learned something: that people’s stories are complicated, and that we can be curious about them without being rude.
There are still moments when I don’t know what to do. A few weeks ago, we were at the playground, and a boy my daughter was playing with told her she couldn’t be the doctor because “doctors are boys.” That wasn’t about race, but it was about exclusion. I watched her freeze for a second, then say, “No, girls can be doctors too.” The boy’s mom and I exchanged a look. I was proud of my daughter for speaking up. I also knew that the next time it might be a comment about skin color, and I might not be there to hear how she responds.
I don’t have a tidy conclusion about what’s working and what isn’t. Some days I feel like we’re doing enough. Other days I read something online and feel like we’re woefully behind, like there’s a whole curriculum of anti-racism I’ve somehow missed. My daughter doesn’t care about any of that. She just wants to read The Colors of Us again and point at the end pages where all the skin-colored swatches are drawn. She likes saying the name of each shade, and she likes mixing paints to try to match them.
That’s where we are right now. We’re taking it one conversation at a time, one book at a time, one song in a language we don’t speak at a time. I still don’t have a perfect resource list or a long-term plan. But I’ve learned that the most useful resource I have is my willingness to sit with the discomfort of talking about race, even when I’m not sure what to say. Because every time I do, my daughter learns that it’s okay to ask questions, that fairness matters, and that we’re the kind of family who keeps trying.
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