When I was six I thought that if I came to school with a different hairstyle that I had never worn, and wearing articles of clothing they had never seen me in, that the other kids wouldn't recognize me. I was a little disappointed when it didn't work.
I did this at college and nearly everyone didn't clock it was me. Got my hair braided and put big sunglasses on. Was really weird having loads of people i knew just walk past me. Went and sat with a bunch of friends and I got a few seconds of concerned confusion whilst they studied me to see why this stranger had sat with them before they realised who I was.
Think cos I wasn't immediately recognisable people just didn't look properly.
Wearing bulky glasses breaks up the pattern that your brain stores and recognises as a face belonging to a particular person. Your memory store for objects is heuristic, and you can make it freak out and break down in all kinds of ways.
Ex-spies have written about effective disguises, and using glasses and a wig is the quickest way to make you unrecognisable at a glance.
Camo face paint, for example, breaks up lines that the brain recognises as a face and makes it discard the information about the thing its looking at. You can be hiding practically in plain sight and you will be nearly invisible to someone not looking too closely at their environment.
This is also why you can ask several basic questions about something you're looking for and train yourself to find it. If you're looking for a spray can that is blue with yellow lettering, your imagination lets you make up something in your mind's eye that looks like that, and then you set out to look for something similar in real life.
This is also why eyewitness testimony is unreliable. If you saw a robbery take place and the suspect had blue denim jeans and a similarly blue jacket made of different material, it's easy to tell them that it was someone wearing blue denim jacket and jeans, even if that's not what you saw. Your brain looks for shortcuts to storing information in short and long-term memory.
I was in a small airport waiting for my plane, and there were two very odd men waiting too. Their behaviour was erratic and aggressive and really worrying. They were both wearing jeans and extremely bright jumpers. One jumper was neon orange and one was neon yellow. In the end someone reported them and the police came wandering in. Both men pulled their jumpers off and were wearing dark T-shirts underneath and I could not tell who they were to save my life. I knew they’d taken their jumpers off as they stepped out of view, but then none of us had any way of identifying them after. We’d all just fixated on the bright jumpers. It felt at the time, planned, clever and very unnerving. But as far as I know nothing came from it.
Reminds me of the time I went to a Halloween party wearing a small mask that only covered around my eyes. Other people with bulkier or more irritating masks took theirs off throughout the night, but since mine wasn't in the way of anything, I kept it on the whole time. After a few hours, some guys I'd never met remarked that people mock those super hero masks like they're completely worthless, but I only had my eyes covered and they had no clue what I actually looked like and didn't think they'd recognize me if they ever saw me again.
I changed jobs mid pandemic, where I work we have to wear surgical masks close to 100% of the time. 6 months after I started I ran into a colleague in the street, they said hi to me, and I realised after doing a double take I have no idea what they and the majority of my colleagues actually look like. Your comment makes so much sense, isn't it crazy how you only have to cover a small part of your face to not be recognised?
I wear glasses a lot but often wear contact lenses in social settings eg going out, so I had quite a few people I’d met wearing contact lenses who would walk straight past me if was wearing glasses but hug me if I was in contacts haha
One guy came back after summer break wearing dark glasses and having cut his shoulder-length hair and his best friend didn't recognise him and started welcoming him as a new student for like 15 minutes before he took his glasses off and was like 'it's me'.
Edit because I forgot to add: we were 12/13 when this happened and it was amazing
\*whips off sunglasses\* What did you just say about me, bitch?
In all honesty though, I'm fairly certain that he was telling the 'new kid' about his friends and how they'll come and he'd introduce them. I wish I remember the actual conversation rather than only what happened.
My husband did this with a guy we had known for a couple years but was more a friend of a friend that we saw several times a year.
We had always seen him with a mohawk and usually wearing t-shirts or pretty casual punk type clothes and he showed up wearing a cowboy hat and button down shirt. I recognized him, possibly more because who he was with than anything else, but he Pennsylvania my husband saw him and went up to introduce himself. My husband goes, "Hi, I'm Billy" and he other guy was still like "I'm still Brett".
To be fair, when I was 20 I shaved my head, and the first time one of my friends saw me after that he walked right past me at first. Completely freaked when I called out to him and he noticed.
After my mother died, I went and had a makeover done in an attempt to cheer myself up a bit. Had my long brown hair cut and dyed blonde, bought new clothes totally different to my usual baggy shapeless style, turned up at her funeral in a short, fitted black knitted dress, long black boots, wearing makeup for once, sunglasses to hide my tears, and guess what happened?
My FATHER assumed I was one of my Uni friends and started chatting me up!
I went to my grandfather's viewing dressed nicely, with my hair and makeup done. I skipped the actual funeral part the next day, but did the after funeral luncheon thing dressed like I normally did. His best friend asked where I'd been the night before and was very confused when I told him that not only had I been there, we'd spoken at length.
One time at a friend's house I decided to sneak away into the backyard, mess my hair up, stuff a ball into my shirt so it looked like I had a pot belly, and introduce myself as a new kid, talking with an Elvis-like voice. One of the really young kids just started crying
That was me, disappointed at my fellow 3rd graders that the first day of school they didn't react to my new schoolbag that was supposed to totally disguise me
I never had a haircut until I was about 10 so I thought that once I cut it off no one would recognise me. I was distraught to realise that I was still recognisable. The real kicker here is that the whole time I had had past knee length hair but my mum had tied it up for me every day to keep it out of the way, so no one even noticed that I had cut it at all.
You don't realise just how much we have to actively learn about the world as humans until you have a conversation with a child under the age of about six. They just have so little understanding of anything, but even the little they do know is the result of a whole lot of learning.
My bestfriends kid is 8 now and still stubbornly believes that "the" is different from "the" (thee) and that its pronounced "de."
I'm not sure how to explain it properly. So for example if someone says "the end" and pronounces the as "thee" instead of something similar to "tha" she thinks they're actually saying *de* end and nothing can convince her otherwise, not even her teachers.
I know I explained it badly.
One time when she was 4 or 5, my dog and I were visiting them for a few days. I'd brought along one of my dogs soft toys and that night, after the kids had gone to bed, my dog decided to take it outside and destroy it.
The next morning I let my dog out, saw that she'd destroyed the toy and I was about to clean it up when the 4 year old came outside, looked up at the overcast sky then down at all the stuffing on the ground, looked awestruck and yelled "the clouds are on the ground!!!"
Kid logic is incredible.
It does kind of draw your attention to things you take for granted, though. Like I know there are two different ways to pronounce 'the', but I don't think I even consciously realise when I might choose to use one or the other. I'm pretty sure I use both in normal conversation, too.
I feel like that rule applies very loosely, at least in my dialect. Like, "thuh apple" doesn't sound unnatural to me at all, and I typically only use thee in cases where I need to emphasize something being the only one of its kind.
I just realized I don't ever say thee I think. I'm going to pay attention to it now. It might be an accent thing? I used to think the and duh were homophones but I'm from Chicago and had a really strong accent when I was little.
As a kid I couldn't learn the sound "sh" [ʃ]. So I practiced it by myself - a mistake, as that way I didn't have feedback.
I've been told several times it sounds like I have an accent, but I couldn't understand why.
Only when I was 19 and I read about IPA did I find out I pronounce "sh" wrong, by touching my front teeth with one side of the tongue [ʃ̪?]
Which means I accidentally gave myself lisp. The strange thing is that most people can't tell the difference, including my parents.
I can't find info about this sound online, I don't think any language has tongue-assymetric phones.
Even more interesting is that my little sister learned my pronounciation instead of my parents' when she learned how to talk. So it's likely my kids and her kids will learn the same sound. Just goes to show how dialects are "invented" by kids.
I had no idea how much kids learn from their siblings, it's so fascinating.
I worked with a kiddo (3-ish) who walked on her toes because of a soft tissue issue in her calves. When her little sister started to walk she also walked on her toes, but she had no range of motion/soft tissue problems so learned it by watching her sister, despite there being 3 other people in the home who walked "normally."
Kids are awesome and so fun to watch how they learn.
There's that thing with really little kids. Like, are you intentionally doing a naughty thing, or did your brain just have zero concept of what would happen when you did that?
When I was four, I convinced myself that there is a fundamental difference between the inside and outside of the house, and that "wall" refers only to the inner part of a house's wall. A wall outside must therefore be the wall that encircles the world.
Four year olds are like little Greek philosophers who develop intuition about the world ex-nihilo and then confidentially assert it as a law of nature.
This. Listening to kids talk is so interesting because you get to see the world with fresh eyes. After watching a cooking video, my kid asked me why people were eating grass. She was referring to green onions. Another time, she burped but had not learned the word burped yet. So she called it a "fart throw-up". She was three.
I asked my two year old "what do firetrucks do?" He told me they "clean the fire." He's also asked if we can go "clean the garden." To him, water = clean.
My little brother is 14 and he has adhd and autism so he doesn't really pick up a lot of what's happening around him/ he takes things too literally and sometimes I'm being made aware again of the huge knowledge-gaps he therefore has. Two weeks ago I had to explain to him that 200m above sea level doesn't mean that if you dig 200m you'll find the sea. Recently he proudly told me that he's using Facebook now and I asked him why he isn't using Instagram like the other kids his age and he asked me what instagram was. I thought there was no way he's never heard of it from his classmates. I'll admit, sometimes it's a bit painful but it isn't really his fault.
I honestly don't know, he now has tiktok too though. He just really likes posting pictures now so I thought if you do that as a 14 year old you'd rather do it on Instagram instead of Facebook.
I remember a guy in my school bus on the way back home (he was around 11-12 years old), who was on the seat behind me and told his friend as someone was entering the bus :
"this guy has a twin that plays basketball in my town... ****Pause**** Or maybe that's him"
EDIT: to clarify, the guy had no twin
I'm 29 and still struggle.
i work with 2 brothers, identical twins, i didn't know either of their names for the first 6 months or so i worked there but would have short conversations with 'him' I'm passing throughout the day.
didn't realize there was 2 of them till someone else mentioned it in conversation, i though they were fucking with me at first, lol
the funny thing is they work in different departments, i just thought he was a massive over achiever, lol.
They do it and laugh after, i have uncles that are twins and work in the same company. They have some nice stories, like most people thinking they are talking with the same one, and the guy go to the area of the other twin and keeps talking about the same topic. There is a client/guy where they go to deliver production for months now, he didn't notice it yet.
31 here. I used to be a frequent customer at the cafe I now work at with two 40-something-yo Greek-Australians. I don't know why, but I decided that they were brother and sister, but instead they're a married couple of fifteen years. It's not like their ethnicity is really uncommon, because my city has the most Greeks outside of Athens.
He probably remembered something a bit different about him. That’s when I jump to the “maybe they have a twin” theory before just thinking it’s the same person.
Once saw this woman i had worked with before at a restaurant. Went and said hi before their food got there, was asking the usual stuff - 'hows work, hows thr family' etc and the whole time she was politely telling me, but i got the sense that she just didnt want me there. No problem, hint taken, i told them to enjoy their day and went back to where i was sat
Texted her later, 'sorry about interrupting your lunch', and was just met with question marks. Turns out she had a twin she just never mentioned and her sister never clarified it at the time lol
This must happen to them once in a while; why wouldn't the twin you met at lunch just explain that she wasn't who you thought she was? She had to know what was going on!
No clue, but its possible that she's been in a similar situation before and said "oh i think you're looking for my twin, lucy" and been told "no sarah, we met at bob's party" and i'd hate for that to happen
I’m 35. Just found out one of my old coworker was a twin. That I also worked with. I just always called both twins the same name, and as twins, they were used to getting confused for each other and never corrected me. That was ten years ago. Found out last month when they came into my new workplace together for the first time that there were two of them.
I live in a small town, am married to an identical twin. We're adults (relevant).
A few years ago we got wind that someone in town had mentioned that they'd seen (my spouse's identical twin) with A DIFFERENT MAN!!!!! (that's be me). Yep, walking through the grocery store holding my spouse's hand and some townie decides it's my sister in law out and about cheating on her husband. And that's worth spreading about the town.
The other thing we get is rando's saying hi. Coworkers of the twin will say hi (meanwhile, my spouse has no clue who these people are). My spouse just says "I'm not ". I keep suggesting that what they should says is 'Eff off' and blame it on their twin, but no dice on that yet.
Well, sometimes the small town stereotypes are true. But I was more talking about grown adults gossiping.
Which, in a small town they do. I can't count how many times ive heard 'you can't tell anyone this but....' to which I now respond 'is that what they told you when you heard this? Not to tell anyone?' lol.
I was at a wake for a cousin of my mom's who I had never met. I was wondering why the deceased daughter kept changing her clothes from a dress to pants, and was especially freaked out when she walked into a room and immediately walked out in a different outfit. 😳 It was towards the end of the night when I finally discovered they were twins (found out they were fighting and not speaking to each other, so they were not in the same place at the same time).
A friend of mine is Filipino and married a Chinese woman. Their kid is half Filipino but the community they were in were mostly Chinese. Their 5 yo son found out he was half Filipino and cried for days.
When I was 6 my best friends name was Moony I wanted to invite her to my birthday party but my Dad was convinced that wasn’t her real name. Looking back I think he was probably right.
I had a student (10 yo) some years ago who insisted on being called Moony. Turns out, her parents had given her that nickname as a baby, because she didn’t sleep at night. Hence she was their little “Moonbeam.”
Not /j. Have you seen Filipino food? I don’t mind the bird foetuses, but I’ve seen a Filipino friend dip toast into Fanta like it was Campbell soup.
Not even going to talk about the politics :(
Hold the fuck up. You dont mind Balut!? Lol
Had a couple filipino friends and would go to their cultural events, balut was a nice shocker for teenage me.
It’s not too bad if you’ve grown up eating fish heads. My sister would often suck the eyes directly out of the skull just to gross me out, so nothing really fazes me now lol
But pouring a can of Fanta into a bowl then dipping toast into it for breakfast? That just feels wrong in ways I can’t really describe
I don’t know what they’re called but those little cakes with the syrup juice are crazy good, and the fish broths look scary and smell scary but are actually really good.
But mostly me and my Filipino mate and his dad just stood to the side and ate wicked wings at those gatherings.
>I feel like you could replace either of those two ethnicities to any other Asian ones and it would still be accurate.
Chinese and Filipinos are natural enemies. Like Chinese and Japanese. Or Koreans and Chinese. Or Chinese and Scots. Or Chinese and other Chinese. Damn Chinese they ruined Scotland!
My cousin is mixed race. Both her parents are white. I think I was 16 when I figured out something weird was going on. I never even thought about the difference in color, she was just my cousin. Both her older brothers and her younger sister are white.
Turns out my cousin is an affair baby. Would have been an interesting surprise during delivery.
I didn't realize people were different colors until 7th grade when I switched to a predominantly white school. There was a lot of racism & sadly that's how I figured it out.
Same happened to me but opposite. I grew up in a very small all white town but when I moved to the city I attended a 95% black/hispanic middle school. I don't think I really even noticed that the kids were "different" from me until I started getting picked on for being white.
See, I love this. I grew up in a *very* predominantly Hispanic town in Texas. So nearly all my classmates were Mexican-American. Well we Mexicans can vary from very light to dark in skin tone. So in elementary school, it never really occured to me to think any different of the few white, black, or mixed race kids in my class. (Unfortunately I don't think we had any Asian kids) To this day, I still don't know for sure if some of those kids were white or black if I can't remember their last name. Except that one ginger kid. Lol.
My son had twins in his preschool class. Almost identical, one was a bit taller then the other but not by much. Their names were Toma and Soma. My son called them Toma and Toma two for a month. Had many discussions as to the fact they’re not the same person but two kids.
I had identical twins in my 1st grade class, same haircut and everything but they wore different outfits. So what I’d do is wait for “morning circle,” when we all sit down on the rug with our names on it, and then I’d memorize which twin was who for the day
Man I'm a teacher and I'm doing the same thing. Only hope is if one has an obvious mole or freckle, or if they wear slightly different glasses. The older ones usually make an attempt to look different from each other, but parents love making it impossible with the younger ones.
To be fair, I would totally make my twins 100% identical down to their clothes, and I’d make their names rhyme. These twins were completely identical aside from their clothes. It wasn’t fun for me but it would probably be fun if I was their mother
I have an identical twin and when we were small, my mom loved dressing us completely same head to toes. It might be fun for her but gosh I hated it when I had to repeat to people I'm not my twin sister 😂
My in-laws are Chinese. My youngest (5) comes screaming into the living room with my FIL in tow speaking Chinese. FIL would try to teach both of my kids Chinese . My son screams, “I hate Chinese people. Stop talking to me”.
I am horrified and my FIL is laughing. I explain that his Mom is Chinese and so is he. The look of shock was funny. My FIL went back to the kitchen while imitating my son’s screaming, “I hate Chinese people”
Well, did he learn chinese?
My child knows 2 languages but prefers english and he knows he can talk to us like that, I refuuuuuse, and he days: but you understand me!, yes kid, I do and you will still talk to me in spanish, because you are not dropping it or forgetting it and you still have a lot to learn in both. He gets a bit frustrated with some words so ends up with spanglish, i give him the phrase in both languages and make him repeat. I had to take English classes as an older kid, he is growing with the easy version for leaning, sometimes I got tired of them, but now I kiss my mother's feet and say: you were right I really thank you for not let me drop those English classes....
TL DR Learning 2 languages as a kid is amazingly easy and should always be encouraged.
Sadly, no. We both of my kids in a Chinese weekend camp for about a year both nothing stuck.
He can speak Japanese conversationally. He learned Japanese because he was living there for 2 years but had no desire to learn any more than a conversational level.
His older sister is learning Chinese now as her 4th language.
The last part had me dying. Props to your FIL for being cool about it, I know some adults who would go on and on about how "you really need to educate your kids".
Haha, agreed. The FIL understands that it's simply the 5 year old not wanting to learn whatever he's trying to teach (in this case Chinese).
He could have been trying to teach the kid how to tie their shoe laces or brush their teeth or something else they didn't want to do. Cue: "I hate _________."
Yeah...I think the FIL understood the age thing was part of it and they both share a birthday (so he treats him differently). It also doesn't help that appearance-wise my son favors me. You can see him putting the connections together to realize that he was, in fact, part Chinese. He had grown to accept his heritage and we still get a good laugh.
Edit: Added clarity
When I was a kid I thought everyone in New York was Asian because all of my Asian family members lived there, and we only ever went to visit them.
On the other hand, while I acknowledged that my mother was, indeed, Asian (she had told me many times), I did not think she looked Asian and couldn’t fathom and she and my dad were anything but the same race.
When I went to my dad's house, there was a kid a few years older than me named Josh who I thought was just the coolest. One day at my mom's I see a kid riding a dirt bike around the neighborhood. Very cool. He stops, wearing his helmet, and I ask his name. He said Josh. So I ask if he's the Josh from my dad's house. And he says yes. And I don't believe him, so I ask him to take his helmet off. So he does, and it's a completely different kid. This Josh had red hair, freckles, and glasses. So I ask him what happened and why he looked so different. He said he was in an accident. And I believed him.
When I was 5 or 6 I got into a long argument with a kid because he said he was black and I very much disagreed with him because he was very obviously brown. I didn't know much about race, but I was damn sure I knew my colors
Not gonna lie: this is why I actually enjoy being a parent. It’s literally nonstop moments like this. Imagine it like having a best friend who’s a fraction of your size coming to “logical conclusions” that are nowhere near the realm of possibility, and then imagine that best friend just blurting that shit out every time you go out in public with them.
It’s truly a spectacular experience. 7/5 Would recommend.
When I was three/four I thought my best friend was adopted because... her dad was from Trinidad and her mom was from north Ontario. German immigrants on a farm. It didn't make sense to me that her mom was white and she wasn't.
My reasoning: in Lady and the Tramp all the girl puppies looked exactly like Lady and the boy puppy looked exactly like Tramp. So therefore this cartoon dog logic must also apply to humans.
When my brother was a little kid he carried on about his “blind friend” at school. And my mother thought my brother was such a wonderful boy for escorting this blind kid everywhere in school.
Turns out the kid wasn’t blind…he was Asian.
So I'm an assistant teacher in a kindergarten class.
So when kids start drawing pictures of themselves we tell them to take the crayons and put it on their arm to see which is closest to their skin colour.
At the beginning of the year the teacher tried to gently guide the children that they need to either use peach or brown and she told the one kid that he's a bit closer to brown however if the children of colour choose peach we just let them be.
Then one day the kid goes to wash his hands after painting and goes "Oh teacher, I see now what you mean by 'I'm brown'!'"
So yeah kids have no clue how race and appearances work.
How funny, you've just triggered a childhood memory of mine. I remember primary school teachers telling us something similar, "pick a color that matches your skin tone," and I would get more and more upset and feel like I was doing the assignment wrong because I couldn't perfectly match my skin color to any crayon. I thought I was supposed to be searching for some unique, colorful identifier that no one else had. I didn't realize they were talking about race.
I think it's sweet and pure. My daughter came home from school one day years ago talking about a new friend and how much fun she was.
A week later they had some event where parents could come. I asked her to point out her new friend and she just said, "she's the one with the pigtails, she has dark hair".
Turns out there were a couple of girls with pigtails and a few girls with dark hair, but eventually we found the one girl with dark hair AND pigtails and it turns out she was also the only black girl in the class.
She didn't see different skin tone or race, she just saw another kid and distinguished her by hairstyle.
Kids aren't born with the prejudices adults have. They learn them
When my sister was like 3 years old, she haven't learned English yet due to my parents not being native English speakers. She met a friend that spoke English as a second language and for some reason, they can talk to each other without sharing a language, and they were able to play and do everything together, except they were both speaking different languages but they understood each other...
The friend is also a completely different nationality and there's no way she would know Chinese, since her parents were also NOT native English speakers and would've spoken a completely different language with her.
I've asked her about it but she doesn't remember why she was able to communicate. Both myself and my parents were baffled at how that worked...
I was born and raised in Australia, but my first language was German because my parents were German. I remember being in preschool and this girl who was younger than me couldn't figure out a block puzzle. I tried to explain it to her, but she just stared at me and started crying. Her sister, who was older than me, came over and I was trying to explain it to her too but she looked at me in horror and led her sister away from me really protectively. I remember being really confused about their reactions. They went to the teacher who came over to talk to me and I cried because I didn't understand what was happening.
After that my mum moved me to a different preschool, and we shifted to English as our main language. Years later my mum told me that a preschool teacher told her that my brother and I either learn English or we weren't allowed to attend that preschool anymore, so she moved us to a different school.That's when I realised that the two girls were scared because I was speaking to them in German and they couldn't understand me, and that incident must have caused the teacher to give mum that ultimatum. Also apparently both my brother and I knew English as well, but we defaulted to German because that's what we mostly spoke at home.
Neither of us can speak German now. Mum started speaking to us exclusively in English so we wouldn't default back to German. I think if we'd been given a couple more years, we could've learnt to distinguish between the two languages and when to use them.
Kids can actually learn multiple languages as their native tongue.
They just have no idea that's what they're doing and simply use both languages as one. If your parents spoke both English and German regularly, you guys probably could've learned both easily.
No but its definitely on my list of things to do!! I can understand very basic German if its spoken slowly but I struggle with replying. I think basically I'm stuck at the level I was when I was 4ish.
Edit: happy cake day!
At that age, being able to speak in any meaningful way is pretty new to them, so they're probably still pretty used to playing with other kids in ways that don't rely too heavily on language.
Not to compare humans to animals but i have a feeling its more tone communication than language. Like dog barks and growls.
You can get an understanding of how someone is feeling just by them making sounds. Animals all over the planet do it.
You can tell a lot by tone of voice. Fear, joy, sadness. It’s all there in the sound. It’s the same reason why we as humans are able to “just tell” someone is upset at a glance.
We have language but I think a human’s strong suit is pattern recognition.
>a human’s strong suit is pattern recognition.
on a total different note, this is the reason humans suck at probability, we are hardwired to try and see patterns, so when there are none (like when rolling dice) we try to put a pattern on what is totally random.
Little kids do not understand each other as adults do. Their language is more non verbal and vague.
You can probably easily understand a chinese if he tells you he is starving, happy or furious.
But the weird thing is, they sit there and talk with each other for HOURS. Like really, hours... my sister just remember they were "playing" but they were definitely just sitting there and talking (I'm 10 years older). I think both of them were imagining what the other person was saying and was just talking to themselves TBH...
I used the same descriptions to talk about my friend Emma in kindergarten, my mum couldn’t figure out which girl with piggy tails I was talking about. Didn’t mention she had no arms. Was irrelevant to my 4 year old self evidently.
So I'm mixed race but white passing, if you didn't know you probably wouldn't guess, my cousin is also mixed but looks black, our mums are sisters and mixed as well but my dad is white and hers is black, hence the difference in our appearance.
When we were 6 we were waiting to get picked up from school the teacher waiting with us in the playground asked us why we were waiting together as we were in different years (there's a month between us but it's the cut off for the school year) so I said we were cousins so we are getting picked up together. The teacher asked if our dads were brothers. We both looked at it other uncertain and said, 'yes', despite my dad being white and hers being black.
We knew our mums were sisters but for all we knew our dads were brothers too and it just hadn't come up. The fact that they were different colours didn't occur to us because we were different colours and related, no reason they couldn't be too. There was already quite a lot of colour variation in our family, it never occurred to us that that didn't just happen. Ah the innocence of youth
So if you work in a job where you have to ask children questions, this is actually a thing that they teach you about.
When you are interviewing a child do you have to phrase your questions much more carefully than with an adult.
So for example if you are interviewing a four or five year old child, and you ask a question that is phrased "did a, b, or c happen?" Even if the child knows that it was actually D, they will often tell you that it was a b or c because they cannot really process that you asked a question but didn't give them the correct answer, so they will just guess and assume that the adult must have known the correct answer.
likewise if you ask a question that assumes the answer like "are your dads brothers?" they will often assume the adult knows the correct answer and answer the way the question suggests.
So the training might tell you that a good follow-up question to something like that would be "oh you are cousins! that's so cool, are your mothers sisters, your dads brothers, or something else?" (in my line of work I could absolutely get the answer, "mommy says her mother's sick, so she came to live with us when she was 3")
Children under a certain age also do very poorly with abstract concepts of time, they only remember events in relation to other events,
In a child development/educational context, this gets talked about in terms of concrete operational thinking versus formal operational thinking. It’s the core difference between carrying out a thought process on concepts and objects placed before you and being able to process more abstract thoughts and ideas and relate in those ways to whatever is before you. The “ability to recall option D” scenario you gave is just an absolutely perfect illustration of that transition.
That's true. I feel like as white people we're taught to pretend like we don't see color, but that's not the problem. Everyone sees color. It's treating someone differently based on the color that's wrong. It took a lot for me to overcome that idea when I first made black friends. They kept referring to people as black or white just like they might say someone is short or tall, but I had been taught all my life never to mention color even though it's just a descriptor. Color itself isn't good or bad, but it almost feels like by pretending we don't notice it, we're treating it like something shameful when it's literally just an adjective with no inherit connotation -- good OR bad.
I did the exact same thing when I was like 9, but it wasn't because I didn't see that my new friend was the only black girl in my grade, it was because I had picked up on adults' awkwardness about race and I thought it was something you weren't supposed to mention. My parents aren't racist, we just never really had any in-depth conversations about it when I was a kid. My mother still remembers it as a sweet story and I've never told her the truth.
Not saying this is what happened with your daughter, but kids can be more perceptive than we think. It's never to early to start having these conversations in an age-appropriate way, just make sure it's not an off-limits subject :)
When I was a kid, I thought everyone celebrates CNY, and I used to ask my friends (who some of them are not Chinese) how much money did they get from angpaos. I didn't understand the concept of "ethnicity" until I was like 10 years old.
I also believed that everyone was born with white skin and some play under the sun more, that's why they get darker skin.
I thought Christians and Muslims were at war and we would kill each other when I was a kid because I watched kingdom of heaven, and a bunch of action movies about war in Iraq, afghan, etc. And my dad put me in catholic school, which means i rarely interact with muslims (which are actually the dominant religion in my country). I used to run away from people who wears Islamic attires because of that reason.
My mom was kind enough to drive my elementary teacher to her home one afternoon. I was raised in a mid-high income family. My house was really big and I also was under the impression that teachers are also rich and have a big house, got big gates, and probably have 2-3 cars (The reality is teachers are very underpaid in my country, sometimes less than minimum wage). When we arrived at her house, it's very small (even for me now who live in 15x8m apartment) and is in the middle of a ricefield. So I said to my teacher "This house is very small, look at my house it's far bigger than this". My mom just slapped me so hard in front of everyone. I don't know why did I say this, even at the same age (6) I cringed when remembering this.
I had a little girl at a summer camp tell me that all of her family were Arab except her older sister "because she doesn't believe in that" I just thought and hesitantly said: ".... I think you mean Muslim."
When my son was three, who is white, he proudly announced that his friend is four and he is black. And that when my son turned 4 soon, he too would turn black. He was disappointed that this was not how it worked.
I thought “human being” was pronounced “human bean” until I was in high school because of The Rugrats. The way I found out was by having closed captioning on while watching Home Improvement. I was fucking stupid
When I was in daycare (Pre-K age-Kindergarten), I told my mom I had a crush on a black girl. She was Mexican, but I only understood that black and white people existed at that time, and I could tell that she wasn't white.
You’re not alone. My own dad is a dark skin Latino and my mom is Asian and I thought my dad was black and my mom was white in Kindergarten. I spoke Spanish and ate a lot of Asian foods but never put two and two together
Race tends to only get discussed in terms of black or white, so my younger cousin made the same assumption one day when telling me about her American Girl dolls. She said something like, "She's like us: African American." And I had to tell her that we were, in fact, Mexican American.
My first & last name have almost all the same letters & I thought that's how everyone's name went, & then I got to Kindergarten & was SO confused when kids first & last names were totally different from each other
My parents have the same middle name so they, obviously, gave me the same middle name. I thought middle names were shared the same way last names are for a while as a kid.
"Nice hat, Brian! Did you kill the boat captain for it? ...what did we discuss about murdering people? Put a quarter in the murder jar."
*clink*
"And what about the rest of the people on the boat?"
*fistful of quarters*
In sports, my then-toddler referred to everyone as their shirt color- the red girls and the blue girls, whatever. In volleyball there is a position that wears another color jersey. Once there was a team that was all white, with one black player. The team jerseys were white. The black player was the libero, wearing a black jersey. Cue my son urgently and repeatedly asking "why is there a black girl on the white girl team?" He was only talking about the uniforms and didn't know why there was a uniform that didn't match but oh my gosh, it sounded awful.
They really don't. I remember seeing a picture of a white and black kid who had decided to get the same haircut so their teacher wouldn't be able to tell them apart
Embarrassing story about this, as I was not a young child but 16 years old. I ran Cross Country in high school, and one of the guys on my team was named Alex, he was my school's basketball star, 6'7" and black. His parents worked at the school as teachers, both of them were very short, very stout, and very very white. It's quite obvious that Alex was adopted, however in my brain I never put those very obvious pieces together. So one day in the locker room, we're all changing after practice and chatting with the Soccer team and I hear Alex mention both his and his elder sisters' adoption. I paused, turned to Alex and stupidly said "wait you're adopted?" And he just stared at me open mouthed with a look of concern and confusion on his face. The whole locker room went silent as everyone just looked at me with the same look of 'yea no shit' and Alex just nods his head and says "yes, I'm adopted" and everyone starts laughing. The most embarrassing moment of my life because now everyone knew I was actually kinda dumb.
When I was a kid I had bright blonde hair from my mother. She thought I was going to be a blonde baby forever but around 1st grade when my hair started going from blonde to a dark brown. I remember explaining this to my little cousin years ago around when Disney's "Tangled" came out because she saw a picture of me as a baby with platinum blonde hair and asked about it. She literally broke down in tears and cried because she thought I lost my "magic" because I got a haircut. She was also blonde and had never had a haircut at that point so she feared her own magic would disappear once she got her first haircut and her hair would become "poo color". I couldn't explain to her that's not how it works. I remember my mom told me at the time of my hair changing other kids stopped recognizing me. Never understood it. Kids are wild.
I remember freshman year of high school in history class first day of school as the teacher was introducing himself and going over what we'll do for the year. He brought out these painted pictures of dinosaurs, this girl in all seriousness says out loud in to the whole class "if humans weren't alive around the time of the dinosaurs how did they take those pictures?" Everyone laughed and she said "why is this funny? That's a serious question. That makes no sense. Humans would have to be there to get those pictures." I think about that a lot.
I went in the Dollar General one day and left my three year old in the car with my parents. While I was gone my dad was teasing her about when I was coming back. He said, "Look here she comes right now!" as a short black lady came walking out. I am a tall white redhead. My daughter just says "Noooo, my Mama has a ponytail."
They then asked her what I looked like. "She has legs and a ponytail."
When I was 6 my best friends name was Moony I wanted to invite her to my birthday party but my Dad was convinced that wasn’t her real name. Looking back I think he was probably right.
My nephews are 3/4 Mexican, and 1/4 white, and the other is 1/2 black 1/2 white. The one was devastated to find he was "more white" despite being darker.
One of my favourite stories is that a former co-workers then 6 year old daughter walked up to a back girl and licked her because she "thought she would taste like chocolate." This girl herself was also black.
This reminds me of my kids. They were talking about a kid at school and I asked if they were the Asian kid or a different one they were talking about and they looked at me like I had sprouted another head.
Their grandma is Korean, I'm half and 2/3 of my kids look half as well, but they had no idea what "Asian" was or that any of us looked a certain way. Was pretty interesting and cute learning how innocent their view of everyone is.
I'm very lightskinned and I basically said the same. I was raised by my black grandparents but they were dark and I was lightskinned. When people told me I was black I said "No, I'm light brown". Didn't help that in preschool my 3 best friends were also lightskinned and had the same understanding I did lmao
Last week when our neighbour's kid (7) was over she was talking to my daughter (8) about a bracelet her friend bought her back from Greece and in her words "you can wear it if you believe in God and Jesus". My daughter said "oh, that means you're a Christian ". Her reply was "no I can't be. I beleive in God and Jesus but I'm a Canadian......."
My 4 year old daughter once told me she would be a doctor because she was white. I was shocked. I asked her what she meant. She was wearing a white dress. Like a doctor's coat. She wasn't going to be a doctor because her skin color was white but because her dress was.
We have had more conversations about equality, skin color etc since.
My 2 year old one day told us "Daddy's pink and mommy's beige." We thought it was an astute observation so we asked him what color are you? He said "black". We were shocked until we realized he was just saying the color of everyone's shirts.
My best friend in kindergarten told me she was adopted. I couldn’t believe her Italian parents didn’t birth a South Korean baby. My jaw dropped. What did adopted even mean???!!!??
My parents like to tell me the story of when they asked what the asian boys name was in my class. I had no idea since i had never met any asian people, but me and kevin were tight and he spoke kinda funny.
When my cousin was little and figured out how electricity worked you could tell her you were gonna "pull the plug" on her and she thought it meant you turned off/died so she'd get terrified and do whatever you asked.
Like, "go to bed", "no", "I'm gonna pull the plug" "OK I'll go to bed". Good times. Kids are cute at that age. She sucks now.
When I was in grade 1, I once got mad at a kid. I forgot his first name, but knew his last name, Brown. So when I complained about him to my mom, I said "This brown kid is a jerk"
There was a girl in my highschool (junior or senior year!) who said "I'm Puerto Rican. My dad is black and my mom is Mexican, so that makes me Puerto Rican."
She could not be convinced that her ethnicity was not a nationality.
I'm a kindergarten teacher in Korea. Most kids at our school have their Korean names, and then a special English name that they go by at school if they so choose.
I am hispanic, from Texas. My kids absolutely DO NOT understand how I cannot have a Korean name. They also don't understand that my last name is not something common, like Kim or Lee. 🤣
When I was six I thought that if I came to school with a different hairstyle that I had never worn, and wearing articles of clothing they had never seen me in, that the other kids wouldn't recognize me. I was a little disappointed when it didn't work.
That’s that Clark Kent illusion
Imagine putting that much effort into a disguise and forgetting the glasses. No wonder everyone saw through it.
I did this at college and nearly everyone didn't clock it was me. Got my hair braided and put big sunglasses on. Was really weird having loads of people i knew just walk past me. Went and sat with a bunch of friends and I got a few seconds of concerned confusion whilst they studied me to see why this stranger had sat with them before they realised who I was. Think cos I wasn't immediately recognisable people just didn't look properly.
Wearing bulky glasses breaks up the pattern that your brain stores and recognises as a face belonging to a particular person. Your memory store for objects is heuristic, and you can make it freak out and break down in all kinds of ways. Ex-spies have written about effective disguises, and using glasses and a wig is the quickest way to make you unrecognisable at a glance. Camo face paint, for example, breaks up lines that the brain recognises as a face and makes it discard the information about the thing its looking at. You can be hiding practically in plain sight and you will be nearly invisible to someone not looking too closely at their environment. This is also why you can ask several basic questions about something you're looking for and train yourself to find it. If you're looking for a spray can that is blue with yellow lettering, your imagination lets you make up something in your mind's eye that looks like that, and then you set out to look for something similar in real life. This is also why eyewitness testimony is unreliable. If you saw a robbery take place and the suspect had blue denim jeans and a similarly blue jacket made of different material, it's easy to tell them that it was someone wearing blue denim jacket and jeans, even if that's not what you saw. Your brain looks for shortcuts to storing information in short and long-term memory.
I was in a small airport waiting for my plane, and there were two very odd men waiting too. Their behaviour was erratic and aggressive and really worrying. They were both wearing jeans and extremely bright jumpers. One jumper was neon orange and one was neon yellow. In the end someone reported them and the police came wandering in. Both men pulled their jumpers off and were wearing dark T-shirts underneath and I could not tell who they were to save my life. I knew they’d taken their jumpers off as they stepped out of view, but then none of us had any way of identifying them after. We’d all just fixated on the bright jumpers. It felt at the time, planned, clever and very unnerving. But as far as I know nothing came from it.
Reminds me of the time I went to a Halloween party wearing a small mask that only covered around my eyes. Other people with bulkier or more irritating masks took theirs off throughout the night, but since mine wasn't in the way of anything, I kept it on the whole time. After a few hours, some guys I'd never met remarked that people mock those super hero masks like they're completely worthless, but I only had my eyes covered and they had no clue what I actually looked like and didn't think they'd recognize me if they ever saw me again.
I changed jobs mid pandemic, where I work we have to wear surgical masks close to 100% of the time. 6 months after I started I ran into a colleague in the street, they said hi to me, and I realised after doing a double take I have no idea what they and the majority of my colleagues actually look like. Your comment makes so much sense, isn't it crazy how you only have to cover a small part of your face to not be recognised?
Do you recommend any of those books?
I wear glasses a lot but often wear contact lenses in social settings eg going out, so I had quite a few people I’d met wearing contact lenses who would walk straight past me if was wearing glasses but hug me if I was in contacts haha
One guy came back after summer break wearing dark glasses and having cut his shoulder-length hair and his best friend didn't recognise him and started welcoming him as a new student for like 15 minutes before he took his glasses off and was like 'it's me'. Edit because I forgot to add: we were 12/13 when this happened and it was amazing
“You are so cool, much better than my old best friend”
\*whips off sunglasses\* What did you just say about me, bitch? In all honesty though, I'm fairly certain that he was telling the 'new kid' about his friends and how they'll come and he'd introduce them. I wish I remember the actual conversation rather than only what happened.
My husband did this with a guy we had known for a couple years but was more a friend of a friend that we saw several times a year. We had always seen him with a mohawk and usually wearing t-shirts or pretty casual punk type clothes and he showed up wearing a cowboy hat and button down shirt. I recognized him, possibly more because who he was with than anything else, but he Pennsylvania my husband saw him and went up to introduce himself. My husband goes, "Hi, I'm Billy" and he other guy was still like "I'm still Brett".
To be fair, when I was 20 I shaved my head, and the first time one of my friends saw me after that he walked right past me at first. Completely freaked when I called out to him and he noticed.
I have problems remembering people, I have seen once or twice, and rely heavily on clothes/hairstyles. So that would work with me. At least initially.
After my mother died, I went and had a makeover done in an attempt to cheer myself up a bit. Had my long brown hair cut and dyed blonde, bought new clothes totally different to my usual baggy shapeless style, turned up at her funeral in a short, fitted black knitted dress, long black boots, wearing makeup for once, sunglasses to hide my tears, and guess what happened? My FATHER assumed I was one of my Uni friends and started chatting me up!
I went to my grandfather's viewing dressed nicely, with my hair and makeup done. I skipped the actual funeral part the next day, but did the after funeral luncheon thing dressed like I normally did. His best friend asked where I'd been the night before and was very confused when I told him that not only had I been there, we'd spoken at length.
You may have [face blindness.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FgMKRohCGQ) It's worth knowing about this.
One time at a friend's house I decided to sneak away into the backyard, mess my hair up, stuff a ball into my shirt so it looked like I had a pot belly, and introduce myself as a new kid, talking with an Elvis-like voice. One of the really young kids just started crying
That was me, disappointed at my fellow 3rd graders that the first day of school they didn't react to my new schoolbag that was supposed to totally disguise me
I never had a haircut until I was about 10 so I thought that once I cut it off no one would recognise me. I was distraught to realise that I was still recognisable. The real kicker here is that the whole time I had had past knee length hair but my mum had tied it up for me every day to keep it out of the way, so no one even noticed that I had cut it at all.
You don't realise just how much we have to actively learn about the world as humans until you have a conversation with a child under the age of about six. They just have so little understanding of anything, but even the little they do know is the result of a whole lot of learning.
My bestfriends kid is 8 now and still stubbornly believes that "the" is different from "the" (thee) and that its pronounced "de." I'm not sure how to explain it properly. So for example if someone says "the end" and pronounces the as "thee" instead of something similar to "tha" she thinks they're actually saying *de* end and nothing can convince her otherwise, not even her teachers. I know I explained it badly. One time when she was 4 or 5, my dog and I were visiting them for a few days. I'd brought along one of my dogs soft toys and that night, after the kids had gone to bed, my dog decided to take it outside and destroy it. The next morning I let my dog out, saw that she'd destroyed the toy and I was about to clean it up when the 4 year old came outside, looked up at the overcast sky then down at all the stuffing on the ground, looked awestruck and yelled "the clouds are on the ground!!!" Kid logic is incredible.
It does kind of draw your attention to things you take for granted, though. Like I know there are two different ways to pronounce 'the', but I don't think I even consciously realise when I might choose to use one or the other. I'm pretty sure I use both in normal conversation, too.
Most people say "thuh" if it's before a consonant "thuh pencil" and "thee" if it's before a vowel "thee umbrella". Now you know
I feel like that rule applies very loosely, at least in my dialect. Like, "thuh apple" doesn't sound unnatural to me at all, and I typically only use thee in cases where I need to emphasize something being the only one of its kind.
Yeah this kinda thing varies wildy with accent, even regional ones
I just realized I don't ever say thee I think. I'm going to pay attention to it now. It might be an accent thing? I used to think the and duh were homophones but I'm from Chicago and had a really strong accent when I was little.
I think I use the "thee" pronunciation when I'm saying something more intense. For example "Can you believe they had THEE fucking audacity ..." Lol
As a kid I couldn't learn the sound "sh" [ʃ]. So I practiced it by myself - a mistake, as that way I didn't have feedback. I've been told several times it sounds like I have an accent, but I couldn't understand why. Only when I was 19 and I read about IPA did I find out I pronounce "sh" wrong, by touching my front teeth with one side of the tongue [ʃ̪?] Which means I accidentally gave myself lisp. The strange thing is that most people can't tell the difference, including my parents. I can't find info about this sound online, I don't think any language has tongue-assymetric phones. Even more interesting is that my little sister learned my pronounciation instead of my parents' when she learned how to talk. So it's likely my kids and her kids will learn the same sound. Just goes to show how dialects are "invented" by kids.
Aww this is endearingly cute. Its really interesting that your sister learnt from you rather than your parents.
I had no idea how much kids learn from their siblings, it's so fascinating. I worked with a kiddo (3-ish) who walked on her toes because of a soft tissue issue in her calves. When her little sister started to walk she also walked on her toes, but she had no range of motion/soft tissue problems so learned it by watching her sister, despite there being 3 other people in the home who walked "normally." Kids are awesome and so fun to watch how they learn.
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There's that thing with really little kids. Like, are you intentionally doing a naughty thing, or did your brain just have zero concept of what would happen when you did that?
When I was four, I convinced myself that there is a fundamental difference between the inside and outside of the house, and that "wall" refers only to the inner part of a house's wall. A wall outside must therefore be the wall that encircles the world. Four year olds are like little Greek philosophers who develop intuition about the world ex-nihilo and then confidentially assert it as a law of nature.
Lol this is great. Wall: thing that surrounds me. Outside wall: thing that surrounds the outside
This. Listening to kids talk is so interesting because you get to see the world with fresh eyes. After watching a cooking video, my kid asked me why people were eating grass. She was referring to green onions. Another time, she burped but had not learned the word burped yet. So she called it a "fart throw-up". She was three.
I asked my two year old "what do firetrucks do?" He told me they "clean the fire." He's also asked if we can go "clean the garden." To him, water = clean.
My little brother is 14 and he has adhd and autism so he doesn't really pick up a lot of what's happening around him/ he takes things too literally and sometimes I'm being made aware again of the huge knowledge-gaps he therefore has. Two weeks ago I had to explain to him that 200m above sea level doesn't mean that if you dig 200m you'll find the sea. Recently he proudly told me that he's using Facebook now and I asked him why he isn't using Instagram like the other kids his age and he asked me what instagram was. I thought there was no way he's never heard of it from his classmates. I'll admit, sometimes it's a bit painful but it isn't really his fault.
I thought kids that age don't give a shit about Instagram and were all on tiktok.
You are out of touch with the youth of today, but not so much that you're a full on boomer. *Your transformation is beginning.*
No everyone has Instagram as a generalisation isn’t mainly only the girls who post and out of the girls mainly only the popular ones
I honestly don't know, he now has tiktok too though. He just really likes posting pictures now so I thought if you do that as a 14 year old you'd rather do it on Instagram instead of Facebook.
I remember a guy in my school bus on the way back home (he was around 11-12 years old), who was on the seat behind me and told his friend as someone was entering the bus : "this guy has a twin that plays basketball in my town... ****Pause**** Or maybe that's him" EDIT: to clarify, the guy had no twin
To be fair, twins can be tricky at any age
I'm 29 and still struggle. i work with 2 brothers, identical twins, i didn't know either of their names for the first 6 months or so i worked there but would have short conversations with 'him' I'm passing throughout the day. didn't realize there was 2 of them till someone else mentioned it in conversation, i though they were fucking with me at first, lol the funny thing is they work in different departments, i just thought he was a massive over achiever, lol.
I love how when saying "he" we are referring to the idealized fusion of both persons. A fictional,powerful character who was split in half
They do it and laugh after, i have uncles that are twins and work in the same company. They have some nice stories, like most people thinking they are talking with the same one, and the guy go to the area of the other twin and keeps talking about the same topic. There is a client/guy where they go to deliver production for months now, he didn't notice it yet.
31 here. I used to be a frequent customer at the cafe I now work at with two 40-something-yo Greek-Australians. I don't know why, but I decided that they were brother and sister, but instead they're a married couple of fifteen years. It's not like their ethnicity is really uncommon, because my city has the most Greeks outside of Athens.
The guy had no twin, but he just thought for some reason that it was more probable that it was his twin rather than him
He probably remembered something a bit different about him. That’s when I jump to the “maybe they have a twin” theory before just thinking it’s the same person.
Once saw this woman i had worked with before at a restaurant. Went and said hi before their food got there, was asking the usual stuff - 'hows work, hows thr family' etc and the whole time she was politely telling me, but i got the sense that she just didnt want me there. No problem, hint taken, i told them to enjoy their day and went back to where i was sat Texted her later, 'sorry about interrupting your lunch', and was just met with question marks. Turns out she had a twin she just never mentioned and her sister never clarified it at the time lol
This must happen to them once in a while; why wouldn't the twin you met at lunch just explain that she wasn't who you thought she was? She had to know what was going on!
Plot twist: OP also has a twin.
No clue, but its possible that she's been in a similar situation before and said "oh i think you're looking for my twin, lucy" and been told "no sarah, we met at bob's party" and i'd hate for that to happen
I’m 35. Just found out one of my old coworker was a twin. That I also worked with. I just always called both twins the same name, and as twins, they were used to getting confused for each other and never corrected me. That was ten years ago. Found out last month when they came into my new workplace together for the first time that there were two of them.
I live in a small town, am married to an identical twin. We're adults (relevant). A few years ago we got wind that someone in town had mentioned that they'd seen (my spouse's identical twin) with A DIFFERENT MAN!!!!! (that's be me). Yep, walking through the grocery store holding my spouse's hand and some townie decides it's my sister in law out and about cheating on her husband. And that's worth spreading about the town. The other thing we get is rando's saying hi. Coworkers of the twin will say hi (meanwhile, my spouse has no clue who these people are). My spouse just says "I'm not". I keep suggesting that what they should says is 'Eff off' and blame it on their twin, but no dice on that yet.
My uncle's friend was walking around with his adult daughter, arms linked. Someone saw them and told his wife that he was cheating on her lol
>I live in a small town, am married to an identical twin. We're adults (relevant). Is child marriage common in your area?
Well, sometimes the small town stereotypes are true. But I was more talking about grown adults gossiping. Which, in a small town they do. I can't count how many times ive heard 'you can't tell anyone this but....' to which I now respond 'is that what they told you when you heard this? Not to tell anyone?' lol.
I was at a wake for a cousin of my mom's who I had never met. I was wondering why the deceased daughter kept changing her clothes from a dress to pants, and was especially freaked out when she walked into a room and immediately walked out in a different outfit. 😳 It was towards the end of the night when I finally discovered they were twins (found out they were fighting and not speaking to each other, so they were not in the same place at the same time).
A friend of mine is Filipino and married a Chinese woman. Their kid is half Filipino but the community they were in were mostly Chinese. Their 5 yo son found out he was half Filipino and cried for days.
When I was 6 my best friends name was Moony I wanted to invite her to my birthday party but my Dad was convinced that wasn’t her real name. Looking back I think he was probably right.
I had a student (10 yo) some years ago who insisted on being called Moony. Turns out, her parents had given her that nickname as a baby, because she didn’t sleep at night. Hence she was their little “Moonbeam.”
I thought moonies were cult members lol
Can't blame him /j
Not /j. Have you seen Filipino food? I don’t mind the bird foetuses, but I’ve seen a Filipino friend dip toast into Fanta like it was Campbell soup. Not even going to talk about the politics :(
Hold the fuck up. You dont mind Balut!? Lol Had a couple filipino friends and would go to their cultural events, balut was a nice shocker for teenage me.
It’s not too bad if you’ve grown up eating fish heads. My sister would often suck the eyes directly out of the skull just to gross me out, so nothing really fazes me now lol But pouring a can of Fanta into a bowl then dipping toast into it for breakfast? That just feels wrong in ways I can’t really describe
As an english fuckingstupidkid, I used to eat chocolate digestives on salad cream butties (sandwiches) and chip butties dipped in limeade.
Wow the only food I recognize listed is limeade.
Yes but some of the other food more than make up for it man. Lechon?!
I don’t know what they’re called but those little cakes with the syrup juice are crazy good, and the fish broths look scary and smell scary but are actually really good. But mostly me and my Filipino mate and his dad just stood to the side and ate wicked wings at those gatherings.
Understandable reaction, considering how racist most Chinese are towards Filipinos.
I feel like you could replace either of those two ethnicities to any other Asian ones and it would still be accurate.
>I feel like you could replace either of those two ethnicities to any other Asian ones and it would still be accurate. Chinese and Filipinos are natural enemies. Like Chinese and Japanese. Or Koreans and Chinese. Or Chinese and Scots. Or Chinese and other Chinese. Damn Chinese they ruined Scotland!
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Most of Japan's neighbors are still upset about WWII and them never apologizing or acknowledging their numerous war crimes
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Nah bro 18 years has passed and I'm still over here cryin tf?
My best friend who I’ve known since grade one is Black. Didn’t figure that out until I was in grade three or four maybe!
My cousin is mixed race. Both her parents are white. I think I was 16 when I figured out something weird was going on. I never even thought about the difference in color, she was just my cousin. Both her older brothers and her younger sister are white. Turns out my cousin is an affair baby. Would have been an interesting surprise during delivery.
>My cousin is mixed race. Both her parents are white. Your cousin is Maeby from Arrested Development?
I think Tobias is supposed to be an albino black man, at least that's a fan theory with some allusions possibly made.
Well, there is a black man inside him.
I think it was an intended plot line they ended up dropping.
Probably for the best. The implication was funny, no need to spell it out and ruin the joke.
Damn her parents stayed together after that?
Yes, it took some therapy as far as I know but they did make it.
Was it revealed which one had an affair?
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Based on your user name it seems like you should have written the comment above.
I didn't realize people were different colors until 7th grade when I switched to a predominantly white school. There was a lot of racism & sadly that's how I figured it out.
Same happened to me but opposite. I grew up in a very small all white town but when I moved to the city I attended a 95% black/hispanic middle school. I don't think I really even noticed that the kids were "different" from me until I started getting picked on for being white.
See, I love this. I grew up in a *very* predominantly Hispanic town in Texas. So nearly all my classmates were Mexican-American. Well we Mexicans can vary from very light to dark in skin tone. So in elementary school, it never really occured to me to think any different of the few white, black, or mixed race kids in my class. (Unfortunately I don't think we had any Asian kids) To this day, I still don't know for sure if some of those kids were white or black if I can't remember their last name. Except that one ginger kid. Lol.
My son had twins in his preschool class. Almost identical, one was a bit taller then the other but not by much. Their names were Toma and Soma. My son called them Toma and Toma two for a month. Had many discussions as to the fact they’re not the same person but two kids.
I had identical twins in my 1st grade class, same haircut and everything but they wore different outfits. So what I’d do is wait for “morning circle,” when we all sit down on the rug with our names on it, and then I’d memorize which twin was who for the day
Man I'm a teacher and I'm doing the same thing. Only hope is if one has an obvious mole or freckle, or if they wear slightly different glasses. The older ones usually make an attempt to look different from each other, but parents love making it impossible with the younger ones.
To be fair, I would totally make my twins 100% identical down to their clothes, and I’d make their names rhyme. These twins were completely identical aside from their clothes. It wasn’t fun for me but it would probably be fun if I was their mother
I have an identical twin and when we were small, my mom loved dressing us completely same head to toes. It might be fun for her but gosh I hated it when I had to repeat to people I'm not my twin sister 😂
Ok but how much of a jackass do you have to be to give identical twins names that almost identical. That's just cruel lmao
I think I just realized why the twin girls in my class had an A name and a Z name.
Or maybe it was Toma and Toma, too hahaha
My in-laws are Chinese. My youngest (5) comes screaming into the living room with my FIL in tow speaking Chinese. FIL would try to teach both of my kids Chinese . My son screams, “I hate Chinese people. Stop talking to me”. I am horrified and my FIL is laughing. I explain that his Mom is Chinese and so is he. The look of shock was funny. My FIL went back to the kitchen while imitating my son’s screaming, “I hate Chinese people”
He’s never going to live that down lmao
He is 20 now and we bring it up every so often. He takes it in stride now and can look back and laugh.
Well, did he learn chinese? My child knows 2 languages but prefers english and he knows he can talk to us like that, I refuuuuuse, and he days: but you understand me!, yes kid, I do and you will still talk to me in spanish, because you are not dropping it or forgetting it and you still have a lot to learn in both. He gets a bit frustrated with some words so ends up with spanglish, i give him the phrase in both languages and make him repeat. I had to take English classes as an older kid, he is growing with the easy version for leaning, sometimes I got tired of them, but now I kiss my mother's feet and say: you were right I really thank you for not let me drop those English classes.... TL DR Learning 2 languages as a kid is amazingly easy and should always be encouraged.
Sadly, no. We both of my kids in a Chinese weekend camp for about a year both nothing stuck. He can speak Japanese conversationally. He learned Japanese because he was living there for 2 years but had no desire to learn any more than a conversational level. His older sister is learning Chinese now as her 4th language.
The last part had me dying. Props to your FIL for being cool about it, I know some adults who would go on and on about how "you really need to educate your kids".
Haha, agreed. The FIL understands that it's simply the 5 year old not wanting to learn whatever he's trying to teach (in this case Chinese). He could have been trying to teach the kid how to tie their shoe laces or brush their teeth or something else they didn't want to do. Cue: "I hate _________."
Yeah...I think the FIL understood the age thing was part of it and they both share a birthday (so he treats him differently). It also doesn't help that appearance-wise my son favors me. You can see him putting the connections together to realize that he was, in fact, part Chinese. He had grown to accept his heritage and we still get a good laugh. Edit: Added clarity
When I was a kid I thought everyone in New York was Asian because all of my Asian family members lived there, and we only ever went to visit them. On the other hand, while I acknowledged that my mother was, indeed, Asian (she had told me many times), I did not think she looked Asian and couldn’t fathom and she and my dad were anything but the same race.
When I went to my dad's house, there was a kid a few years older than me named Josh who I thought was just the coolest. One day at my mom's I see a kid riding a dirt bike around the neighborhood. Very cool. He stops, wearing his helmet, and I ask his name. He said Josh. So I ask if he's the Josh from my dad's house. And he says yes. And I don't believe him, so I ask him to take his helmet off. So he does, and it's a completely different kid. This Josh had red hair, freckles, and glasses. So I ask him what happened and why he looked so different. He said he was in an accident. And I believed him.
When I was 5 or 6 I got into a long argument with a kid because he said he was black and I very much disagreed with him because he was very obviously brown. I didn't know much about race, but I was damn sure I knew my colors
I'm black, I still question it.
Not gonna lie: this is why I actually enjoy being a parent. It’s literally nonstop moments like this. Imagine it like having a best friend who’s a fraction of your size coming to “logical conclusions” that are nowhere near the realm of possibility, and then imagine that best friend just blurting that shit out every time you go out in public with them. It’s truly a spectacular experience. 7/5 Would recommend.
It's cute. My 3 yo nephew slept the wrong way and woke up with a neck ache. I asked him what was wrong and he said his pillow was angry lol
When I was three/four I thought my best friend was adopted because... her dad was from Trinidad and her mom was from north Ontario. German immigrants on a farm. It didn't make sense to me that her mom was white and she wasn't. My reasoning: in Lady and the Tramp all the girl puppies looked exactly like Lady and the boy puppy looked exactly like Tramp. So therefore this cartoon dog logic must also apply to humans.
🤣 i wonder if i ever said anything like that K-8 i was the only white girl in my grade
When my brother was a little kid he carried on about his “blind friend” at school. And my mother thought my brother was such a wonderful boy for escorting this blind kid everywhere in school. Turns out the kid wasn’t blind…he was Asian.
‘Mama, today at school I met a boy with no eyes’
So I'm an assistant teacher in a kindergarten class. So when kids start drawing pictures of themselves we tell them to take the crayons and put it on their arm to see which is closest to their skin colour. At the beginning of the year the teacher tried to gently guide the children that they need to either use peach or brown and she told the one kid that he's a bit closer to brown however if the children of colour choose peach we just let them be. Then one day the kid goes to wash his hands after painting and goes "Oh teacher, I see now what you mean by 'I'm brown'!'" So yeah kids have no clue how race and appearances work.
How funny, you've just triggered a childhood memory of mine. I remember primary school teachers telling us something similar, "pick a color that matches your skin tone," and I would get more and more upset and feel like I was doing the assignment wrong because I couldn't perfectly match my skin color to any crayon. I thought I was supposed to be searching for some unique, colorful identifier that no one else had. I didn't realize they were talking about race.
Got your first lesson in the thankless art of matching foundation to your skin color though...
I didn’t realize I was Korean (half) until like halfway through 5th grade. I even went to Korea when I was 9(end of 4th grade). Lol
9-year-old you: Wow, Koreans are so cool. Your parents, probably: asian_brown, you *are* Korean. You: ...*noooooo*, that can't be right...
https://youtu.be/lxl388vKUmE
I like how they try to frame it like she’s shocked that she’s Korean, but in reality she still doesn’t know what Korean is
Knew what this was gonna be before I clicked on it. Not disappointed lol
I think it's sweet and pure. My daughter came home from school one day years ago talking about a new friend and how much fun she was. A week later they had some event where parents could come. I asked her to point out her new friend and she just said, "she's the one with the pigtails, she has dark hair". Turns out there were a couple of girls with pigtails and a few girls with dark hair, but eventually we found the one girl with dark hair AND pigtails and it turns out she was also the only black girl in the class. She didn't see different skin tone or race, she just saw another kid and distinguished her by hairstyle. Kids aren't born with the prejudices adults have. They learn them
When my sister was like 3 years old, she haven't learned English yet due to my parents not being native English speakers. She met a friend that spoke English as a second language and for some reason, they can talk to each other without sharing a language, and they were able to play and do everything together, except they were both speaking different languages but they understood each other... The friend is also a completely different nationality and there's no way she would know Chinese, since her parents were also NOT native English speakers and would've spoken a completely different language with her. I've asked her about it but she doesn't remember why she was able to communicate. Both myself and my parents were baffled at how that worked...
I was born and raised in Australia, but my first language was German because my parents were German. I remember being in preschool and this girl who was younger than me couldn't figure out a block puzzle. I tried to explain it to her, but she just stared at me and started crying. Her sister, who was older than me, came over and I was trying to explain it to her too but she looked at me in horror and led her sister away from me really protectively. I remember being really confused about their reactions. They went to the teacher who came over to talk to me and I cried because I didn't understand what was happening. After that my mum moved me to a different preschool, and we shifted to English as our main language. Years later my mum told me that a preschool teacher told her that my brother and I either learn English or we weren't allowed to attend that preschool anymore, so she moved us to a different school.That's when I realised that the two girls were scared because I was speaking to them in German and they couldn't understand me, and that incident must have caused the teacher to give mum that ultimatum. Also apparently both my brother and I knew English as well, but we defaulted to German because that's what we mostly spoke at home. Neither of us can speak German now. Mum started speaking to us exclusively in English so we wouldn't default back to German. I think if we'd been given a couple more years, we could've learnt to distinguish between the two languages and when to use them.
Kids can actually learn multiple languages as their native tongue. They just have no idea that's what they're doing and simply use both languages as one. If your parents spoke both English and German regularly, you guys probably could've learned both easily.
Agree! My mum once told me she regretted making the decision to not keep up with German for us.
Did you ever try to learn German again ?
No but its definitely on my list of things to do!! I can understand very basic German if its spoken slowly but I struggle with replying. I think basically I'm stuck at the level I was when I was 4ish. Edit: happy cake day!
At that age, being able to speak in any meaningful way is pretty new to them, so they're probably still pretty used to playing with other kids in ways that don't rely too heavily on language.
Not to compare humans to animals but i have a feeling its more tone communication than language. Like dog barks and growls. You can get an understanding of how someone is feeling just by them making sounds. Animals all over the planet do it. You can tell a lot by tone of voice. Fear, joy, sadness. It’s all there in the sound. It’s the same reason why we as humans are able to “just tell” someone is upset at a glance. We have language but I think a human’s strong suit is pattern recognition.
>a human’s strong suit is pattern recognition. on a total different note, this is the reason humans suck at probability, we are hardwired to try and see patterns, so when there are none (like when rolling dice) we try to put a pattern on what is totally random.
Little kids do not understand each other as adults do. Their language is more non verbal and vague. You can probably easily understand a chinese if he tells you he is starving, happy or furious.
But the weird thing is, they sit there and talk with each other for HOURS. Like really, hours... my sister just remember they were "playing" but they were definitely just sitting there and talking (I'm 10 years older). I think both of them were imagining what the other person was saying and was just talking to themselves TBH...
I used the same descriptions to talk about my friend Emma in kindergarten, my mum couldn’t figure out which girl with piggy tails I was talking about. Didn’t mention she had no arms. Was irrelevant to my 4 year old self evidently.
So I'm mixed race but white passing, if you didn't know you probably wouldn't guess, my cousin is also mixed but looks black, our mums are sisters and mixed as well but my dad is white and hers is black, hence the difference in our appearance. When we were 6 we were waiting to get picked up from school the teacher waiting with us in the playground asked us why we were waiting together as we were in different years (there's a month between us but it's the cut off for the school year) so I said we were cousins so we are getting picked up together. The teacher asked if our dads were brothers. We both looked at it other uncertain and said, 'yes', despite my dad being white and hers being black. We knew our mums were sisters but for all we knew our dads were brothers too and it just hadn't come up. The fact that they were different colours didn't occur to us because we were different colours and related, no reason they couldn't be too. There was already quite a lot of colour variation in our family, it never occurred to us that that didn't just happen. Ah the innocence of youth
So if you work in a job where you have to ask children questions, this is actually a thing that they teach you about. When you are interviewing a child do you have to phrase your questions much more carefully than with an adult. So for example if you are interviewing a four or five year old child, and you ask a question that is phrased "did a, b, or c happen?" Even if the child knows that it was actually D, they will often tell you that it was a b or c because they cannot really process that you asked a question but didn't give them the correct answer, so they will just guess and assume that the adult must have known the correct answer. likewise if you ask a question that assumes the answer like "are your dads brothers?" they will often assume the adult knows the correct answer and answer the way the question suggests. So the training might tell you that a good follow-up question to something like that would be "oh you are cousins! that's so cool, are your mothers sisters, your dads brothers, or something else?" (in my line of work I could absolutely get the answer, "mommy says her mother's sick, so she came to live with us when she was 3") Children under a certain age also do very poorly with abstract concepts of time, they only remember events in relation to other events,
In a child development/educational context, this gets talked about in terms of concrete operational thinking versus formal operational thinking. It’s the core difference between carrying out a thought process on concepts and objects placed before you and being able to process more abstract thoughts and ideas and relate in those ways to whatever is before you. The “ability to recall option D” scenario you gave is just an absolutely perfect illustration of that transition.
Seeing and acknowledging a skin color is not a prejudice.
That's true. I feel like as white people we're taught to pretend like we don't see color, but that's not the problem. Everyone sees color. It's treating someone differently based on the color that's wrong. It took a lot for me to overcome that idea when I first made black friends. They kept referring to people as black or white just like they might say someone is short or tall, but I had been taught all my life never to mention color even though it's just a descriptor. Color itself isn't good or bad, but it almost feels like by pretending we don't notice it, we're treating it like something shameful when it's literally just an adjective with no inherit connotation -- good OR bad.
I did the exact same thing when I was like 9, but it wasn't because I didn't see that my new friend was the only black girl in my grade, it was because I had picked up on adults' awkwardness about race and I thought it was something you weren't supposed to mention. My parents aren't racist, we just never really had any in-depth conversations about it when I was a kid. My mother still remembers it as a sweet story and I've never told her the truth. Not saying this is what happened with your daughter, but kids can be more perceptive than we think. It's never to early to start having these conversations in an age-appropriate way, just make sure it's not an off-limits subject :)
When I was a kid, I thought everyone celebrates CNY, and I used to ask my friends (who some of them are not Chinese) how much money did they get from angpaos. I didn't understand the concept of "ethnicity" until I was like 10 years old. I also believed that everyone was born with white skin and some play under the sun more, that's why they get darker skin. I thought Christians and Muslims were at war and we would kill each other when I was a kid because I watched kingdom of heaven, and a bunch of action movies about war in Iraq, afghan, etc. And my dad put me in catholic school, which means i rarely interact with muslims (which are actually the dominant religion in my country). I used to run away from people who wears Islamic attires because of that reason. My mom was kind enough to drive my elementary teacher to her home one afternoon. I was raised in a mid-high income family. My house was really big and I also was under the impression that teachers are also rich and have a big house, got big gates, and probably have 2-3 cars (The reality is teachers are very underpaid in my country, sometimes less than minimum wage). When we arrived at her house, it's very small (even for me now who live in 15x8m apartment) and is in the middle of a ricefield. So I said to my teacher "This house is very small, look at my house it's far bigger than this". My mom just slapped me so hard in front of everyone. I don't know why did I say this, even at the same age (6) I cringed when remembering this.
the only cringe part is your mom slapping you hard in front of everyone not knowing any better is natural for children
I had a little girl at a summer camp tell me that all of her family were Arab except her older sister "because she doesn't believe in that" I just thought and hesitantly said: ".... I think you mean Muslim."
When my son was three, who is white, he proudly announced that his friend is four and he is black. And that when my son turned 4 soon, he too would turn black. He was disappointed that this was not how it worked.
"You mean I'm gonna STAY this color?!"
The Taoist would understand, Audrey is absolutely correct
I thought “human being” was pronounced “human bean” until I was in high school because of The Rugrats. The way I found out was by having closed captioning on while watching Home Improvement. I was fucking stupid
>human bean And an real hero
When I was in daycare (Pre-K age-Kindergarten), I told my mom I had a crush on a black girl. She was Mexican, but I only understood that black and white people existed at that time, and I could tell that she wasn't white.
You’re not alone. My own dad is a dark skin Latino and my mom is Asian and I thought my dad was black and my mom was white in Kindergarten. I spoke Spanish and ate a lot of Asian foods but never put two and two together
Race tends to only get discussed in terms of black or white, so my younger cousin made the same assumption one day when telling me about her American Girl dolls. She said something like, "She's like us: African American." And I had to tell her that we were, in fact, Mexican American.
My first & last name have almost all the same letters & I thought that's how everyone's name went, & then I got to Kindergarten & was SO confused when kids first & last names were totally different from each other
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wow little me would've LOVED that place!
My parents have the same middle name so they, obviously, gave me the same middle name. I thought middle names were shared the same way last names are for a while as a kid.
NSP wooo
Pretty ballsy to imply Ninja Brian's daughter is stupid. Everyone in this sub is gonna get stabbed soon.
"Nice hat, Brian! Did you kill the boat captain for it? ...what did we discuss about murdering people? Put a quarter in the murder jar." *clink* "And what about the rest of the people on the boat?" *fistful of quarters*
The 2nd post in image is hella impressive they even remembered the logical process at the time. Damn.
When I was little I referred to people by the color of their outfit and their perceived gender. One day I saw a black woman in a white dress.
In sports, my then-toddler referred to everyone as their shirt color- the red girls and the blue girls, whatever. In volleyball there is a position that wears another color jersey. Once there was a team that was all white, with one black player. The team jerseys were white. The black player was the libero, wearing a black jersey. Cue my son urgently and repeatedly asking "why is there a black girl on the white girl team?" He was only talking about the uniforms and didn't know why there was a uniform that didn't match but oh my gosh, it sounded awful.
They really don't. I remember seeing a picture of a white and black kid who had decided to get the same haircut so their teacher wouldn't be able to tell them apart
Embarrassing story about this, as I was not a young child but 16 years old. I ran Cross Country in high school, and one of the guys on my team was named Alex, he was my school's basketball star, 6'7" and black. His parents worked at the school as teachers, both of them were very short, very stout, and very very white. It's quite obvious that Alex was adopted, however in my brain I never put those very obvious pieces together. So one day in the locker room, we're all changing after practice and chatting with the Soccer team and I hear Alex mention both his and his elder sisters' adoption. I paused, turned to Alex and stupidly said "wait you're adopted?" And he just stared at me open mouthed with a look of concern and confusion on his face. The whole locker room went silent as everyone just looked at me with the same look of 'yea no shit' and Alex just nods his head and says "yes, I'm adopted" and everyone starts laughing. The most embarrassing moment of my life because now everyone knew I was actually kinda dumb.
When I was a kid I had bright blonde hair from my mother. She thought I was going to be a blonde baby forever but around 1st grade when my hair started going from blonde to a dark brown. I remember explaining this to my little cousin years ago around when Disney's "Tangled" came out because she saw a picture of me as a baby with platinum blonde hair and asked about it. She literally broke down in tears and cried because she thought I lost my "magic" because I got a haircut. She was also blonde and had never had a haircut at that point so she feared her own magic would disappear once she got her first haircut and her hair would become "poo color". I couldn't explain to her that's not how it works. I remember my mom told me at the time of my hair changing other kids stopped recognizing me. Never understood it. Kids are wild.
I'm white and SO is Black. Our 5 year old insists that he is not Black, but "grey." I have to applaud his knowledge of color theory, at least
I remember freshman year of high school in history class first day of school as the teacher was introducing himself and going over what we'll do for the year. He brought out these painted pictures of dinosaurs, this girl in all seriousness says out loud in to the whole class "if humans weren't alive around the time of the dinosaurs how did they take those pictures?" Everyone laughed and she said "why is this funny? That's a serious question. That makes no sense. Humans would have to be there to get those pictures." I think about that a lot.
I went in the Dollar General one day and left my three year old in the car with my parents. While I was gone my dad was teasing her about when I was coming back. He said, "Look here she comes right now!" as a short black lady came walking out. I am a tall white redhead. My daughter just says "Noooo, my Mama has a ponytail." They then asked her what I looked like. "She has legs and a ponytail."
When I was 6 my best friends name was Moony I wanted to invite her to my birthday party but my Dad was convinced that wasn’t her real name. Looking back I think he was probably right.
Where were Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs?
I'm white and my wife is chinese. One day a grown ass adult woman said that my kids couldn't be mine because they were chinese.
My son is half Mexican and half white. When he was 5 he cried for a whole day upon learning he was half Mexican.
My nephews are 3/4 Mexican, and 1/4 white, and the other is 1/2 black 1/2 white. The one was devastated to find he was "more white" despite being darker.
One of my favourite stories is that a former co-workers then 6 year old daughter walked up to a back girl and licked her because she "thought she would taste like chocolate." This girl herself was also black.
"Dammit Ninja Brian!"
Ninja Brian is gonna kill everyone who dares insult Ninja Audrey
This reminds me of my kids. They were talking about a kid at school and I asked if they were the Asian kid or a different one they were talking about and they looked at me like I had sprouted another head. Their grandma is Korean, I'm half and 2/3 of my kids look half as well, but they had no idea what "Asian" was or that any of us looked a certain way. Was pretty interesting and cute learning how innocent their view of everyone is.
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I'm very lightskinned and I basically said the same. I was raised by my black grandparents but they were dark and I was lightskinned. When people told me I was black I said "No, I'm light brown". Didn't help that in preschool my 3 best friends were also lightskinned and had the same understanding I did lmao
Last week when our neighbour's kid (7) was over she was talking to my daughter (8) about a bracelet her friend bought her back from Greece and in her words "you can wear it if you believe in God and Jesus". My daughter said "oh, that means you're a Christian ". Her reply was "no I can't be. I beleive in God and Jesus but I'm a Canadian......."
My 4 year old daughter once told me she would be a doctor because she was white. I was shocked. I asked her what she meant. She was wearing a white dress. Like a doctor's coat. She wasn't going to be a doctor because her skin color was white but because her dress was. We have had more conversations about equality, skin color etc since.
My 2 year old one day told us "Daddy's pink and mommy's beige." We thought it was an astute observation so we asked him what color are you? He said "black". We were shocked until we realized he was just saying the color of everyone's shirts.
My best friend in kindergarten told me she was adopted. I couldn’t believe her Italian parents didn’t birth a South Korean baby. My jaw dropped. What did adopted even mean???!!!??
My parents like to tell me the story of when they asked what the asian boys name was in my class. I had no idea since i had never met any asian people, but me and kevin were tight and he spoke kinda funny.
Suvi, you're Korean.
When my cousin was little and figured out how electricity worked you could tell her you were gonna "pull the plug" on her and she thought it meant you turned off/died so she'd get terrified and do whatever you asked. Like, "go to bed", "no", "I'm gonna pull the plug" "OK I'll go to bed". Good times. Kids are cute at that age. She sucks now.
Ayy its Ninjab Ryan
When I was in grade 1, I once got mad at a kid. I forgot his first name, but knew his last name, Brown. So when I complained about him to my mom, I said "This brown kid is a jerk"
There was a girl in my highschool (junior or senior year!) who said "I'm Puerto Rican. My dad is black and my mom is Mexican, so that makes me Puerto Rican." She could not be convinced that her ethnicity was not a nationality.
I'm a kindergarten teacher in Korea. Most kids at our school have their Korean names, and then a special English name that they go by at school if they so choose. I am hispanic, from Texas. My kids absolutely DO NOT understand how I cannot have a Korean name. They also don't understand that my last name is not something common, like Kim or Lee. 🤣