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Teaching Tolerance
Guiding Your Preteen to Care, NOT Hate By Kelly Burgess
Today's world can be a scary one for a child. While the national debate on tolerance picked up steam with the Columbine tragedy, war and terrorism have given it an international tone.
The society that is most integral to our children's lives – school – has long been rife with instances of intolerance. Teasing, exclusion and bullying are early examples of the results of intolerance. Now, with news programs filled with the events in Iraq, children may get the impression that Muslims, people born abroad or even all people of color represent a danger to them.
Complicating this fact may be your own neighborhood. We are a country of white suburbs and urban neighborhoods divided upon ethnic and racial lines. If your child only sees people who look like him, how does he learn to respect others rather than fear them?
In the spring of 2000, the Guilford School District started a program called "Names Can Hurt Us" where high school students are trained to speak to younger children about their experiences with prejudice. It is a pilot program of the Anti-Defamation League's A Classroom of Difference series. A Classroom of Difference is in its 15th year, and more than 350,000 teachers in the United States have gone through its workshops, which means that 13 to 16 million students have been positively impacted.
Nelson was impressed with the results of the new program. "Parents spend practically every moment trying to guide their children in all areas of life," she says. "So when something like this comes from a parent, often it's just one more thing. When it comes from other kids, they pay attention."
One of the parents who helped put the program together was Rosemary Alpert. She has a personal interest in teaching tolerance. Because she's Catholic and her husband is Jewish, they are raising their two children to embrace both religions.
"For very young children, the lesson can be as simple as teaching them not to tease," says Alpert. "As they get older, that can be expanded upon to include the issue of cliques and standing up for those who are being left out."
