apihtawikosisan: The Thorny Issue of Children in...

The Thorny Issue of Children in Costumes

allie0op:

Oh how cute I was back then…

How you feel when you see a picture like this is going to depend in large part on what you understand about what you’re seeing.

I see my children, in a classroom during a Halloween party, with two girls dressed up like ‘squaws’ (a word my children had thankfully never heard until that day). I see my youngest daughter nearly in tears, explaining to me how the girls in costume were ‘war whooping’ in her face because they know she’s native. I see her tell me how she was scared to ask them to stop. I see her shake her head in the negative when I ask if her teachers intervened or told the girls what they were doing was wrong.

I see my daughter’s best friend give her a comforting hug, because she too knows what it’s like. She is Chinese, and kids in her class haven’t been told that it isn’t okay to pull at the sides of your eyes and say “ching chong ching chong”.

I see settler parents smiling benevolently on their ‘ethnically costumed’ children. I see their eyes passing over my daughter’s tears. Kids will be kids they say.

Kids will be kids. They take their clues mainly from the adults in their lives. They play act those adult roles until they become habits. They learn to ignore the pain they cause other people, believing that as their parents tell them, “other people’s feelings are not your problem. After all, you can either choose to be offended…or not.”

Kids will be kids. They can be incredibly cruel to one another, and in the absence of any discernible differences they will still find ways to tease and belittle and exclude.

But children also have a keen sense of justice. A fierce understanding of what it feels like to be left out, mocked, put down. Is it not our duty as adults to teach them to bridge that divide between ‘justice for me’ and ‘justice for all’?

Children don’t come into the world with biases. They learn them. You can see the progression. “The brown skinned girl” at first is only a way for them to explain to you which Chloe is being discussed. If some other characteristic is present, they’re just as likely to use it. “The one who always wears a gold headband.” “The one who can’t eat wheat.”

But you see that change as they grow, and interact, and have lessons passed through parents to children to other children. You are not the only influence in their lives anymore, but you can be the most important. When they come home telling you that a boy in their class was called a ‘sissy’ because he smuggled a Barbie doll to school, talk to them about gender roles. When they say that kids were making fun of a classmate who has two moms, talk to them about love.

When you hear from another parent that your child called another student ‘gay’, deal with it. Don’t let that kind of behaviour go.

Children are not to blame for what the adults in their lives teach them, but at some point, children do need to be held accountable for their own actions too. We should be striving to give them the skills necessary to make good decisions, because so much of their time is spent away from us once they’re in school. If you talk to your kids about these things, you can bet that they’ll be talking about it at school too.

And if more children had been talked to, maybe my daughter wouldn’t have felt so afraid to speak out when some parent thought it was merely harmless fun to send her child to school as a ‘squaw’.