Essential Questions:

• Identity: How do parents affirm children who have received an identity related microaggression? / How do parents help support children who deliver an identity related microaggression?
• Action: What is a decision parents can help children make to build resilience from, and/or practice personal or collective action after an identity related microaggression has taken place?

Reflective Blog Post:

I have many goals when I work with LREI parents. Two of them are:

• support parents in their efforts to raise children with healthy identities;
• provide research and concrete examples of anti-bias parenting in order for 
  • parents raising children with marginalized identities to develop strategies for dealing with identity microaggressions and;
  • parents raising children with dominant identities to learn to be resilient and accountable for their actions. 

While the number of parents who attend my parent equity meetings has grown, the truth is that these forums only hit a small percentage of our parent community. I wanted to consider ways to maximize the impact of my the meetings while also finding other venues for reaching the parent community.  

My focus for this year has been to help parents identify skills and strategies they can use when their child has either experienced or delivered an identity related microaggression. What does accountability look like? What does healing look like? Using the Teaching Tolerance framework, I created a processing sheet for parents and attended affinity spaces to gain perspective about the worksheet. An interesting conversation surfaced with the Asian families committee about the extent to which they engage or do not engage in identity conversations with their children. I welcomed the invitation to sit with the White Anti-Racist Parent Affinity Group (WARPAG) to think through the usability of the worksheet from the point of view of children who might be the ones to deliver racial microaggressions. These conversations are still being organized. I suspect that my meeting with the Parents of Children of Color, who consist of more Black and afrolatinx parents, will yield a different conversation and a lens into how they help their children process and heal from racialized moments that take place at LREI. 

One exercise that proved helpful was a midpoint review of my use of the anti-bias anchor standards. I wanted to push myself to understand these standards better and so read through them carefully, asking myself, “Did I really address that standard so far?” I made a list of the ones I could confidently say were showing up in my work with the parents and which standards I needed to include before the year ended. What surprised me most about doing this is that I saw I was missing the opportunity to address critical standards; numbers 5, 10, 15, and 20. The trouble with these as the missing standards is that these serve as catalysts to better understanding the four domains; Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action. I was left with a bigger challenge. How do I instill in my work with the parents conversations and opportunities that propel them from one domain to the next?