We’re an interracial family but since our kids are so little, we have never had an in-depth conversation about race. And to be honest, I really wouldn’t know where to start.

But the topic has come up. While drawing and coloring one day, my son, who just turned 6, said to me, “I’m white."

My response was automatic: “No, you’re not.”

(Just a side note – do you remember a time when “flesh” was actually a color in the crayon box?)

I’m not sure why I responded so quickly instead of asking him to clarify, which is what I would normally do. I started explaining to him that even though his dad is white, I’m not white, so therefore, he isn’t white, either. It made him a little confused but we both dropped the subject. I just didn't know where to go from there. I told him it would probably be more accurate to describe ourselves as "brown."

Earlier this month, excerpts from the book, “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,” were published in Newsweek. The book's author, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, wrote about a researcher from the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas and her studies on racial attitudes among children. Families who volunteered for the study were asked to discuss racial equality with their children every night for five nights.

Several families immediately dropped out.

“It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity,” wrote Bronson and Merryman.“But according to (the researcher)'s entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles—like ‘Everybody's equal’ or ‘God made all of us’ or ‘Under the skin, we're all the same’— but they'd almost never called attention to racial differences.

 “They wanted their children to grow up colorblind.”

 However, through an earlier test of just the kids, the researcher discovered that the children already had discriminatory attitudes about race. "In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions—many of which would be abhorrent to their parents," Bronson and Merryman wrote.

Do you talk to your children about race? Is race a topic that comes up only among people of color or mixed race families? How old should the child be before engaging him or her in this conversation?  How do you start talking to your child about this often complicated and controversial subject?

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