my lightbulb moment of the day

Just had to share my lightbulb moment of today; As parents we spend so much time worrying about how we raise our children and if we are passing on good values and it's great when you get one of those crystal clear signals that tells you "You have a great kid". Mine came today after watching a snippet of Oprah where she was talking about an experiment done with preschoolers where they had a fair skinned and a dark skinned baby doll in front of them and they had to pick the nice one, bad one, the one they liked the best etc. Shockingly nearly all kids thought the fair skinned one was the best "because it was white" and the dark skinned one was bad "because it was black".

Later I got to thinking about what Akira's feelings on race were. We have never really raised it as an issue and I don't know that he has ever questioned why people have different skin tones. I thought he would immediately like the fair skinned doll because it was most like him but when I asked him (showing him a picture of the babies off the show) he said he liked the dark one, I asked why he liked that and he looked at me like I was totally absurd and said " Because sometimes people have dark skin and thats just the one I like"

My heart beamed with pride, here he is at 5yrs old able to see the unclouded simple truth on an issue that arouses so much hate, violence and ignorance in our world today.

If only we could all see through the eyes of a 5yr old for a few minutes of our day.

What a great boy I have :)