Looking for Anti-Racism Resources for a 5 Year Old? Here Is What Actually Helped
The brown crayon in our house is called “chestnut.” My daughter was using it to draw a cat when she looked up and said, “Mom, why is this crayon called skin? That’s not my skin.”
I was chopping carrots. Spice on my hands. Half listening. Then I stopped.
I hadn’t planned to talk about race during snack time, but there it was. A cheap coloring set. A crayon labeled “skin color” that wasn’t the color of her skin, or mine, or most people’s. I said something like, “Yeah, that’s silly. Skin comes in lots of colors. You can use this one if you want, or you can use a peach, or you can use a brown. Let’s see which looks close to your arm.” She was satisfied. We went back to the cat.
That moment stuck with me longer than I expected.
Like a lot of white parents, I had been thinking vaguely about anti-racism for a while. I knew I needed to do something. I didn’t know what a five-year-old could actually take in. So I did what I do with most parenting questions: I went online.
I typed the exact phrase, “anti-racism resources for a 5 year old,” into a search engine. I found lists. Lots of lists. Some recommended books about police violence. Some were Instagram accounts meant for adults. Some had titles like “How to Start the Race Conversation Early” and then gave advice that was mostly about using the right vocabulary. A few things felt useful. Many felt too heavy or too abstract.
I ordered a few books anyway.
“Antiracist Baby” arrived first. It’s a board book, which felt promising. My daughter liked the rhythm. But when I asked her what “make it antiracist” meant, she said, “Be nice.” We read it a few times, but I could tell she wasn’t understanding much beyond “some people are mean and my mom gets intense when she reads.”
Then I tried “All Are Welcome,” a picture book about a school where the kids are diverse. That worked better. We read it and she pointed to a girl with dark skin and a hijab.
“Why is she wearing that?”
“It’s a head covering,” I said. “Some girls wear it because of their religion.”
“Oh. Can I wear one?”
“Sure, if you want to wear a scarf someday.”
She turned the page. That was it.
The moment helped me see what I should have realized sooner: at five, most conversations about race are not big speeches. They are small, factual exchanges. The child is not asking for a lecture. They are asking for an answer.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. There are moments when I’m not ready.
One afternoon in the library, my daughter noticed a boy sitting with his mom. She stared at him a little too long. I braced myself.
“Why is that boy’s skin so dark?”
The boy heard her. His mother heard her. I wanted to sink into the floor.
I had read the parenting articles. I knew the recommended response: don’t shush, don’t whisper, don’t pretend you didn’t hear. Acknowledge. Name. Keep it simple.
So I said, “Because he has more melanin. People have different amounts of melanin, and that makes different skin colors. You have some. He has more.”
He looked at us, then went back to his book. My daughter asked if I had melanin. I said yes. She asked if the dinosaur book had melanin. I said no. Then she lost interest.
What I learned from that moment: It is okay to be awkward. What matters is not hitting the perfect phrase. It’s making sure your child knows that the question is normal and that you will answer it.
That was how I stopped looking for a resource and started looking for a habit.
I began to notice the absence of certain kinds of stories in our house. We had plenty of books with white children doing normal things—going to school, losing teeth, having tantrums. I did not have many books with Black or brown children doing those same normal things. That felt like a problem, so I fixed it.
I ordered “Hair Love” and “The Colors of Us.” We read them in the same week. My daughter loved “The Colors of Us” because the little girl in the story compares skin tones to cocoa, cinnamon, and leaves. After we finished, I brought out some paint swatches and we matched them to our arms. We matched the arms of every person in our family. We even matched our cat’s fur, which came nowhere close.
That was a small thing, but it changed how my daughter talks about skin color. She hears it as something interesting, not taboo.
I also stopped relying only on books. I started paying attention to what was on the TV shows she watched. I looked for shows with a bigger mix of characters. I bought a few band-aids in different brown shades and let her pick which ones were “hers.” It sounds small. It is small. But a five-year-old notices when all the princesses look the same, and they also notice when they don’t.
The other part of this, the harder part, is talking about unfairness.
One day at the playground, a kid told my daughter’s friend, a Black girl, that she couldn’t play. I wasn’t sure if it was about race or just a kid being bossy. I heard the words: “No, you need to go. This is for my group.”
My daughter looked at me. The Black girl looked confused.
I didn’t want to take over, but I also didn’t want to stay silent. I walked over and said, “In this playground, everybody can play. There’s enough room. If you want to play together, great. If not, you both can use the space.”
It wasn’t a speech. It was a boundary. I wanted my daughter to see that when someone gets pushed out, a grown-up can say something. She doesn’t need a perfect explanation. She needs to see what ordinary fairness looks like.
Later, at home, I said, “Sometimes people make rules that keep other people out because of how they look. That’s unfair. We try to be people who notice that.”
She nodded. I wasn’t sure how much she absorbed. But I know this: she repeats things now. She talks about “people with different melanin.” She says “brown is beautiful” sometimes, mostly to mock me now. It’s fine.
If you’re looking for resources right now, I would say this: get the books, but don’t trust lists alone. Look for stories that show race without making it a problem to solve. Look for characters with brown skin who go to the dentist, catch a bus, bake a cake. For a five-year-old, that is just as important as a book with the word “anti-racist” on the cover.
Use the quiet moments. Answer the question when it comes. If you do not know, say, “I don’t know. Let me think about that.” That is allowed.
And remember that your child is watching what you do as much as what you read. If you don’t have a bookcase that reflects the world, add some. If you never mention skin color, they’ll learn to act like it’s not supposed to be mentioned. If you do mention it in a regular, simple way, they will treat it as a normal part of being human.
We haven’t figured this out. There are still things I trip over. There are questions I answer too late or too clumsily. But I stopped expecting to find one perfect resource. The work is in the everyday parts—the crayons, the library, the playground, the same books read for the fifth time. It doesn’t feel heroic. It just feels like parenting.
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