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I don't think it is a negative thing at all - at that age it is just innocent curiousity. I think it is great that they are interested in learning about the world around them. But sometimes it can put you in a no-win situation, especially if the person your child is talking about doesn't understand kids or have a sense of humour about them and especially when your child doesn't understand or just ignores any attempts from you to divert the topic or get them to understand that it is innapropriate to speak like that about others.
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I was horrified when we were at the doctor and there was a patient and even I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.
Thankfully DS whispered to me "Mummy, is that a man or a lady?" I could have died. I was sure everyone could hear it
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DS does not know the word "fat". We don't use it. For that exact reason! However, DS is interested in other differences such as height, age, skin colour and nose shape. All innocent and all things I can talk about. I'm also teaching him which words to use to women - you don't call a girl "big". His best friend recently compared sizes with "I'm small and you're big. Mummy, you are big, but not as big as a house" so we don't use big for girls any more. We use "tall" and "small" to describe height.
As for colours, he will look at very, very black people, but mostly he will say someone has a different colour face (if he bothers to comment) and that's fine. They do. He will refer to "that boy" or "that girl"... if he sees people with different skin colours as being human just like him, that's not really racism. Just an observation.
Might be robbing him of innocent words, but hearing a male colleague tell a female colleague she has skinny legs (and being re-educated about the word "slender")... I'd rather start him off early. The same colleague also offered to mathematically prove that I had the same gravitational attraction as the earth. Massive attractive power I can cope with, same size as a planet I do not.
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thanks lady Zaidie - I like your approach.
Reading it reminded me of our "white-centric" approach to race, where we are more likely to describe someone non-white by their skin colour, assuming that white is the "norm".... I remember consciously ruling out such adjectives at one stage and referring to people as "people".
A good thing to teach my kids!!
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we were in big w the other day and this dwarf walked by us, Jack has never seen a dwarf goes look at that little girl and all her hair, the nasty woman turned round and said nastily look at you you little boy :(....he wasn't commenting on her stature, he saw a little person who is rpesumed was a little girl and she had masses of hair.
I did explain it was lady and try to explain dwarfism but he was adament is was a little girl, but she was so nasty her reaction I couldn't be bpthered getting him to say sorry...
really upset me it did
