good evening I'm Marie beam CEO of Discovery Museum and what you see behind me is our beautiful Wheels accessible Discovery Treehouse a great place to explore and learn if you're tuning in from Massachusetts I do hope you'll come visit welcome to the second event in the 2024 Discovery Museum speaker series how to have Brave conversations that build empathetic kids with Dr Vora Washington of the kale Institute thank you for joining us for this important and very timely conversation a quick bit of
housekeeping Q&A will be open throughout the event please submit your questions anytime using the Q&A button and we'll address as many as possible after vora's presentation please use the chat button for any technical questions for the webinar host closed captioning can be turned on and off at the bottom of your screen and finally we are recording tonight's presentation a link to the recording will be sent to All registrants once available and we'll also send a resource list with any follow-up
information referenced in the talk I'm pleased to extend a special thank you to our speaker series sponsors tonight's event is free thanks to the loyal support of Enterprise Bank and southernland realy group along with the other sponsors shown here their support has made this 12th year of the speaker series always free and open to everyone possible and thank you too to those of you who made a donation when you registered for tonight's event that's a big help this year's speaker series theme is c
onversation understanding hope we've chosen to host conversations on topics that can be challenging for families or for anyone really to navigate our goal is that with the guidance of informed and insightful speakers we can all gain a better understanding of these issues and through that a more hopeful perspective on the future and our ability to navigate it the upcoming events on the schedule are shown here registration for all of them is open now on our website and I'd like to especially highl
ight uh our presentation with Chanel thural who will be our first ever artist in Residence at the Discovery Museum speaking with us about public art as uh a an encouragement for um inspiring Civic engagement in our communities we have guests from across the country with us tonight so I'd like to briefly introduce our Museum and our work to those of you who don't know us Discovery Museum Works to support kids and families by providing play-based learning programs that are rooted in science and na
ture we create exhibits and programs that spark kids natural creativity and curiosity and that make learning fun in 2023 we were able to grow our impact to new underserved audiences continue on a path toward carbon neutrality and work with our Community Partners to better reflect and serve a diverse community of interests and lived experiences this year we will work to evaluate how best to build upon a very solid foundation to understand uh to expand the depth and breadth of our impact we will b
e incorporating voices from across our community to find new ways to support and increase the number of partner organizations we work with to deliver even more joyful learning experiences to kids and families if you have ideas for how we can extend our impact please reach out we would love to hear from you we are honored to host Vora for tonight's important conversation Dr velora Washington is an internationally recognized Authority in early childhood education during her decade tenure as CEO of
the council for professional recognition Dr Washington Advanced and professionalized the field of early childhood education with her leadership of the largest credentialing program for early Educators in the United States the Child Development Associate or CDA credential Dr Washington is considered a Pioneer in Early Education having been named as a legacy Leader by the center for enhanced Early Learning outcomes for having shaped the early childhood education field having a unique perspective
on the history and context of today's policy initiatives and for developing strategies to address the issues that impact child outcomes she formerly served as vice president at Antioch college and the Kellogg foundation and as a tenured faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she's held leadership roles with massach with the Massachusetts governor's School Readiness commission voices for America's children NC Black Caucus of the society for research and Child Developmen
t National Head Start Association Commission on 2010 Boston's CH Boston Children's Museum and Wheelock College Bora welcome thank you so much for being us tonight we are honored to have your tremendous expertise and wisdom with us and um I just like to re reiterate for an audience for our audience what a difference you have made in the last lives of Children and Families um you are truly an expert in every way and um thank you for guiding us this we thank you thank you so much you are welcome an
d let me get your slides going for you very well thank you I want to say it is a tremendous pleasure for me to be here with you today to really join with you in thinking together about why and how we can have Brave conversations that build empathetic kids and what better place to have this conversation than at the Discovery Museum because museums are tremendous powerful learning places and so is it really appropriate that you are having these series of conversations about this topic and many oth
er serious important topics that face our children in our communities now I think there's a little lack time with this computer but we'll just keep moving on so I'm really inspired to have this conversation with you tonight and as I was thinking about this conversation one thing that came to my mind was a quote from a rabbi who said if I am not for myself who will be for me but if I am only for myself who am I I think this speaks to both bravery and it also speaks to our topic of empathy if I am
not for myself who will be for me often it takes a lot of Bravery to stand up for yourself your children stand up for themselves but if I am only for myself who am I very powerful quote so you know even when we don't realize it there are a lot of messages around our children that the world is a pretty messy place so no matter how hard we work to keep our children safe and to keep them free from all of these messages it's pretty hard for somebody even at 2 3 4 five and six to stay away from mess
ages of violence and incivility and harm it's really hard for us to Shield our children from all of these messages and this is true now more than ever because our children even from babyhood have access access to so many screens and children are getting a lot of messages they're getting messages about how humans are treating each other they're getting messages about how humans are thinking about skin color and hair and language but the good news of all of this is that because they're getting all
these messages it creates a lot of opportunity for us as the adults in their lives to engage in conversations with them to engage in conversations with them about what they're hearing what they're seeing what they're experiencing our children are relying on us the trusted adults to give them a sense of safety to create it to really help them interpret all these messages they're getting in the world so too often when kids say things or they're curious about things they say it maybe at times that
feel inappropriate to us I can remember my son very loudly in the grocery store making a comment about an outfit that another woman was making and you know when kids say things a lot of times our response is that we want to shush them we want to silence them that can feel like shaming to them and we do that because we're inconvenience or sometimes we don't know how to respond or we don't want the other person that they're referring to to have hurt feelings but what we're going to talk about ton
ight is how we don't have to shush kids we don't have to shame kids we don't have to silence kids we can be inspired to step up to the plate and have Brave conversations with kids even when it's inconvenient for us and that's what we're going to be doing tonight so tonight we're going to be talking about how we're thinking about having Brave conversations that build empathetic kids why we want to have these conversations what the question really means to be brave to have empathy we're going to t
alk about if young children are even really ready for these conversations and give some tips on how we might approach these conversations and then ask the real question which is are we ready for this and at the end of my talk I'm going to drop into the chat a handout with some beginning resources that you can use to take this conversation even further if you want to explore it further so let's start off by saying why are we having these conversations why are we having these conversations and so
as we'll see later kids are really getting a lot of messages as I said they're getting message about what's fair and what's unfair differences in race and gender and other kind of social constructs that's why we're having these conversations so I'm going to reference a lot of the work by Louise Sturman Sparks and her colleagues to really talk about five reasons why we need to have these conversations and the first reason why we need to have these conversations is very simple we need to respect c
hildren's intelligence they see things they're hearing things and what we know from over 50 years of research is that very young children from six months old two months old 5 years old are already perceiving not only concepts of fairness and unfairness but also Concepts about race about gender about handicapping conditions they are seeing and perceiving this they have a lot of knowledge about it and not only that do they see it they also are picking up the social constructs that go with these id
eas of race and gender and ability so let's respect their intelligence and that's a good reason why we want to have these conversations another reason we want to have these conversations is really to help children's social identities and their identities in their families and that we can observe our children and make sure that they are really having the kind of social emotional development and development within our families that we want them to have a third reason we can have these conversation
s is to really make sure that our children are getting ACC ACC information they're getting accurate information and appreciation about human diversity so anybody who's been around little kids especially in group settings will have heard this example that some kid at some point looks at another kid's lunch and says you know that's really weird kids often call things weird and you know when we hear that we can give kids accurate information about it we can say that is curry a lot of people eat Cur
ry you know I've tried it myself and I really like it we can give them words for things which is the fourth reason we want to have these conversations when we give them words for the diverse experiences they come across we're building their capacity to think critically about human diversity and what they're experiencing we're giving them a vocabulary to talk about fairness and unfairness and that's what we want to do a fifth reason why we want to have this conversation is just simply that we wan
t to be proactive with our children our children are picking up a lot of information as I've said and as I'm going to talk more about and you know the best time to bring these topics up with our children is before they have them because before they even start expressing these things to us they're seeing they're hearing so the best time is even before they bring it up but the second best time is right now so if you haven't brought it up right now would be a good time to start thinking about bring
ing it up being proactive person who is guiding your child's understanding of the world in important ways that's why we want to have these conversation we want to have these conversations because we know childhood has changed there are many generations of people listening to this webinar tonight but I can assure you that if we're all adults the world our children is growing into is so different than the world we grew into and one of the things that I've written about is the fact that we now have
a generation of children called the alpha generation and there are big Mega trends that are fundamentally changing the way childhood is happening for them and so just briefly some of these Mega Trends are these children are growing up in a United States of America where adults are going to outnumber children for the first time that is going to shape their worlds in some fundamental ways these children are growing up where there's a mega Trend where they're growing up in smaller families more co
mplex families constantly evolving families one child family in the step sibling are things that are becoming real demographic phenomena right now I can remember when I was growing up you would even hardly mention that somebody was divorced now by the time kids are six years old 30% of them have already experienced a change in their family structure because of death marriage remarriage or something and so their worlds have changed their engaging with technology is intent starting from the time t
hey are very very very young and that's a talk for another day um these children are globally connected they're exposed to a lot of things through screens this is a diverse generation this generation for children under 10 in the United States the majority of these children are already children of color that is a fact that is not going to be changed so we need to prepare all of our children to have empathy to be ready to work in a world of people who are different than themselves because they are
going to be citizens of a Nation where their generation the majority of people will be people that are not like them and so as adults we know that this is a generation that's going to be differently educated because of online experiences non-traditional certification options these are Mega trends that are influencing this generation and these are reasons why we want to influence them by having these Brave conversations and by teaching empathy so then let's stop for a moment and say what what do
es it mean to be brave what does it mean to have empathy what do we really mean with these Concepts let's think about that together and so when we think about being brave being brave is associated with the word called courage courage is from the Latin word core c o are and the original definition of courage is that you speak your mind by telling your whole heart and that's what we want to do with our children at an appropriate developmental level we want to share ideas with them we want them to
be brave and we have to be brave ourselves and Maya Angelo says that you know what without courage you can't practice any other virtue she says courage is the most important virtue of all she says you can be kind for a while you can be generous for a while you can be just for a while merciful loving for a little while but only with courage can you persistently be kind and generous and fair so being brave is quite fundamental to what we're talking about tonight I'm emphasizing being brave because
having courage is something something the research is strongly suggesting that many many parents and especially white parents need to have more of so what we find in a lot of research is that parents especially white parents are very very reluctant to talk to their children about the courageous things that we need to talk with our children about but as you've just heard me explain when you look into the future that your child is going to be entering into then you realize that you've got to prep
are your children for that world that world which is a diverse world that world which is going to require a lot of empathy and a lot of being able to put yourself in other people's shoes and in order to help our children prepare for that world we have to face our own discomfort or our own lack of know knowled we have to talk to our children explicitly about difference about race about racism about gender all of these things and so what research also finds is that parents of color are definitely
more likely to be talking to their children about these issues white parents are reluctant largely because they they're worried that they're going to say the wrong thing they want to make sure that people believe they believe in equality that they believe in the post-racial society and but what happens with this kind of approach is that it creates a vacuum of information for children which leads them to absorb biases around them and many of these biases are counter to the parents own beliefs I c
an't tell you how many times a parent a white parent has said to me that they were shocked by something their child says because children are picking up information from a lot of sources and they need us to be brave and have conversations and guide them Studies have shown that even when researchers have asked white parents to specifically talk about certain issues the parents are very reluctant to do so and the parents then turn to euphemisms like saying to the child we should be nice to every b
ody or we really care about everybody these are vague platitudes that really are not instructive for children and so we've got to move beyond that and research has shown that unless white parents specifically talk to their children that it is not having the impact that they think it is so white parents let's have more courage on the other hand a different kind of courage may be required for parents of color research yes shows that parents of color are much more likely to talk about race more bla
ck parents 65% 60% of Asians 50% of Hispanics 20% or more of the of whites will talk to their kids about these difficult issues but a different kind of Courage might be required because many of us as adults have experienced racial trauma and a lot of us know a lot about discriminatory practices we know about discrimination that has happened to us in housing it's happened to us in education it's happened to us in healthc care it's happened to us in interaction with police and the criminal justice
system so we know a a lot about racism so it takes courage for us to talk with our children in a way that more highlights resilience so everybody needs courage in this situation then let's move on to think about building empathy because it takes courage to build empathy with our children Plato said I love this quote he said the highest form of knowledge is empathy because it requires us to suspend our egos and live in somebody else's world it's the ability to understand and share the feelings o
f other people I love that somebody else I want to cite another resource for you tonight is a woman named Michelle borba she wrote a book called The unselfie and she said the problem with the selfie is that it puts yourself in the center of the world and if we want kids to have more empathy we need to have more unselfie and she says low levels of empathy are rampant in our culture and that that's why we have so much bullying and cheating and weak moral reasoning and anxiety and depression and sh
e says we need more empathy and fewer selfies so you might be thinking hm even my 15-year-old isn't showing a lot of empathy well you know empathy is a process that begins in early childhood but it's also a lifetime growth opportunity those of us if you've watched the news tonight you know there are a lot of adults out there on television that still need to express more empathy but as we often say empathy is caught not taught and it is a process so when and how are children developing empathy ho
w do they start to develop empathy well there's a lot of milestones in empathy and I want to refer you to 0o to3 website which is 0 to .org to really look more at some of these Milestones of empathy because empathy really starts with how our children are connecting and feeling accepted by US during infancy it helps them to feel secure we also know that empathy happens when children start to understand that they are a separate person around six months old these children start doing social referen
cing social referencing is the reason why the preschool teacher tells you to go home and leave the child happily with a smile and don't linger because when the child is doing social referencing to you and you're hanging around looking anxious giving 25 hugs to the kid you're communicating to the kid that maybe this isn't a safe place to be after all so that's an example of social referencing by the time kids are two years old they've developed a theory of mind and they start realizing they have
their own thoughts and feelings that's why they can say know they have their own thoughts and feelings and they realize that they have their thoughts which are different from other people's thoughts they also start to realize that there's common thoughts among humans we all have happiness we all have sadness they start to realize that you know things we can do to impact others that's why some kids you'll see them hugging each other if somebody's upset and so forth so this is the development of e
mpathy and there's a lot of things that you can do to help your children develop empathy one thing we can do is we can empathize with our child you know a lot of times when I'm in the grocery store somewhere I hear people telling their kid don't do this don't do that you know or the the child is scared something like let's say a dog one of the ways we can help show empathy is to say to our child are you feeling scared of that dog the dog is barking pretty loud let's hold hands what until we walk
by we talk about feelings we suggest how kids can show empathy so you know what your sister's sad because you snatched that toy away maybe we could give her another toy to play with so we're modeling empathy and things we can do um as we understanding that other people have feelings and that other people have reactions to what we're doing so this goes on through childhood through adolescence that we're constantly learning more about how to take the perspective of other people we're constantly l
earning this and we have patience because it is a lifelong process empathy has a lot to do with how people perceive other people and how children are developing race awareness and social Consciousness I know a lot of us are still wanting to hold on to this idea that children don't see race that they just love each other but guess what that is against 50 years of research that shows that children yeah they do see race and they start seeing it at a very young age because guess what they're intelli
gent by the age of two kids start to hear and absorb these messages about race they start to hear and absorb stereotypes by the age of four they're already putting labels on different groups and having thoughts about what causes a disability or different skin tones or gender by five they know what it means to be One race or another they know the social connotations of race and by six seven8 they've gained a lot of information by nine and 10 a lot of their attitudes are solidified and this contin
ues on this is why we have to be proactive with our children this is why let's think about their Futures let's not think about our past past and let's think that in the future we're helping our children we're raising children we're teaching children to be in the 21st century not the 19th and 20th centuries preparing children for the future I love what Abraham Lincoln says the best way to predict that future is to created it so in my work I've done all of these studies about the demographic reali
ties and things that aren't going to change but what can change is how we live out and live within those demographic realities and that's what we can create so let's think about how we can do this and how we can do this together and there's lots of suggestions and things we can actually do number one let's speak into the silence silence can hurt silence can really hurt silence robs children of vocabulary that they need to talk about and ask questions about what's troubling them if you've ever be
en around children of color even in the pre School many children of color have already heard disparaging or confusing comments about their hair about their names about certain experiences and silence hers because silence requires them to figure it out on their own when they have such a limited understanding of the world all around them us silence hurts silence teaches fear to all children because all children come to conclude that certain topics are so dangerous that even the adults are scared t
o talk about it silence fors his children to rely upon other sources of information and not you so they're picking up stuff from the internet they're picking up stuff from screens they're getting information from other children from the television they're not getting it from you and a lot of information they pick up may be inaccurate it may be stereotyped you want to guide your children you want to guide them so an important way that you guide them is that you speak into the and you also listen
listening carefully is very important and you listen without judgment or overreaction well I had a chance to practice this recently with a great nephew of mine who was seven who was telling me he thought I was pretty and he was also suggesting that was kind of strange because I was dark skinned and you know you usually light-skinned black people are prettier and usually white people are even prettier than that remember this is not a child I'm raising this is another relative it's important to li
sten without judgment without overreaction to find out what they know to find out what they feel to help them talk through these feelings giving them opportunities to self-regulate it's really important things that we hear from young children some of of you know that recently the new movie came out the Little Mermaid and you realized that there was a lot of backlash because this little mermaid had an Ariel that was a person of color and you know there was so much backlash about this fictional fi
sh girl that even you two had to hide the dislike counter because they were bombarded with racist comments and a million and a half dislikes let me tell you this is a fictional character children of course heard this we think they don't but they do and when they make these comments again it's an opportunity they find out what they heard and also that opportunity to give them factual information according to their developmental level to give children honest information in age and individually app
ropriate ways another thing we hear from young children and that we heard a lot of in recent years is children coming around using a term China virus China virus and this idea of this virus being something that is Chinese in nature and that Asian people have this and again this is an opportunity for us to provide factual information the Corona virus covid-19 affects people all over the world all kinds of people so we listen carefully we ask questions we respond with simp simple straightforward a
nswers and we proceed in small steps and we proceed over a lifetime we also do something important as family members we communicate our values we want children to know where we stand in our family we do this in our classroom we behave this way this is what's fair in our family This Is How We Do fairness in our classroom really important and we keep checking in with kids this isn't a oneandone conversation you were Brave you had that one conversation it's over no this is a lifetime of conversatio
ns and because you started the conversation when the child was young the child now trust you to have that that conversation we can expect many conversations through childhood we also want to provide our children with many opportunities for expression have you heard of this idea of giving our children Windows mirrors and sliding glass doors this is an idea that was initially introduced by a woman named Emily style and then it built upon by a woman named rudine Sims Bishop this idea of giving chil
dren Windows mirrors and sliding glass doors mirrors are important because we want to give children opportunities to see themselves to see characters like themselves to experience their own culture to F pride in their own family we want to give children mirrors to have those experiences we also want to give children windows we want to give them windows so they can peek into other people's experiences so they can learn about the outer world so they can see how other cultures and people with other
abilities conduct their lives we want to give them windows into those worlds we can do that with books with films we can do that with taking our children to various cultural type festivals lots of ways we can provide expressions for children we also want to give our children sliding glass doors sliding glass doors give children more of an expansion and a personal experience with other people's cultures sliding glass doors helps them go into other people's experiences one way that we do that for
our children is we give them the gift of many cross group friendships this is really important research has demonstrated how important cross-group friendships really are research has demonstrated that when children have friends from different cultural religious ability groups that they're less likely to show prejudice and discrimination toward those groups and they've even done longitudinal studies even with adolescence that's showing that kids who have had cross group friendships were less lik
ely to develop certain kinds of biases and while we're talking about cross-group friendships I hope that you're being brave to have cross group friendships of your own and making sure that you're again modeling and being that experience that you're showing for your children that leads us to the question are we ready for this are we ready to have these Brave conversations are we ready to demonstrate empathy in situations where we encounter ideas about people and things that are different from wha
t we typically experience can we let children know that there are people working on these various issues and so forth that they're concerned about at their own developmental level we can facilitate Brave conversations with other adults with other parents and we can facilitate these conversations with our children as well what we don't want to do is we don't want to shush them we don't want to silence them we don't want to shame them we don't want want to do nothing we're trying to make life bett
er for this next Generation we're trying to come forward with courage with commitment with compassion we are bringing knowledge and wisdom that we have we're adults we're not powerless in this situation we can be game changers for these children for these Alpha children going into the 21st century we can be architects of the change that they can experience in the way the United States of America is going to be and we can have hope and express this hope with our children so as I promised we're dr
opping into the chat some resources that we hope that you will enjoy to continue the conversation that this can become a movement among all of us as family members as we work with our children remember Frederick Douglas says power concedes nothing without a demand and so we're giving that demand into the universe as we're creating these brand new children these Brave children a generation of Brave children who are showing a lot of empathy for other people in the world thank you so much for liste
ning to me this evening Aura thank you so very much let me uh clear the screen here there we are so folks can see the two of us um I was I I was struck by a number of things um uh when we when we spoke in in anticipation of this evening and we were talking about your topic and I said um what's on your mind these days and this was this is really front of mind for you in a lot of ways um um what what strikes me is how unique it is um as compared to many of the messages that we all receive as paren
ts in that it is a hopeful positive optimistic empowering look at how we can make a difference in the lives of our children um not one that um sort of T takes the idea of risky conversations and makes it feel that there are um punitive effects if we don't get it right so you're telling us we can do it and I greatly appreciate absolutely thank you so we have some questions here from our audience let me Dive Right In um why is it that we find these conversations scary many of us have challenging a
nd provocative conversations at work with adult family and other parts of life what causes us nervousness um why do we feel like the stakes are higher maybe in these conversations with our children you know with our children we're one W to get it right you know we we're all so deeply caring about our children we want it we want to get it right and a lot of times if you're having a conversation with another adult you understand that you're both in a learning mode but with children we see ourselve
s as authority figures we don't always have the answers and so we're kind of afraid to tread that it we may come up on areas that we don't feel comfortable with and we don't know about and so maybe we're not going to be strong Authority and so you know we need to risk Being Human with our children and you know depending on their age and their developmental level maybe we need to share with them I don't know let's find out I think that sometimes we're afraid to do that with our kids and our kids
can be forgiving right if we if we admit our own mistakes so that we're you know maybe we don't get it right the first time try again exactly yeah yeah um for um caregivers who may not live with their child um how do we pick our moments to have these Brave conversations if we don't get a lot of time for example with a child um you know the the the um writer says these can be tough conversations to have with limited time and reduced opportunity for followup so any suggestion for for those folks y
eah and with limited time you know I think probably the more limited time the more you want to listen you know I think sometimes when you're living with kids we're constantly talking to them and giving them instructions and telling them to do this not being with your child all the time and I I find this with nieces and nephews that I'm not with all the time in some ways I listen to them more because I I need to find out I need to fill in a lot of blanks for myself so I think if we listen to chil
dren they're going to start sharing their experiences they'll start sharing what they're thinking about they'll start sharing questions that they have and the more that we shut our mouth and open our ears I think things will naturally evolve and opportunities to you know a brave conversation isn't an hour conversation it isn't a 45 minute webinar sometimes it's two minutes right that's wonderful that's wonderful what do you recommend if um in a in a a multiparent household for example what do yo
u recommend if one parent does not support these sort of Brave conversations with a child um waiting to do them in private might not capture the teachable moment H um you know sometimes it's unavoidable having you know sometimes it's the child that's going to lead not the parents and the parents maybe not agreeing on things so for example if you're in the grocery store in that moment you got to say something so you know you can start thinking right now what you might say in a situation like that
and also even without um if there's parental disagreement about how to handle things you still have the opportunities to choose books that children are reading you have the opportunity to choose films that children are watching you have the opportunity to take your child to community events you have the opportunity to take your child to the museum I've been to your Museum you know if I come to your Museum I'm going to encounter things that I'm unfamiliar with so there's lots of ways to introduc
e your child to ideas of difference ideas of having empathy um lots of ways to do it nowadays that's wonderful um for slightly older children perhaps how can we as caregivers explain the poor behavior of other adults um those in the media or maybe those in our own lives in circles who are not good at expressing empathy yeah and I think that's where we can again express our values you know in our family we don't yell at each other the way they seem to be doing on TV you know in our family we don'
t interrupt each other constantly the way they seem to be doing on television so you can express your values about things that kids are seeing all the time that's wonderful and uh very useful um one of our audience members asks if you have any particular children's book recommendations for young children ages uh birth to five years in the material that I've provided you in the followup there is a list of children's books but I also encourage you I mean to if you Google children's books about dis
ability children there's so much literature that's out there today also just as museums are powerful learning tools libraries are powerful learning tools as well and so even though I am providing you a few examples of books it's easy to find books at your local library or um bookstore so there's lots of materials out there but I have started you off with the few in the handout that I've provided you that's fantastic well our our question asker happens to be a librarian so shout out to her for ma
king sure she's expanding the collection in wonderful ways um floraa you said that silence teaches fear um so could we think of these Brave conversations as a a way of modeling for our children so that they um are able and inspired to have their own Brave conversations when we're not around and and how how might that play out for them M absolutely you know that goes back to what the rabbi said who's going to stand up for me if I don't stand up for myself but yet if I'm only thinking about myself
then who am I so you know and I I'm G to say this in the context of children of color but it could be any child you know it's not unusual for a very young child of color to have people say disrespectful things to them that they don't know how to process and I think this is one reason why the research so clearly shows that parents of color are more having these conversations because if you're listening to your child they're going to come home and say these experiences you know Johnny said my lun
ch was weird because it's a food that they're not familiar with or you know Susie said that your mom wears funny clothes you know this kind of thing so that that um you know by teaching children words giving them vocabulary you know because you say to your child you're arming your child when you send your child of color out into the world you are arming your child with words and responses so that they can have a strong sense of self so that they can be resilient people have been doing this for 2
00 years okay how do you prepare your child to face a world that is not always Pleasant for you and you got to start doing this at a young age sadly so I think that it does by being brave yourself is helping your children learn to be brave wonderful what if a child is resistant to these Brave conversations um should we plow ahead Don't Force It um does that mean the time is not right or the topic is too challenging how can we temper ourselves well I think if we're leading with listening the chil
d is going to bring up things that they're curious about that they're wondering about that they heard that they saw so I think that breaks down the resistance because you're you're responding to them in that way so I think that's one way that you're not just going to sit away around one day and say to your fouryear old you know I was thinking about race I want to talk to feel about race that's not what we're doing right yeah indeed Laura how how might this topic um translate to environments outs
ide the Home Educators uh place like the Discovery Museum where we're in contact we have so many staff members who are interact with visitors uh and families every day how can we um help Advance the cause of Brave conversations when we are not the parent oh so many ways that you are doing this uh you well know the answer to this question there are so many ways that you do this first of all you're providing a rich array of Multicultural materials that children can see hear touch interact with and
so talk about using vocabulary as a way of building PE children's ability to take the perspective of others there's so many things that one Encounters in a Museum that requires perspective taking so I think that great museums like yours do this almost naturally um although I obviously there's a lot of expertise that goes into doing that you have materials written and Unwritten you have things on the wall that families read or that your um Museum guides read with children or with families when t
hey're coming so there's so many ways that you provide opportunities for people to take the perspective of others and also to have those mirrors and those windows and lots of that in a museum setting that's great and it sounds like a lot of that would work in a classroom too for the Educators that are absolutely not just not just Traditional School classrooms but also summer camp art camp you know so many EX group experiences that children had I mean you know overnight camp when kids start going
to overcamp overnight camp tons of opportunities to help them learn how to take the perspective of others and consider the impact of their behavior and the reactions they're getting from other people as a result of what they say or do fantastic um I have one more question for you tonight we see so many examples of parents trying to prevent their kids and others from being exposed to information that represents values that are different from their own how do we help parents talk to kids about as
sessing those values and coming to their own conclusions in other words to become Discerning yeah everything we've been talking about is critical thinking you know everything we've been talking about really has a foundation of supporting your child as a critical thinker and so that you know as we're listening to people as children are sharing their experiences as they are remarking on what they're seeing and hearing in the world I I think it's pretty impossible for your children not to be expose
d to things and values that may be different from your own if your child is in any kind of group setting whatsoever they're going to hear another child so forget about TV internet and all of that which are tremendous influences on even young children but if they if they're interacting with almost anyone in a group setting they're going to ultimately come into contact with something different than you may prefer and again that gives you the opportunity to say without being judgmental how we do th
ings in this classroom how we do things in our home you know without being judgmental and so there's um I think it's virtually impossible to protect your children from coming across messages other than the ones you might want them to receive we want our this a really yeah this is an important beginning conversation this webinar today so I hope people really will dig deeper and that we really create an army of parents that are just strong and brave and having these conversations so that we can cr
eate an army of children that are just so resilient and so ready to be responsive to others and having empathy toward others thank you for inviting me tonight thank you so very much Vora Dr velora Washington um we will follow up the um the resources that you have prepared we will be sending out an email actually to everyone so we'll have that uh in hand and adding in anything else that came up during the talk tonight that we can reference um likewise there will be a survey going out to all of yo
u in the audience we um uh invite you to just take a moment if you would and give us your feedback so that we can continue to present topics and formats that are um working for you and helping you and supporting you and your family um thank you very much for joining us for the Discovery Museum speaker series we really look forward to seeing you next time good night
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