We read this article and were so impressed, that we thought we would share it with you. Given the proliferation of hate speech and fear, it's important for you to share your values and outlook with your great-grandchildren.
Before you read this important piece, let us share with you the perfect example of how children personalize what they hear. About a month ago, our almost 9 year old great-granddaughter, had this exchange with her parents after hearing Trump on TV..
"...she asked with a tear in her eye, "Why does Donald Trump hate me? He says such mean things about women. Does he really hate me, mommy, Savta, Nana, Abuela and June?"
We encourage you to share this article with teachers,parents, child-care workers, and/or others involved with children. This is so very important.
How Kids Learn Prejudice
"Recently, my 2½-year-old daughter asked me about the Trump video everyone seemed to be talking about. Like many parents, I had made the mistake of assuming we were still in the soft and squishy baby days when she wasn’t listening. But now she is listening.
I told her that a man who
would like to be president said some mean things that hurt a lot of people’s
feelings. My daughter started to cry; like many children, she is sensitive. I
hugged her and assured her that everything would be O.K.
But as a psychology professor
who studies the development of social attitudes, I had to ask myself, will it
really be O.K.?
At the second presidential
debate, Hillary Clinton talked about the “Trump effect,” a rise — anecdotally, at least — in
bullying in schools. Are children adopting the negative attitudes that Donald
J. Trump’s campaign has too often promoted? Do they feel a newfound sense of
permissibility in mocking people, as Mr. Trump has, based on their race, their
religion, their gender or their disability?
It will take time for
research on education to answer those questions fully. But past research from
psychology suggests that a “Trump effect” on children’s attitudes is very
likely real.
Children are cultural
sponges: They absorb the mores that surround them — how to dress, what to eat,
what to say. This is a good thing, all in all, since a major function of
childhood is figuring out how to be a proficient adult in a particular society.
This means picking up on social norms. Unfortunately, this includes learning
your society’s explicit and implicit views of the status and worth of different
social groups.
Developmental psychology
research has shown that by the time they start kindergarten,
children begin to show many of the same implicit racial attitudes that adults
in our culture hold. Children have already learned to associate some groups
with higher status, or more positive value, than others.
An association between status
and group membership can be learned surprisingly quickly. The psychologists
Kristin Shutts, Kristina R. Olson and Suzanne R. Horwitz recently demonstrated that in just a few minutes of exposure in a
laboratory setting to information about fictional groups with differing
socioeconomic status, children picked up on which groups were wealthier — and
indicated that they liked those people better.
Gender attitudes, too, form
early and can be influenced by subtle cultural cues. For instance, in
experiments in preschool and elementary school classrooms, teachers were instructed to make
a bigger deal of gender than they typically would. They treated girls and boys
equally positively, but they highlighted that the two genders were different —
for instance, boys and girls hung their art on different walls, and children
were labeled often as being “boys” and “girls.” Note that the children were not
taught anything explicit about gender stereotypes. Yet after a few weeks, they
started to endorse broader stereotypes about gender. For example, they became
more likely to think that boys, but not girls, should become scientists. It
seems that merely marking a category — suggesting to children that it matters —
led them to pick up on cultural stereotypes.
It is also important to
consider that negative information is particularly compelling to children. For
example, my colleagues and I have found that when children learn about people
committing antisocial actions, they remember those actions in greater detail
than they do with comparable positive actions. Talking about entire groups of
people as being threatening or dangerous, as Mr. Trump has done, is precisely
the kind of language that children are likely to internalize.
Now, all hope is not lost.
Our country has made progress on many issues of social bias, and younger
generations tend to be more open-minded and tolerant of different groups than
older generations are. Research by the psychologists Melissa Ferguson, Thomas Mann and Jeremy
Cone shows that with sufficient countervailing positive information, even
initially negative implicit attitudes about people can be unlearned.
But we need to remember that
what’s at stake in a Trump presidency is not just his policy choices, his
approach to diplomacy and his having a finger on the nuclear trigger. Also at
stake are the attitudes Mr. Trump’s discourse would transmit to a generation of
children. Electing Hillary Clinton, in addition to offering a wholly different
set of policy positions, will also help teach children that America is a place
where little girls can grow up to be scientists, and maybe even
president."
*Katherine D. Kinzler is an associate professor of
psychology and human development at Cornell.
