Acceptance

There are few things more utterly pointless in life then brewing and spreading hatred towards what people are as opposed to what they do, hatreds which often come with a healthy dollop of hypocrisy.

Take for example the racist who things naught of going to the Indian takeaway for his tea or the homophobe who 'allows' a gay surgeon to save a loved ones life.

It's all jolly pointless and in all honesty rather ridiculous. Yet it doesn't unfortunately stop there for it isn't just manners (or indeed lack of them in many an instance) that children learn from home they often gain political alignment, football team, bad language and prejudices. Often parents neglect to consider the vulnerable empty canvas that young children are who can become moulded by actions and thoughts of their parents, many a behaviour is learned and mirrored for that is how we learn. Think of the Toddler cooking in their play kitchen or bathing their doll then think of the child in the playground spitting vulgarity and learned prejudices that they most likely don't even understand.

So take Thing Two recently. I was asking her who her best friends are at school and what they looked like. She pointed into the direction of one of them and said 'there she is, stood next to the girl in the green coat, she has plaits in her hair' there were many many children in her class line. Both her friend and The girl her friend was stood next to had something in common. They were both black. It didn't even occur to Thing Two to drop that into her description nor to single the girls out because of it anymore then she would have described her other friends as having peachy faces. Yet that is infact the key, It simply isn't an issue nor a defining factor. Long ago she once asked why some people have brown faces to which I replied that everybody is different just like people have different colour hair and eyes from each other and its just the way we're made. It made sense to her so she just accepted it.

They didn't understand the term 'Paki' that they had heard bandied around the playground. We took care to explain that It's not so much the word but the usage of it insofar as to say, on It's own it is shortened form of Pakistani which in itself is in our opinion no more offensive then scouse, jock, cockney, yank etc It's only offensive when the speaker means it in a derogatory sense, which is wrong and ridiculous.

Thing One was recently watching some tripe on the television I think it was entitled 'Mr and Mrs' with celebrities and their other halves. One of the couples were two men. He asked why they were both men to which I explained that love is love regardless it doesn't matter whether It's man/woman, woman/woman or man/man It's the love that matters as love is love.'oh you mean lesbians and gays?' And with that he continued watching his programme. It's that easy to normalized a child's perception and understanding yet sadly It's also that easy to cloud and tarnish It too.

They understand that it is a persons actions that they should be judged by not their skin colour, race or sexuality as that would be as pointless and as absurd as judging someone by their eye colour, hair colour or height.

The Toddler however takes it all a step further ...

With him love is inter species and homosexual.



I love The Spawn's acceptance of diversity in life and their lack of prejudice despite being surrounded by it outside in society. Part of being a parent is to help repair and create a better society. A large part of prejudice is ignorance and there is no excuse for ignorance.