‘Aren’t I American’? How parents empower kids who face hate.
| Worcester, Mass.
Phyllis Myung didn’t anticipate she’d have to start talking with her child at such a young age about race and identity. But then her kindergartner came home asking, “Aren’t I American?” after having her nationality questioned based on her Asian features.
Some years later, she and her daughter, now a seventh grader, are discussing the recent rise in violence toward Asian Americans. “I want her to feel that she has power to be able to handle these things,” Ms. Myung says.
Why We Wrote This
To prepare their children for difficult encounters, parents who come from backgrounds that are the focus of hate crimes and speech are leaning into instilling confidence and self-esteem.
With schools enmeshed in culture wars over race, and with a national focus on rising hate crimes, more discussions like these have been happening between parents and children from a range of racial and religious backgrounds, anecdotal evidence suggests.
Today’s parents are often approaching such conversations differently than in the past – drawing on more resources that are now available and opening up about their experiences during challenging times like the aftermath of 9/11. Recent attacks on synagogues, and the murder of George Floyd, are also influencing the tone and quantity of discussions.
In Ms. Myung’s case, she also wanted something different for her daughter than she felt growing up. “I ... wanted her to be really proud of who she was and her heritage.”
When Phyllis Myung’s daughter was in kindergarten, she came home from school and asked, “Aren’t I American?” after a classmate disputed her nationality based on her Asian features.
Ever since then, Ms. Myung and her daughter, now a seventh grader, have spoken regularly about race and identity.
“We had that conversation a lot earlier than I was expecting,” says Ms. Myung, from Bolton, Massachusetts.
Why We Wrote This
To prepare their children for difficult encounters, parents who come from backgrounds that are the focus of hate crimes and speech are leaning into instilling confidence and self-esteem.
Their discussions lately often have been about the rise in violence against Asian Americans. “If something does happen to us while on the street out and about, I want her to feel prepared,” says Ms. Myung. “I want her to feel that she has power to be able to handle these things.”
With schools enmeshed in culture wars over race, and with a national focus on a surge in hate crimes, more conversations like these have been happening between parents and children from a range of racial and religious backgrounds, anecdotal evidence suggests.
Today’s parents are often approaching such conversations differently than in the past. They draw on multicultural books and podcasts as resources, sing their children’s praises on social media, and are opening up about their experiences during challenging times like the aftermath of 9/11, for example. Recent attacks on synagogues, and the murder of George Floyd, are also influencing the tone and quantity of discussions.
“Has the conversation changed? Yes, because the number of incidents has gone up so much,” says Valerie Cohen, a rabbi in Worcester, Massachusetts, and mother of two, who says Jewish parents have talks with their children now with higher frequency and intensity than when she was young.
Ms. Cohen, speaking in her office at Temple Emanuel Sinai, says high school students at her synagogue are “craving” conversations about how to handle antisemitism. “They are scared” about increasingly violent events, like the nearly 11-hour hostage standoff at a synagogue in Texas in January.
Start with preparation
At dinner tables around the United States, parents are discussing current events, role-playing scenarios, and offering ideas about what to say when confronted with situations, both small and large, that leave young people with questions and hurt.
“If you have a little bit of prep and a little bit of reality around the state of affairs of our country and our world, then it’s not such a shock to the system when it happens,” says Broderick Leaks, a clinical associate professor at the University of Southern California and director of counseling and mental health services at USC Student Health.
Besides being more necessary, having conversations is also what research shows is the best approach. Studies show babies notice race as early as three months, and by the time children are in preschool they start picking up on subtle social and nonverbal cues about race, says Christia Spears Brown, author of the recent book “Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why It’s Time To Break the Cycle.”
“Know that kids notice race, and that if we aren’t the ones talking about it, they will have to try and figure it out on their own and we probably don’t want that,” because children will fill in gaps in their knowledge with stereotypes, says Dr. Brown, who is white.
Dr. Brown suggests talking with young children about book and TV characters and highlighting in a positive way physical attributes. Conversations with elementary-age kids might include stereotypes they spot in movies and better ways to represent people. Along the way, parents can role-model empathy, kindness, and fairness, she says. She recommends the website Embrace Race, a compilation of research-backed resources.
Ms. Myung – who works as a church youth pastor and occasionally blogs about race, diversity, and parenting – supplies her daughter with books like the graphic novel “New Kid” by Jerry Craft, which they read and talk about together. She focuses on helping her daughter know how to handle it when issues arise such as a classmate reading a poem in an Asian accent. Ms. Myung teaches her daughter to name and express her feelings and to quickly talk about it with peers or teachers.
Ms. Cohen takes a similar approach. “I say to my kids, ‘People will say things that are offensive; always come to it, especially if it’s someone you have a relationship with, from the assumption that it’s from a place of not knowing and try and educate,’” she says.
“Promote pride”
Experts and parents say the aim is often to promote confidence and self-esteem in children and young people when they are faced with unexpected vitriol from the world. “When families talk with their kids and really promote pride in who you are as individual, also ethnic pride, that buffers you against some of the messages that you’re either getting at the time, or going to get later in terms of how society is structured,” says Dr. Leaks, who is Black. He describes his own efforts to support his 13-year-old son, bringing him to his speaking engagements to role-model career possibilities and reading books about Black culture and heritage together.
Danielle Officer, a college administrator from New Rochelle, New York, says discussions with her now 22-year-old son when he was young about being Black in America made it easier for him to process hurtful comments when he came out as gay in middle school. She intentionally goes out of her way to publicly talk about how much she loves and supports her son.
“I post on social media pictures of him, telling him how proud we are of him. When he was home for spring break, I said, ‘I’m proud of you and everything you do,’ those kinds of reinforcements,” she says.
For some parents, these conversations are opening the door to sharing similar struggles they had when younger.
Shifa Saltagi Safadi, a Muslim mother of four in northern Indiana, did just that recently when she needed to help her daughter after a neighbor near her school, housed in a mosque, yelled at children playing outside that he didn’t want any Muslims in his yard.
“My daughter came home that day and she was upset and was asking me, ‘Why does the neighbor not like Muslims?’ She was very confused,” says Ms. Safadi, who started MuslimMommyBlog in 2019.
Ms. Safadi shared with her daughter that a few weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was when she had first chosen to wear a headscarf, and how she had racial slurs yelled at her in public. Ms. Safadi found an ally in her town’s mayor at the time, who convened an interfaith event where she recited a poem she wrote about how 9/11 made her feel and that the perpetrators didn’t represent Islam.
“I told my daughter my story. I told her [hate] comes from fear and some people are scared of what they don’t know,” says Ms. Safadi, who now writes children’s books with Muslim characters. “I told her this is something we are going to experience, but there are so many more positive people. I told her the best thing to do would be not to let it weigh her down.”
A different path
Parents say they often assess how they were spoken to by family members when they were young, and then consider what to incorporate and change.
Uzma Jafri, co-founder of the “Mommying While Muslim” podcast, says her parents, immigrants from Pakistan and India, relayed that there were certain activities or places, like their local country club in Texas, that were off-limits to her because she was “not a white, real American,” as she puts it.
“I raise my kids differently,” says Ms. Jafri, now a family medicine doctor in Phoenix, raising four children. She tells her children, “You are 1,000% American, you belong here, you are responsible for fixing things here and for getting rid of any ills.”
Ms. Myung recalls only one conversation about race with her parents, who emigrated from Korea, after children in her neighborhood outside Seattle threw rocks and yelled when she and friends were walking home. Her parents spoke to her about Japanese American incarceration camps occurring in the U.S. not so long ago and how you can “never take off what you look like, so you have to be really careful and you have to work extra hard because they are never going to 100% accept you in this country as an American.”
“Really, that was the only conversation that I had with them growing up, and I think for me that was really hard because I was wrestling with, ‘Where do I belong? Where do I fit in?’” says Ms. Myung. “I always felt I was one foot in one place and one in the other, and I didn’t want that for my child. I wanted to make sure that we talked about those things. And I also wanted her to be really proud of who she was and her heritage.”
