Where do children learn about ethnicity?
There are many different ways in which children come to learn about ethnicity and consequently to develop a sense of their own ethnic identity. Parents and the immediate family will obviously tend to have a strong influence on children’s developing ethnic identities. The family is, after all, the first experience that most children will have of being a member of an ethnic group and we already know just how influential parents can be in shaping children’s ways of thinking, interests and tastes.

However it is important to understand that it is not just the family where children learn about their ethnic identity. As mentioned earlier, ethnicity is about groups of people, often communities, which tend to have a shared culture and sense of history and belonging. Children’s sense of ethnicity will therefore also tend to be influenced by the events around them in their local community as well as by what they see on television and the ways in which ethnic differences tend to be portrayed.

These influences can also begin from a very early age, as we found in research on young children in Northern Ireland. Whilst these children tended not to begin to explicitly see themselves as Protestant or Catholic until about the ages of five and six, the influences of their respective communities were found to have begun much earlier than this.

By the age of three, for example, Protestant and Catholic children tended to already demonstrate notable differences in terms of which national flag they preferred and also whether they liked particular cultural events in Northern Ireland that tend to be associated with one or other of the two communities.

In the above cases, these same children showed very little knowledge of what the flags or the specific events they expressed preferences for actually represented. What all of this tends to show is that children are already picking up the cultural ‘habits’ and preferences of their own ethnic group even before they become fully aware of what these represent.

Alongside the family and wider community, the other main influence on children’s emerging ethnic identities is the peer group. Once at school a significant part of children’s day is spent mixing with other children. The influence the peer group can have on children’s attitudes and behaviour can be as strong, if not stronger at times, as that of the family. So, in terms of ethnicity it isn’t surprising to find that children learn much about themselves and others from their peers.

Moreover, children don’t simply repeat passively the negative attitudes and prejudices about other ethnic groups they may have heard elsewhere. In fact, even at the ages of five and six, children in England have been found to adapt and re-work existing stereotypes to make sense of their own experiences and sometimes to justify their own actions. The peer group is therefore a place where children actively make use of existing ideas and beliefs to construct their own meanings.