We have all been a victim of stereotyping at some point in our lives. Be it because of the color of our skin, the color of our eyes, our geographical location… the list goes on. Stereotyping typically makes an appearance early on in childhood. Children experience some form of stereotyping and prejudice at school where they are surrounded by other children from all walks of life. Students join clubs that fit their social liking, they play sports with like children, they eat lunch with their in-group. In some way, this categorizes groups from other groups and in turn brings about the opportunity for prejudice or stereotyping. There becomes a pecking order of sorts. Children get together and talk about the children in the out-groups.
Where do they learn this type of behavior? We can look at society right now and see how divided we are on the grand scale. Democrat’s vs Republicans vs Liberals, white vs black vs yellow. We learn from our home environments how to treat others. We learn from our home environments about politics and other affairs. According to an article on children’s social stereotyping, children learn this behavior by the time they are 4 years old. (Bigler & Liben, 2007) Bigler and Liben discuss a new theoretical model that can help address the issue of stereotyping and prejudice. Developmental Intergroup Theory (DIT) looks at the reasons children categorize certain attributes of a person such as race, gender, age and even a person’s appeal and how to direct a child’s attention to correlations that are related. Bigler & Liben call the gender, race and age traits meaningless because they have nothing to do with who a person really is. So, how do we fix this problem of prejudice and stereotyping that has been around since the beginning of time? We may never really know.
Bigler, R. S., & Liben, L. S. (2007). Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children’s social stereotyping and prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(3), 162-166. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00496.x
In response to your post Stereotyping Since the Beginning of Time, I agree, we have all experienced stereotyping and discrimination, and it does begin at a young age. Yet, children are not born judgmental, children are not born prejudicial, or discriminatory. Children are born a blank slate. Somewhere along the way they are molded, shaped by the world around them and influenced by the adults in their lives and the things they see. With time comes stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, however, these are not just learned traits, they are also inherent ones. In our early history, humankind had an understandable fear of the unknown. Those groups of strangers we had not met before could very well do us harm. If people did not look, act, or dress like us they than they were not to be easily trusted. As reported by Michael Schreiner, “That irrational fear of the Other, a fear whose roots lie in our evolutionary past, is the unconscious choice to move backwards, to regress rather than progress, along the continuum of human insight and knowledge. It’s a folding inward into a clan mentality rather than a reaching outward into a universal mentality.” (Schreiner, 2017). So, in the past, we feared those that were different from us as a way to protect ourselves from the dangers of the world.
In the modern era, we all now agree this is an outdated idea. We do not fear people simply because they look, sound, or act a little differently than we do, or do we? In short, I think we do, and if this year’s election is any indication we are getting less and less civilized about our fears. Part of the prejudice we feel are inherited fears and part are currently developing fears and prejudice. The worst part is that our children are watching, and they too are learning this horrible habit.
The development of prejudice and discriminatory actions begins early. According to Augoustinos and Rosewarne, predominantly black/white prejudices “While this pro-white, anti-black racial bias increases significantly in the early school years” (Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001 ), but this changes as a child matures, “it has been generally found that around 7 years of age there is a modification in the relatively dichotomized positive-white, negative-black response. At around age 7 there is a decline in racial and ethnic bias, demonstrated by a decrease in the number of positive attributions to one’s own group and negative attributions to another ethnic group. (Augoustinos and Rosewarne, 2001). So, when a child hits around seven there is a shift from black and white thinking to “us” and “other” thinking, which has less to do with race and more to do with the familiar and the unfamiliar.
If it is around the age of seven that we develop the “us” and “them” mentality, then it is at this age that we need to begin addressing these attitudes. We have a golden window of opportunity to try to adjust the ideas and attitudes of children towards others that are not like them. This goes for matters of race, matters of jock vs. nerd, Christian vs. pagan, and so on. From about the age of seven through adolescence is the time we can make the most difference in a child’s perspective on others. According to Hope, Skook, and Jagers, “Adolescence is marked by identity exploration, where young people consider who they are in relation to the world around them. During this time of discovery, adolescents refine their own personal identity and beliefs in multiple areas of functioning” (Hope, Skook, & Jagers, 2015). We need to help them define themselves and others in new ways, more unifying ways.
It is imperative that we begin to make these types of changes if we ever hope to create a society without the ever-present scourge of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. We all carry these inherent fears, but we no longer need to fear the tribes we compete with for mere survival. Today, we need to learn to look to all of the “others” with hope. However, this is hard when discrimination rears its ugly head daily. Hope and his colleagues further reported that “racial/ethnic discrimination is a common experience for adolescents of color in schools and other public settings given the overabundance of negative stereotypes that situate Black and Brown youth as dangerous and threatening to society” (Hope et. al., 2015).
Parents have a big influence on children and this can be seen over and over again. In fact, my grandmother used to have a saying that summed it up nicely “Little monkeys do what the big monkeys do”, meaning that we learn by example. This goes for things parents mean to show us and for those things they do not mean to show us. We pick up from observing both their conscious and unconscious actions. For example, like the actions and attitudes revealed by our explicit and implicit biases. Interestingly, according to Sinclair, Dunn, and Lowery, “parents’ implicit racial attitudes may have an even bigger impact on children’s views than their explicit racial attitudes because parents are unaware of implicit biases and, therefore, unable to consciously censor them” (Sinclair, Dunn, & Lowery, 2005). Meaning that our actions, intentional and unintentional change the worldview of the children in our lives.
Everything we knowingly do, and unknowingly do influences the development of the children around us. It is up to us to try to start eliminating prejudice in the world of the future. If a child in our care begins to develop biases and prejudices, we must ask ourselves what are they mirroring from us? What do we need to change? Is it something we are doing, or is it something we are letting them be exposed to in our environment?
References
Augoustinos, Martha, and Dana Louise Rosewarne. “Stereotype knowledge and prejudice in children.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 19, no. 1 (2001): 143-156.
Hope, E. C., Skoog, A. B., & Jagers, R. J. (2015). “It’ll Never Be the White Kids, It’ll Always Be Us” Black High School Students’ Evolving Critical Analysis of Racial Discrimination and Inequity in Schools. Journal of Adolescent Research, 30(1), 83-112.
Schreiner, M. (2017, February 02). Fear Of The Other. Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://evolutioncounseling.com/fear-of-the-other/
Sinclair, S., Dunn, E., & Lowery, B. (2005). The relationship between parental racial attitudes and children’s implicit prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41(3), 283-289.