Tonight's class was on culture.  Basically driving home the fact that children have a culture that they are used to and your culture may be entirely different.

It is something you have to be aware of.  This is something that does hit close to home for us as we have a target child being 3 to 7 years old and a minority.  Now God may deliver an infant white child, but that's our target.

We have to be very aware of the differences of this child.  Hair care is significantly different, and that's just a small thing.

Then watched a video about a 'new' way to do school.  Basically you purposefully put different races in class together to teach tolerance.  Now this was an old tape so I'm sure they now include sexual preferences in the class, so then the only people not given tolerance are the Christians... but I digress.  While I understand the goal of such classes I think at some level its a bad idea.  Think through your life, how diverse is it?  One of the task we had to do in the class tonight was answer some questions and put a colored bead in a cup to represent our social circle by color.

Mine was 100% white.  Not because I'm not around different races at all, but because the questions were framed around the phrase 'mostly'.  And 'mostly' my circle of friends is white.  Even at my most diverse days at my first church (30 to 40% minority) the mostly would have wound up white. 

But by putting children in a setting where pure diversity is required doesn't train them to well for the real world.  I just worry that it would set the child up for unrealistic expectations when they entered their own adult hood.

I've been able to train my children to not be racist or prejudice by teaching them that you 'judge' a person by how they act, not by how they look.  And really I am proud to say that my children have lived that out over the years.  Some of their better friends were/are minorities (picture above, is an actual shot of my son with some friends).  They never blinked an eye on the race of a person.  Then when we told them our goal for a minority child, they were like... so?  And that is the reaction I expected, but I had to have that talk with them to make sure. 

So overall a good class.  Made me think through who our 'black' support system will be if we land a minority child.  I'm just blessed to have people to go for to get that support when needed.