Book Talk: Promoting Race-Conscious Conversations in White Families through a Preschool-Based Reading Curriculum

Abstract

White parents in the United States are unlikely to engage their preschool children in proactive discussions about race, instead waiting to follow their children’s lead in broaching these topics. This passive approach risks missing critical opportunities to build children’s positive racial identities and interrupt bias formation. This study aimed to increase parent-child discussions of race in white families in the U.S. through the implementation of a race-conscious book-reading curriculum in preschool classrooms. We hypothesized that children’s proactive exposure to race-conscious content in preschool would have a spillover effect on parent-child conversations about race at home, such that white preschoolers and their parents would have more race-conscious conversations following the implementation of a classroom book-reading curriculum. Participants consisted of 29 monoracial white parents of preschool children, most of whom were highly educated, high-income mothers. Each day during the study period, parents reported any race-related conversations they had with their child. Results demonstrated that race-conscious conversations between white parents and their preschoolers increased following the implementation of the book reading curriculum. Book reading in preschool prompted children’s bids for conversation about race with their parents on the same day, and these child-initiated bids resulted in more race-conscious parent-child conversations than bids initiated by parents or other adults. Further, families with more child-initiated bids had more total conversations about race than families with fewer conversations started by children. These findings suggest that white preschool children are capable of engaging in discussions about race and school-based socialization may be a promising avenue for supporting these conversations.