Brown Kids

One day my son comes to me and says “There are kids playing on our swingset.” So, I ask him if he minds sharing and he tells me that he does not mind. Then my son says “There is a brown kid playing on my swingset.”

At this point I was quite shocked. Race and color are not things that have ever been discussed around the kids. With many questions running through my head I ask my son where did he hear “brown”. Who told him that there are brown kids?

My son tells me that his teacher told him. Then I remember the permission slip he’d brought home a couple of weeks ago. They wanted permission for him to take part in a class about sexual education where they tell them the differences between the sexes, roles of the sexes, and differences among people.

I signed the permission slip not even considering that this would open his eyes to the fact that people are different than him and even give him the words to openly express this. I don’t doubt that he has noticed that there are people of different colors and that girls are a bit different than he is. But I don’t believe it was something that he had pondered or given much thought to at all.

Now after taking this class he has not only noticed the differences but he is talking about it and actually putting some thought into it. He has actually looked out the window and differentiated this little boy from the other two kids playing on the swingset because his skin is a different color.

This is very disturbing to me. I pry a little further and ask him a few questions. “Is there anything wrong with having brown skin? Does he have friends at school with brown skin? Are kids with brown skin different than he is?”

His answers aren’t very alarming. He has played with children of different colors before. We have black friends who they enjoy visiting because they want to play with their children. So, it is not so much that he thinks they are different from him. He actually seems proud because he now knows the difference. His teacher taught him something and he can apply it.

But is it something he should be applying? I tried explaining to him that some people might get their feelings hurt if he points out that they are “brown”. Though, among his peers I am not sure that this is the case since they are all being taught this in school now. I just know that I don’t like it.

There have been other things coming from this class that i didn’t much care for. My son has also made comments about things that girls can’t do. I thought in this day and age they would be teaching him that girls and boys can do the same things for the most part. It seems this is not the case.

It is likely that this is not totally due to the curriculum. It is quite possible that the teacher may have said something that led him to these beliefs or maybe he just misconstrued the information he was being fed. All the more reason to make me wonder if these things should be taught to children at such a young age.