How to Explain Immigration to Kids: DEI Parent Guidebooks

By Trish Allison

Inside this guidebook, you'll find concise how-to instructions, age-appropriate ideas, and real-life scenarios for talking to kids (ages 5-11) about immigration. These are the steps we found to be the most effective for making sure your message sinks in:

1. Discover what your child already knows about immigration.
2. Define immigrantion basics.
3. Talk about genetics and your own family heritage.
4. Correctly answer common questions about immigration.
5. Explain how and when to be an immigrant's ally.

Please note: All of our instructions align with American Psychological Association child development guidelines.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: DEI for Parents
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781393931751

Trish Allison

Raising two children in a non-traditional family gives Trish a unique perspective on the importance of teaching kids that everyone deserves kindness and respect.  She combined her experience as a parent, her career as a technical writer, countless hours of child psychology research, a degree in English from U.C. Berkeley, and a long-ignored passion to write something meaningful -- into a collection of DEI parenting guidebooks.  The goal of the guidebooks is not to brainwash children into a 'socialist' way of thinking, but to simply, honestly, and at an appropriate age-level, discuss and respond to children's curiosity about contemporary cultural issues.

Book preview

Introduction

It's likely that your child has already heard about immigration in one way or another. But because kids tend to have spotty knowledge about the subject, it's important to fill in the gaps of information with the truth and to correct any misconceptions they might have.

In this guidebook—and in all of our guidebooks—we emphasize two basic principles: 1) children learn most efficiently when they’re given ‘breadcrumbs’ of information that lead them to arrive at a conclusion on their own; and 2) any subject that has a direct effect on humanity (e.g., immigration, poverty, religion, etc.) needs to be explained to children with empathy for the human experience at the core.

To be clear, DEI for Parents guidebooks are not intended to replace school curricula. Instead, the intent is to supplement lesson material by helping parents integrate the ‘human factor’ into homeschool conversations.

That said, the best way to emphasize immigration’s ‘human factor’ is to offer simple explanations to questions like 'What is an immigrant' and 'Why do immigrants leave their home countries?'

To make the basic concepts offered in this guidebook as easy as possible to absorb, information is broken into small chunks.

Learning by chunking increases working memory capacity by reducing memory load and facilitates acquisition or recall by organizing long-term memory for information in perceived stimuli, motor sequences, or cognitive representations.¹

To that end, we sprinkled chunks of expert-backed information throughout to guide your child toward an understanding of why it’s important and how to respect immigrants.

Finally, while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for raising equality-minded kids, this guidebook provides suggestions for scenarios that you can tailor to fit your own situation. The ultimate goal is to help you raise compassionate, non-biased, successful humans.

About This Guidebook

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Chapter 1

Learn What Your Child Already Knows About Immigration

This chapter appears first because it's important for you to find out what your child already knows about immigration before you start guiding them. If you start saying things they already know, they're likely