Between the lines: teach your child to celebrate being different

I recently had coffee with friends who were emigrating to a small town in Australia. Aside from envying how the idyllic environment would influence the positive growth of their young child, we also pondered what it would be like for a Chinese child to grow up in a community where he would be the only non-Caucasian child.

We considered the need for my friend to stock up on books about Chinese children living in a non-Chinese community.

Wouldn't it be ideal to find picture books showing a Chinese child who enriched his life and those in his community through acknowledging their cultural differences as well as their common humanity, we thought.

We explored the range of books featuring Chinese children, and only came up wit those littered with Asian stereotypes: studious girl, dutiful boy, racist bully, tiger mum, new immigrant family, and so on.

My friends and I then reflected on our own childhoods in Canada, where we were among a handful of non-Caucasian children at school. We realised that back then, all we wanted to do was simply assimilate. Would a fictional story showing a Chinese child being different, even if in a positive way (cherishing best of both worlds), have made any impact on our younger selves?

Fitting in is part of the universal experience of growing up. It's not until we reach college that individuality is valued, and even considered "cool".

In the end, my friends and I agreed that perhaps the best books for their child would be those that celebrate differences. Picture book creators are amazingly inventive when it comes to the using anthropomorphic characters to show differences.