How to Begin About Teaching the Importance of Diversity
The very beginning of how we raise children starts with our culture. Part of how we are raised has an influence on how we raise our own children. How we feed, dress, care for, teach, and love our children is partially influenced by how we were raised and some new things we learned along the way. Teaching children to appreciate their own culture and then to encourage them to appreciate that everyone around them may have a slightly different culture is an important first step to teaching diversity.
What Does Diversity Mean?
Diversity means to have various different cultures living in close proximity to one another. It can also mean to have people from various different cultures in a workplace environment or in a group of friends. Diversity may also be applied to the entire planet. The entire face of this planet is filled with a very diverse populous of people.
How to Create Cultural Sensitivity
To help your child become objectively minded in a culturally sensitive manner, you should follow a few simple steps. Talk about differences with your child. Be open and communicate effectively with your child. Whenever there is an instance of closed minded thinking toward someone based on their culture or race, you should immediately discuss why it is a wrong and backward way of thinking with your child.
Appreciating Cultural Differences with the Help of Nursery Rhyme Books
Teaching children to appreciate differences and to be non-judgmental is a fairly easy undertaking if you make an effort to encourage this kind of thinking as often as possible. Children learn to start forming biases against certain people from television, movies, photos, books, magazines, and from their families. It’s important to keep your children’s entertainment and learning materials culturally and racially diverse to show them that the world is a diverse place and that they should not form negative biases against a person based on their cultural differences. You can incorporate nursery rhyme books that have diverse illustrations. Nursery rhymes are often our first exposure to books when we are growing up. To show children diversely illustrated versions of nursery rhymes from an early age allows the child to view a diverse world in a positive light. Nursery rhymes that come from various places around the world would also begin to teach your child and appreciation and sensitivity toward other cultures. There are plenty of books that have collections of rhymes like this that you can incorporate into your home library for a more cutlurally sensitive selection of reading material for your child.