Talking to Kids About Skin Tone with Dr. Lucretia Carter Berry

This week, I interviewed Dr. Lucretia Carter Berry, author of the book Hues of You: An Activity Book for Learning About the Skin You Are In. Dr. Berry’s book gives children and families a foundational understanding of skin tone, as well as the language and framework for supporting a healthy and evidence-based understanding of skin tone.

Listen to the entire conversation by clicking the "Play" button above, or find Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Below, you'll find some of the key takeaways from our conversation:

Babies notice skin tone differences beginning as early as 3-6 months of age, and by the age of 5 kids understand skin tone as a major point of distinction and difference between people, whether or not anyone has explicitly mentioned it to them.

Be proactive about talking about race, racism, and skin tone—don’t wait until your child is the perpetrator or recipient of a racist incident or until race-related tragedies happen in the news. Otherwise, kids may begin to associate skin tone with behavior when genetically they have nothing to do with each other.

Acknowledging the existence of different skin tones doesn’t make kids racist. In fact, it makes the noticing and discussing of skin tone less taboo and associated with shame. Research shows that explicitly talking about race and skin tone improves racial attitudes across groups.

Dr. Berry created Hues of You… to help normalize human differences, give kids permission to have conversations about race, and give adults the language and framework to meet the natural curiosity children have with evidenced-based information.

The book is divided into four sections: the hues of you, the hues of your family, the hues of your ancestors, and finally, the hues of your friends. This puts the idea and fact of skin tone in social context and begins to plant the seed that skin tone is biological, but race is not.

Start with explaining what makes a person’s skin tone when children are very young. As they gain understanding, you can begin to slowly layer in the complex social construct of race, such as: the ways race is about rules, the boundaries created by those rules, and why those rules were put in place.

The more kids know about race and...

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