When your child asks if they’ll be harmed like the people on the news, what do you say? Psychologists provide tips on how to talk about identity

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Imagine your child asks you out of the blue, “If we speak Spanish, will they take you away?” Or imagine them suddenly asking what an offensive slur means. When a child asks these types of questions, it can be difficult to trace them back to a specific news story or event. But you may not need to. The question itself tells you that your child is trying to make sense of something they heard.

As parents, we’ve each had some version of these conversations with our young children.

The fear takes different forms in different families. For some children, it’s a question about whether their family may be harmed because of the language they speak. For others, it may be about their skin color, gender, religion or the person they love. Underneath is often the same concern that young people across the country are grappling with: What do these messages mean for people like me?

Children whose identities aren’t directly targeted are listening too. Public discourse teaches children which differences are treated as ordinary, which are treated as suspect and who is allowed to belong without having to explain themselves.

As psychologists who study and treat anxiety and depression as well as research resilience among diverse groups of children and families, we frequently hear versions of this question in our work and at our kitchen tables.

Parents cannot control every message their child encounters, but they can help their child understand what those messages do and do not mean.

Listen for the sideways question

Parents often imagine that an important conversation will announce itself clearly: “Something I heard on the news made me worried about being Latina.”

Usually, it doesn’t. A younger child may ask whether a classmate’s family is safe or whether something that happened to someone else could happen to them too. An older child may repeat something they saw online, make a joke or suddenly go quiet when a topic related to identity comes up.

Children often don’t have the vocabulary to name a fear directly or the confidence that a topic is safe to raise. We’ve seen this pattern again and again when we work with families in the clinic: Teasing a fear out by going sideways, such as through someone else’s situation or a hypothetical, can allow a child to gauge how an adult will react before deciding whether to ask their real question.

Some children need assurance before they can ask a hard question. Ed Bock/The Image Bank via Getty Images

In our experience, younger children sometimes find it easier to talk about a worry through a drawing, a stuffed animal or a story about “a kid who felt scared about something” rather than addressing it head-on. If a direct question stalls out, shifting the format – rather than repeating the question – can help children open up.

Instead of immediately correcting or reassuring your child, get curious first. Research on how children respond to different kinds of questions has consistently found that open-ended prompts like “tell me more” draw out far more than direct or yes or no questions. That principle can be useful at the dinner table too: “What made you think about that?” may get further than “Are you scared about something?”

If a child says “I don’t know,” resist the urge to press further in that moment. Not knowing yet is a normal response; sometimes kids may need more time to make sense of a feeling before they can put words to it. You can leave the door open instead: “That’s OK. If you think of it later, I’m here.” This tells your child the invitation still stands without turning it into an interrogation.

Don’t leave the meaning blank

Parents sometimes avoid talking about difficult news because they don’t want to frighten their children. But if a child has heard people like them described as dangerous, defective, unwanted or less worthy, changing the subject doesn’t erase the message. Neither does staying silent. It simply leaves children to work out on their own what that message means about them.

Instead of changing the subject, minimizing what they heard or saying “don’t worry about it,” parents can answer directly: “Some people believe that, but we don’t.” They can tell their child directly that comments that demean someone because of who they are aren’t acceptable.

Research on ethnic-racial socialization – that is, the ways parents teach children about race and ethnicity – suggests that messages about cultural history, traditions and pride can be just as important for children’s self-esteem and sense of identity as conversations that prepare them for prejudice.

Studies on LGBTQ+ youth show a similar pattern: Greater family acceptance during adolescence is associated with higher self-esteem and better health, as well as lower rates of depression, substance use and suicidal thoughts.

Affirming that you love and respect your child no matter their identity can protect their well-being. Raja J/iStock via Getty Images

Parents can reassure their child that there is nothing wrong with being autistic or that they don’t need to be afraid of people who pray differently from them. They can confirm that they and their family belong – in this home, community and country – regardless of what anyone else says.

The goal isn’t to pretend discrimination doesn’t exist. It’s to help children – whether they are the ones being targeted or are watching it happen to someone else – separate what people say about an identity from what that identity actually means about a person’s worth.

Children deserve explicitly positive messages from trusted adults. Even when those messages seem obvious or your child already knows them, saying them out loud anyway could help reinforce that their worth was never actually in question. It can also give children something to hold onto when they encounter hurtful messages in the future.

Don’t wait for a crisis to talk about identity

Silence itself can take a toll. Research has linked avoiding conversations about ongoing threats to worse mental health in children…