Please be gentle with me if you reply, I’ve got quite bad anxiety and have almost been in tears with this.
DD recently turned 3, and is fairly stereotypically ‘girly’ in her toy/hobby choices. She loves Peppa, Frozen (Anna and Elsa were the first characters she was really into), her doll, unicorn stuff, sparkly stuff, things like that.
Recently she seems to have noticed skin colour, and when we were looking at dolls together online, she said ‘that dolly is brown. I don’t like that one.’ I casually said something like, yes, dolls are like people, skin colours can be different. We live in a very white area, and so she’s not really exposed to people of other ethnic backgrounds, but I have made an effort to buy story books with families/children of different ethnic backgrounds in, and the same with the television she sees.
Today we saw an advert featuring a Black baby, and I said how beautiful they were and how I remember her being that age. She looked up and said ‘I don’t like brown babies.’
I froze, and felt utterly mortified. I said not to be silly, that all babies are beautiful, but inside my heart fell out. I’ve been fretting about it ever since. I would hate for someone to think she heard anything like that at home, I know small children sometimes make embarrassing comments but that could be really upsetting for someone if she said anything like that when we’re out and about. She can be forthright in her opinions (she told me she didn’t like my hair after I had it cut) but I just felt absolutely gutted to hear her say that. I know she’s only little but it’s awful to hear, my older DC never made a comment like this, so it’s really weird for me that she’s spoken like this.
Has anyone got any advice?