This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Imagine your child asks you out of the blue, "If we speak Spanish, will they take you away?" Or imagine them suddenly asking what an offensive slur means. When a child asks these types of questions, it can be difficult to trace them back to a specific news story or event.
The question itself tells you that your child is trying to make sense of something they heard. As parents, we've each had some version of these conversations with our young children. The fear takes different forms in different families.
For some children, it's a question about whether their family may be harmed because of the language they speak. For others, it may be about their skin color, gender, religion or the person they love. Underneath is often the same concern that young people across the country are grappling with: What do these messages mean for people like me?
Children whose identities aren't directly targeted are listening too. Public discourse teaches children which differences are treated as ordinary, which are treated as suspect and who is allowed to belong without having to explain themselves. As psychologists who study and treat anxiety and depression as well as research resilience among diverse groups of children and families, we frequently hear versions of this question in our work and at our kitchen tables.
Parents cannot control every message their child encounters, but they can help their child understand what those messages do and do not mean. Parents often imagine that an important conversation will announce itself clearly: "Something I heard on the news made me worried about being Latina." Usually, it doesn't. A younger child may ask whether a classmate's family is safe or whether something that happened to someone else could happen to them too.
An older child may repeat something they saw online, make a joke or suddenly go quiet when a topic related to identity comes up. Children often don't have the vocabulary to name a fear directly or the confidence that a topic is safe to raise. We've seen this pattern again and again when we work with families in the clinic: Teasing out a fear by going sideways, such as through someone else's situation or a hypothetical, can allow a child to gauge how an adult will react before deciding whether to ask their real question.
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