Kids Say The Darndest Things... Sing Them Too

They are blissfully unaware, unedited and even painfully honest. Sometimes it’s cute…like when my daughter Lexi at three years old asked my father-in-law, who has a generous midsection, if he had a baby inside his tummy. Sometimes it’s not so cute like when my son Jonah asked me why I looked different when I woke up in the morning compared to after I got dressed. (Answer – bronzer and lipstick) “You look like an old mommy in the morning,” Jonah recently said. My daughter confirmed this as well.

But when my kids came home from camp singing songs they learned on the bus – hand clapping, rhyming songs, I was shocked. “What was that you just sang?” I asked Jonah, suspiciously. When he repeated the lyrics with the hand movements to create “Chinese and Japanese eyes” I was horrified. The tunes actually sounded remotely familiar. Did I sing those at camp too? I don’t remember my mom getting tense about my tunes. But now they seemed radioactive.

The more I told my kids not to sing the songs because they were mean and hurt people’s feelings, the louder they sang them. When I tried to ignore the offensive lyrics singing hoping that the lack of my response would get them to stop, they sang even louder.

For the record, we live in a very progressive and tolerant community. My town in New Jersey is known for its social activism and diverse population of African Americans, Gays, Lesbians, Asians and Jews. It is not uncommon to see a gay couple with adopted African American children from nearby Newark. Our town population would make for a great Benetton ad – and I love that. My children are exposed to and interact with lots of people who do not look like themselves. But they had no sense that their words were in any way hurtful.

Needless to say, I was horrified when my kids broke out one of their offensive tunes in the middle of my local Starbucks. At first I nearly choked on my latte. Then I loudly reprimanded my kids. People stared. I wanted to scream out, “I swear I don’t teach them this!” But no one would believe me -- people always blame the parents. Isn’t racism taught at home?

The further we get away from summer, the less they’ve been singing the songs. But now both of my kids are extremely curious about people with what they call “brown skin.” “Carly’s nanny has brown skin,” Jonah says. He also tells me about other children in his class with brown skin. When we got a new nanny, he wanted to know if she would have brown or peach skin. (We’ve had several nannies from the Caribbean, one from Colombia and now one from Utah).

I like to write it off as simply kids’ curiosity. My daughter tells me about the girl with red hair in her class. She now wants red hair too. My son’s best friend Lilly told her mom that she likes the “brown skinned girl” in class with the “puffy hair.” But in our culturally sensitive society today, alarms go off when our kids point out differences in other people and label them. Jonah just started Hebrew school and now divides the world into Jewish and Christian. He hasn’t learned about Muslim or Hindu yet.

I give my “Everyone in the world looks different, practices different religions, believes in different things, eats different foods and that’s what makes people special” speech all of the time, but frankly it still doesn’t make me feel less embarrassed when my children publicly and very loudly point out different people in the neighborhood. And it’s not just color or weight. “Why is that man sleeping on the street with dirty clothes?” Jonah asked me the other day as we walked through New York City.

While we adults have been taught to not see color or differences and maybe even step around the homeless person on the street without even a glance, children do pay attention to everyone. And as long as they are taught sensitivity and tolerance, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

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